Authentication is about Identity, not Virtue

I just got some mail claiming to be from “Bank of America <secure@bofasecure.com>”.
It passes SPF:

Received-SPF: Pass (sender SPF authorized) identity=mailfrom; client-ip=185.235.176.160; helo=bofasecure.com;

It passes DKIM:

Authentication-Results: mx.wordtothewise.com (amavisd-new); dkim=pass (1024-bit key) header.d=bofasecure.com

The visible RFC 822 From address is strictly aligned with both the SPF domain and the DKIM domain. So if they’d published a DMARC record it would have passed DMARC.
The message branding is good, and looks like Bank of America (unsurprisingly, as it’s loading assets from bac-assets.com, which is Bank of America). The only visible giveaway is that it includes an attached Word file, one which will presumably try and install malware on my machine if I load it with Word.
The perfectly passing authentication tells me it’s from bofasecure.com. There’s nothing that tells me that bofasecure.com isn’t Bank of America, and isn’t someone I should trust.

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A brief history of TXT Records

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When the Domain Name System was designed thirty years ago the concept behind it was pretty simple. It’s mostly just a distributed database that lets you map hostname / query-type pairs to values.
If you want to know the IP address of cnn.com, you look up {cnn.com, A} and get back a couple of IP addresses. If you want to know where to send mail for aol.com users, you look up {aol.com, MX} and you get a set of four hostname / preference pairs back. If you want to know the hostname for the IP address 206.190.36.45 you look up {45.36.190.206.in-addr.arpa, PTR} and get a hostname back.
There’s a well-defined meaning to each of those query types  – A is for IP addresses, MX is for mailservers, PTR is for hostnames – and that was always the intent for how DNS should work.
When DNS was first standardized, though, there was one query type that didn’t really have any semantic meaning:

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Ask Laura: Can you help me understand no auth / no entry?

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Dear Laura,
I’m a little confused by the term “no auth / no entry”. Gmail and other major receivers seem to be moving towards requiring authentication before they’ll even consider delivery.
Does this just mean SPF and DKIM, or does this mean the much more stringent DMARC, as well?
Thanks,
No Shirt, No Shoes, No What Now?

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