liable to incompatible change.
-OCSP Stapling support
---------------------------------------------------------------
-
-X.509 PKI certificates expire and can be revoked; to handle this, the
-clients need some way to determine if a particular certificate, from a
-particular Certificate Authority (CA), is still valid. There are three
-main ways to do so.
-
-The simplest way is to serve up a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) with
-an ordinary web-server, regenerating the CRL before it expires. The
-downside is that clients have to periodically re-download a potentially
-huge file from every certificate authority it knows of.
-
-The way with most moving parts at query time is Online Certificate
-Status Protocol (OCSP), where the client verifies the certificate
-against an OCSP server run by the CA. This lets the CA track all
-usage of the certs. This requires running software with access to the
-private key of the CA, to sign the responses to the OCSP queries. OCSP
-is based on HTTP and can be proxied accordingly.
-
-The only widespread OCSP server implementation (known to this writer)
-comes as part of OpenSSL and aborts on an invalid request, such as
-connecting to the port and then disconnecting. This requires
-re-entering the passphrase each time some random client does this.
-
-The third way is OCSP Stapling; in this, the server using a certificate
-issued by the CA periodically requests an OCSP proof of validity from
-the OCSP server, then serves it up inline as part of the TLS
-negotiation. This approach adds no extra round trips, does not let the
-CA track users, scales well with number of certs issued by the CA and is
-resilient to temporary OCSP server failures, as long as the server
-starts retrying to fetch an OCSP proof some time before its current
-proof expires. The downside is that it requires server support.
-
-If Exim is built with EXPERIMENTAL_OCSP and it was built with OpenSSL,
-or with GnuTLS 3.1.3 or later, then it gains a new global option:
-"tls_ocsp_file".
-
-The file specified therein is expected to be in DER format, and contain
-an OCSP proof. Exim will serve it as part of the TLS handshake. This
-option will be re-expanded for SNI, if the tls_certificate option
-contains $tls_sni, as per other TLS options.
-
-Exim does not at this time implement any support for fetching a new OCSP
-proof. The burden is on the administrator to handle this, outside of
-Exim. The file specified should be replaced atomically, so that the
-contents are always valid. Exim will expand the "tls_ocsp_file" option
-on each connection, so a new file will be handled transparently on the
-next connection.
-
-Under OpenSSL Exim will check for a valid next update timestamp in the
-OCSP proof; if not present, or if the proof has expired, it will be
-ignored.
-
-Also, given EXPERIMENTAL_OCSP, the smtp transport gains two options:
-- "hosts_require_ocsp"; a host-list for which an OCSP Stapling
-is requested and required for the connection to proceed. The default
-value is empty.
-- "hosts_request_ocsp"; a host-list for which (additionally) an OCSP
-Stapling is requested (but not necessarily verified). The default
-value is "*" meaning that requests are made unless configured
-otherwise.
-
-The host(s) should also be in "hosts_require_tls", and
-"tls_verify_certificates" configured for the transport.
-
-For the client to be able to verify the stapled OCSP the server must
-also supply, in its stapled information, any intermediate
-certificates for the chain leading to the OCSP proof from the signer
-of the server certificate. There may be zero or one such. These
-intermediate certificates should be added to the server OCSP stapling
-file (named by tls_ocsp_file).
-
-Note that the proof only covers the terminal server certificate,
-not any of the chain from CA to it.
-
-At this point in time, we're gathering feedback on use, to determine if
-it's worth adding complexity to the Exim daemon to periodically re-fetch
-OCSP files and somehow handling multiple files.
-
- A helper script "ocsp_fetch.pl" for fetching a proof from a CA
- OCSP server is supplied. The server URL may be included in the
- server certificate, if the CA is helpful.
-
- One failure mode seen was the OCSP Signer cert expiring before the end
- of validity of the OCSP proof. The checking done by Exim/OpenSSL
- noted this as invalid overall, but the re-fetch script did not.
-
-
-
-
Brightmail AntiSpam (BMI) suppport
--------------------------------------------------------------
logwrite = Internal Server Address: $received_ip_address:$received_port
-4. Runtime issues to be aware of:
+4. Recommended ACL additions:
- Since the real connections are all coming from your proxy, and the
per host connection tracking is done before Proxy Protocol is
evaluated, smtp_accept_max_per_host must be set high enough to
handle all of the parallel volume you expect per inbound proxy.
+ - With the smtp_accept_max_per_host set so high, you lose the ability
+ to protect your server from massive numbers of inbound connections
+ from one IP. In order to prevent your server from being DOS'd, you
+ need to add a per connection ratelimit to your connect ACL. I
+ suggest something like this:
+
+ # Set max number of connections per host
+ LIMIT = 5
+ # Or do some kind of IP lookup in a flat file or database
+ # LIMIT = ${lookup{$sender_host_address}iplsearch{/etc/exim/proxy_limits}}
+
+ defer message = Too many connections from this IP right now
+ ratelimit = LIMIT / 5s / per_conn / strict
+
+
+5. Runtime issues to be aware of:
- The proxy has 3 seconds (hard-coded in the source code) to send the
required Proxy Protocol header after it connects. If it does not,
the response to any commands will be:
mail programs from working because that would require mail from
localhost to use Proxy Protocol. Again, not advised!
-5. Example of a refused connection because the Proxy Protocol header was
+6. Example of a refused connection because the Proxy Protocol header was
not sent from a host configured to use Proxy Protocol. In the example,
the 3 second timeout occurred (when a Proxy Protocol banner should have
been sent), the banner was displayed to the user, but all commands are
the next hop does not support DSN.
Adding it to a redirect router makes no difference.
+
Certificate name checking
--------------------------------------------------------------
The X509 certificates used for TLS are supposed be verified
component FQDN).
+DANE
+------------------------------------------------------------
+DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities, as applied
+to SMTP over TLS, provides assurance to a client that
+it is actually talking to the server it wants to rather
+than some attacker operating a Man In The Middle (MITM)
+operation. The latter can terminate the TLS connection
+you make, and make another one to the server (so both
+you and the server still think you have an encrypted
+connection) and, if one of the "well known" set of
+Certificate Authorities has been suborned - something
+which *has* been seen already (2014), a verifiable
+certificate (if you're using normal root CAs, eg. the
+Mozilla set, as your trust anchors).
+
+What DANE does is replace the CAs with the DNS as the
+trust anchor. The assurance is limited to a) the possibility
+that the DNS has been suborned, b) mistakes made by the
+admins of the target server. The attack surface presented
+by (a) is thought to be smaller than that of the set
+of root CAs.
+
+DANE scales better than having to maintain (and
+side-channel communicate) copies of server certificates
+for every possible target server. It also scales
+(slightly) better than having to maintain on an SMTP
+client a copy of the standard CAs bundle. It also
+means not having to pay a CA for certificates.
+
+DANE requires a server operator to do three things:
+1) run DNSSEC. This provides assurance to clients
+that DNS lookups they do for the server have not
+been tampered with.
+2) add TLSA DNS records. These say what the server
+certificate for a TLS connection should be.
+3) offer a server certificate, or certificate chain,
+in TLS connections which is traceable to the one
+defined by (one of?) the TSLA records
+
+There are no changes to Exim specific to server-side
+operation of DANE.
+
+The TLSA record for the server may have "certificate
+usage" of DANE_TA(2) or DANE_EE(3). The latter specifies
+the End Entity directly, i.e. the certificate involved
+is that of the server (and should be the sole one transmitted
+during the TLS handshake); this is appropriate for a
+single system, using a self-signed certificate.
+ DANE_TA usage is effectively declaring a specific CA
+to be used; this might be a private CA or a public,
+well-known one. A private CA at simplest is just
+a self-signed certificate which is used to sign
+cerver certificates, but running one securely does
+require careful arrangement. If a private CA is used
+then either all clients must be primed with it, or
+(probably simpler) the server TLS handshake must transmit
+the entire certificate chain from CA to server-certificate.
+If a public CA is used then all clients must be primed with it
+(losing one advantage of DANE) - but the attack surface is
+reduced from all public CAs to that single CA.
+DANE_TA is commonly used for several services and/or
+servers, each having a TLSA query-domain CNAME record,
+all of which point to a single TLSA record.
+
+The TLSA record should have a Selector field of SPKI(1)
+and a Matching Type fiels of SHA2-512(2).
+
+For use with the DANE_TA model, server certificates
+must have a correct name (SubjectName or SubjectAltName).
+
+The use of OCSP-stapling should be considered, allowing
+for fast revocation of certificates (which would otherwise
+be limited by the DNS TTL on the TLSA records).
+
+
+For client-side DANE there are two new smtp transport options,
+hosts_try_dane and hosts_require_dane. They do the obvious thing.
+[ should they be domain-based rather than host-based? ]
+
+DANE will only be usable if the target host has DNSSEC-secured
+MX, A and TLSA records.
+
+(TODO: specify when fallback happens vs. when the host is not used)
+
+If dane is in use the following transport options are ignored:
+ tls_verify_hosts
+ tls_try_verify_hosts
+ tls_verify_certificates
+ tls_crl
+ tls_verify_cert_hostnames
+ hosts_require_ocsp (might rethink those two)
+ hosts_request_ocsp
+
+Currently dnssec_request_domains must be active (need to think about that)
+and dnssec_require_domains is ignored.
+
--------------------------------------------------------------
End of file
projects / exim.git / blobdiff