Chuhan Wang (Tsinghua University), Yasuhiro Kuranaga (Tsinghua University), Yihang Wang (Tsinghua University), Mingming Zhang (Zhongguancun Laboratory), Linkai Zheng (Tsinghua University), Xiang Li (Tsinghua University), Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University; Zhongguancun Laboratory), Haixin Duan (Tsinghua University; Quan Cheng Lab; Zhongguancun Laboratory), Yanzhong Lin (Coremail Technology Co. Ltd), Qingfeng Pan (Coremail Technology Co. Ltd)

Email spoofing attacks pose a severe threat to email systems by forging the sender's address to deceive email recipients. Sender Policy Framework (SPF), an email authentication protocol that verifies senders by their IP addresses, is critical for preventing email spoofing attacks. However, attackers can bypass SPF validation and launch convincing spoofing attacks that evade email authentication. This paper proposes BreakSPF, a novel attack framework that bypasses SPF validation to enable email spoofing. Attackers can actively target domains with permissive SPF configurations by utilizing cloud services, proxies, and content delivery networks (CDNs) with shared IP pools. We leverage BreakSPF to conduct a large-scale experiment evaluating the security of SPF deployment across Tranco top 1 million domain names. We uncover that 23,916 domains are vulnerable to BreakSPF attacks, including 23 domains that rank within the top 1,000 most popular domains. The results underscore the widespread SPF configuration vulnerabilities and their potential to undermine the security of email systems. Our study provides valuable insights for detecting and mitigating SPF vulnerabilities and strengthening email system security overall.

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Rui Zhu (Indiana University Bloominton), Di Tang (Indiana University Bloomington), Siyuan Tang (Indiana University Bloomington), Zihao Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Guanhong Tao (Purdue University), Shiqing Ma (University of Massachusetts Amherst), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Haixu Tang (Indiana University, Bloomington)

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Huaiyu Yan (Southeast University), Zhen Ling (Southeast University), Haobo Li (Southeast University), Lan Luo (Anhui University of Technology), Xinhui Shao (Southeast University), Kai Dong (Southeast University), Ping Jiang (Southeast University), Ming Yang (Southeast University), Junzhou Luo (Southeast University, Nanjing, P.R. China), Xinwen Fu (University of Massachusetts Lowell)

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Ke Mu (Southern University of Science and Technology, China), Bo Yin (Changsha University of Science and Technology, China), Alia Asheralieva (Loughborough University, UK), Xuetao Wei (Southern University of Science and Technology, China & Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Computation, SUSTech, China)

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Lachlan Moore, Tatsuya Mori (Waseda University, NICT)

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