Hi,

On 04/05/2020 18:48, Ben Schwartz wrote:
On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 1:36 AM Ryan Sleevi <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


    On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 2:11 PM Ben Schwartz
    <[email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


        On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 8:35 AM Alexey Melnikov
        <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
        wrote:

            Hi Ben,

            On 21/04/2020 01:12, Ben Schwartz wrote:

            On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 5:40 AM Alexey Melnikov
            <[email protected]
            <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

                Hi Ben,

                My apologies for missing your email in March:


            And mine for this delayed response.

                On 12/03/2020 20:42, Ben Schwartz wrote:
                Section 3 says token-part1 "contains at least 64 bit
                of entropy", but Section 3.1 says token-part1 "MUST
                be at least 64 octet long after decoding".  Is this
                difference deliberate?

                No, I obviously made a typo when saying octets. I
                will fix.

            Fixed.

                Also 64 octets of entropy is a _lot_.  RFC 8555 says
                "the token is required to contain at least 128 bits
                of entropy".

                The draft seems to be oriented entirely toward use
                with e-mail clients that have a built-in ACME-S/MIME
                client.  I'm a bit disappointed that the draft
                doesn't accommodate users with "naive" email clients
                very well, e.g. by allowing customized subject lines.

                Actually, I was trying to accommodate naive email
                clients, but it was a fine balance trying to specify
                minimal requirements.

                Can you suggest some specific text to change and then
                we can discuss whether or not it should be done? My
                thinking about the Subject header field was that I
                wanted to have a unique subject (so that ACME email
                messages are easily findable). I also wanted to allow
                the token in the subject for APIs that can easily
                access Subject and not other header fields.

            In that case, I would suggest "... subject ending with
            "(ACME: <token-part1>)", where ...". That would allow the
            first part of the subject (most likely to be seen by a
            human) to be human-readable.

            After thinking a bit more about this:

            As ACME servers are generating ACME challenge emails, the
            requirement on them is stricter (they create the first
            message in an email thread). I am tempted to leave this as
            is. Can you think of a case where ACME servers would be
            unable to comply with this restriction?

        My concern is that users will not know what to do if they
        receive an email whose subject line is "ACME:
        awlkNSdpijawrfz...".  Users are used to seeing emails whose
        subject line is "Please verify your email address" or "Confirm
        your email".  (My inbox is full of them.)  I see no reason to
        disallow that here.

        Mandating that the subject line be non-human-readable seems
        like an unnecessary barrier to adoption.


    Are you expecting humans to be the primary interaction point?


Ideally, ACME-aware mail clients will handle these messages in some beautiful, mostly-invisible way, but mail clients don't update as fast as browsers.  Even many years after most users have ACME-aware clients, I think a sizable fraction will have non-aware clients.
Right.

    It almost seems that ensuring human unfriendliness is a feature,
    not a bug, towards the goal of automation.


That was my expectation after reading draft-06, but Alexey explained that human-friendliness was in-scope, hence my suggestions.

Obviously human-friendliness for non ACME aware email clients and ease of implementation in ACME aware email clients are in conflict. I would be happy to use some compromise if a good balance can be found.

    This structure seems especially important if it has a chance to be
    adopted by publicly trusted CAs. One of the big concerns with
    existing validation approaches is bodies that are rich-text with
    links used for approval, and for which anti-spam or scanning
    engines inspect (“click”) and cause improper authorizations.


According to this draft, authorization requires sending a specially formed reply email, so I think the risk of a scanning engine accidentally authorizing is low.

    The more structure, the better, towards preventing accidental
    authorizations.

Best Regards,

Alexey

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