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Re: Proposed patch to enforce STARTTLS before MAIL FROM

Maxim Dounin
March 05, 2019 01:24PM
Hello!

On Mon, Mar 04, 2019 at 01:06:58PM -0600, Community Proposed via nginx-devel wrote:

> Hello, in nginx 1.14.2 using a configuration directive of 'starttls only;' and
> 'smtp_auth none;' I noticed this was only applied to the AUTH section of the
> SMTP transaction. I have written the below to be applied to the MAIL FROM
> section which should be enforced over STARTTLS. MAIL FROM should occur before
> RCPT TO and DATA to avoid out of sequence errors. Scenarios where the patch
> changes would be seen in the real world would be for NGINX in front of an MTA
> which is the final destination. Without enforcing STARTTLS before the MAIL
> FROM the full conversation inclusive of the DATA command can occur in clear
> text during testing.

Not sure it is a good change.

The main goal of "starttls only;" used to be to ensure that
authenticated clients are using encryption and client credentials
are not transferred in clear text. While "smtp_auth none;" is to
be used on public SMTP servers, and RFC 3207 clearly says that:

A publicly-referenced SMTP server MUST NOT require use of the
STARTTLS extension in order to deliver mail locally. This rule
prevents the STARTTLS extension from damaging the interoperability of
the Internet's SMTP infrastructure.

For example, with

starttls only;
smtp_auth none plain;

current behaviour is to require SSL/TLS for authentication, but
allow non-encrypted connections without authentication for mail
delivery. This matches RFC 3207 requirements out of the box.

With the suggested change such a configuration would violate the
above "MUST NOT" clause of RFC 3207. Moreover, it would be
impossible to configure nginx with a single listening socket to
accept only encrypted connections from clients, while accepting
mail delivery without encryption as required by RFC 3207.

If you want unathenticated clients to use SSL/TLS encryption, a
better solution might be to enforce this requirement with
auth_http script.

[...]

--
Maxim Dounin
http://mdounin.ru/
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Subject Author Views Posted

Proposed patch to enforce STARTTLS before MAIL FROM

Community Proposed via nginx-devel 329 March 04, 2019 02:08PM

Re: Proposed patch to enforce STARTTLS before MAIL FROM

Maxim Dounin 233 March 05, 2019 01:24PM

Re: Proposed patch to enforce STARTTLS before MAIL FROM

lists--- via nginx-devel 135 March 05, 2019 02:48PM

Re: Proposed patch to enforce STARTTLS before MAIL FROM

Maxim Dounin 151 March 07, 2019 12:40PM



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