Philipp Hancke wrote:
Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
As I always say, we don't need to be perfect, just more difficult to
attack than other networks. Part of raising the cost (mostly the cost in
time) would involve requiring TLS with CA-issued certificates for s2s
(perhaps we can get there eventually!). But as you say there is no magic

If getting there was possible, why is that solution not applied to SMTP?

Besides, the TLS situation on s2s is a huge mess... and will continue to
be so while you accept "bogus certificates" (as defined below) at
jabber.org.
The problem is mostly limited to what is called "starttls+dialback".
Since that had never been officially specified, it seems that developers
ignored possible interactions.

Definition of a bogus certificate:
* subject does contain the hostname (especially: CN=ejabberd)
* subject is valid but certificate is expired - even expired since
  January 2009.
* certificate is revoked (that even worked with 0178 style auth when
  I tested it)
* ...
Note that I did not include self-signed certificates or certificates issued by a CA which is not well-known. Those are probably better
handled in a ssh-like approach.

Just another piece of "not really relevant" criticism.

philipp

The TLS situation will not be improved until there is a way for a domain owner to delegate (via SRV records perhaps) which server provides their XMPP service. We host over 250 email domains, and one of the reasons why we don't enable them all for XMPP is because we can't practically manage that many certificates. The idea that Google Talk will be able to practically, or ethically, manage thousands of valid matching signed certificates is preposterous.

Jesse

--
  Jesse Thompson
  Division of Information Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Email/IM: [email protected]

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

Reply via email to