On Fri, Aug 08, 2014 at 02:32:17PM +0200, Gilles Chehade wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 08, 2014 at 02:31:35PM +0200, Johannes L??thberg wrote:
> > On 08/08, Gilles Chehade wrote:
> > >>With STARTTLS I believe there is a clear text race where an attacker can
> > >>create a response stating STARTTLS is unsupported resulting in
> > >>cleartext transmission which I believe would not be the case for smtps.
> > >>
> > >
> > >I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about :-/
> > >
> > 
> > When you connect to a mailserver without SMTPS you start in cleartext, and
> > that connection can be man-in-the-middle'd, which leads to the attacker
> > being able to make it appear so that the mailserver doesn't support
> > STARTTLS.
> > 
> > I've seen this in practice at my old school for one.
> > 
> 
> Yes, I know that :-)
> 
> But I don't understand why it is a problem.
> 
> OpenSMTPD does opportunistic-TLS and an attacker doing a MITM will only
> be able to skip STARTTLS in a situation where..., well... we would have
> falled back to plaintext anyway if the server didn't offer STARTTLS.
> 
> If you want to enforce TLS relaying, you can add the "tls" parameter to
> the relay rule which will disable opportunistic-TLS and mandate it.
> 

While at it, SMTPS is deprecated, we onlu support it because it shares
100% of the TLS code with STARTTLS and that some clients still offer a
SMTPS auto-configuration.

If it were only for me, we'd kiss smtps goodbye

-- 
Gilles Chehade

https://www.poolp.org                                          @poolpOrg

-- 
You received this mail because you are subscribed to [email protected]
To unsubscribe, send a mail to: [email protected]

Reply via email to