On 7/19/15, 10:57 AM, "Viktor Dukhovni" <[email protected]> wrote:


>On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 01:52:53PM +0000, Rose, Scott wrote:
>
>> First, if the _smimecert.<domain> is hosted by a service provider (i.e.
>> not the domain owner), the service provider can see who may be receiving
>> encrypted mail.
>
>Which they'll also learn by just looking at the zone data, if the
>localparts are not hashed in the final spec.

Has there been any recent discussion about using a non-hashed LHS
encoding?  I don¹t think there has so we probably don¹t want to bring
that question into scope here.

>
>I'd be more concerned above passive monitoring, because with
>submission over port 587 with TLS, and forward hops from the MSA
>to the destination also increasingly over TLS, there is often at
>present no cleartext exposure of the envelope recipients.
>
>With SMIMEA, passive monitoring of DNS queries will often reveal
>the correspondent addresses.

Obvious but worth a reminderŠpassive monitoring isn¹t a problem peculiar
to the SMIMEA approach, it is an issue for all elements of the email flow
that are not encrypted.

>
>
>> and may also learn the source IP address and other potential
>> information.
>
>That'll be less common, there will typically be iterative resolvers
>between the user and the authoritative nameserver.
>
>> Of course, the hosting provider also knows the whole list
>> of (hashed) cert holders in the domain as well.  Pervasive monitoring
>>may
>> also discover this (source IP A is looking for a cert for person X in
>> order to send them mail), but qname-minimization may mitigate this to a
>> degree.
>
>Query minimization does not help here, it only hides the data from
>operators of parent domain nameservers.  Only encryption of DNS
>traffic (ala DNScurve and at all zone cuts from the root down)
>would help.
>
>> Second, clients looking to validate a digital signature using SMIMEA
>> queries may also be signaling a read receipt.  If the original sender
>> knows the recursive servers of the recipient, The sender could get an
>>idea
>> as to when the receiver MUA validated the digital signature by observing
>> SMIMEA queries to their domain.  This isn't a showstopper IMHO as
>>recipients
>> with cached digital signature certs may not send queries.
>
>The cache lifetimes should be relatively short (not in excess of
>the DNS TTLs of the TLSA RRs), so whenever there's a hiatus in
>email flow between two correspondents (as opposed to a flurry of
>immediate replies) it is quite likely that new conversations will
>involve new DNS lookups.
>
>> SMIMEA RR queries may leak information about who
>> is planning to send, or has receive S/MIME protected email messages.
>>DNS
>> privacy techniques such as qname-minimization may mitigate some of the
>> leakage.
>
>Qname minimization does not help against passive monitoring, unless
>that passive monitoring is in (only) in front of the root or
>gTLD/ccTLD nameservers, rather than on path somewhere between author
>and target domain.

I think it is fair to say that QNM does help as it reduces the number of
points
at which a passive monitor can see traffic.  It is an incremental
improvement.
>
>-- 
>       Viktor.
>
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