On 11/13/17 8:06 AM, Daniel Margolis wrote:
> Hey, thanks to you both for the discussion. I'll try to centralize the
> issues here a little bit, if you don't mind.

Good summary, thanks for organizing it. Comments inline.

>
> > Security properties of policy discovery and risks of persistent MITM
> preventing discovery. 
>
> I'm going to take a pass on this discussion, Jim, unless it's a
> blocker. As Viktor said, this is a tradeoff that's been there since
> the beginning, but we've discussed it many times before and resolved
> (I think) to go forward. So this is simply a risk we have to document,
> as we have done in Security Considerations.

OK.

>
> > Mode "report" vs "none".
>
> You make a fair point that "report" is a no-op if there's no TLSRPT,
> but I think it's somewhat nice to call it out as "report" because it
> indicates the likely usage of this setting--to generate data for
> observers. This isn't TLSRPT-specific; it's just that absent TLSRPT or
> human intervention there's no good way to share reports with the
> domain admin. 
>
> Nicolas's suggestion of "testing" works for me, but frankly I would
> prefer not to change this since it requires changing a bit of code in
> a few places and will take a few minutes longer than it takes for me
> to just say I'd prefer to be lazy and keep "report". If you feel
> strongly, let me know. ;)

I'm mixed on this. This is at the draft stage so some changes should be
expected. The key question that I have, and implementers will need to
know, is if there is any semantic difference between "report" and
"none". I can't find any, except possibly in Section 7.3, "Removing
MTA-STS", and I'm not sure if that is really a difference. My main
concern with "report", which I probably said before, is that it might
confuse domains that are publishing MTA-STS policies and don't know
about TLSRPT.

>
> > SNI
>
> To be clear, SNI is only required to be /sent/ by the SMTP and HTTPS
> clients. This is necessary in that servers cannot use SNI if they
> cannot assume clients will send it. But that doesn't mean servers must
> support SNI; they can simply ignore it if they want. So this is the
> minimum requirement to make SNI functional, as was discussed on this
> list before.

My mistake here; the spec does clearly say the client MUST have SNI
support, not the server.

>
> > Cert validity and max_age.
>
> There's no relationship at all between max_age and cert lifetimes.
> Certificate validation involves checking the cert as one normally
> would, i.e., by verifying the signing chain and the expiry (and,
> optionally, revocation). There's no implication of policy ages
> applying to anything other than the policy, I think. I'm happy to
> clarify this if you suggest language, of course.

Seems reasonable, it's just a question that came up in my head while I
was reading the spec.  Not sure it warrants clarification.


>
> > How strongly to require senders to proactively refresh the policy
> (as currently in 9.2).
>
> I'm OK with moving this up in the doc and making it more prominent. I
> don't know if we want to make it normative (MUST) because a) the
> system works "fine" without it and b) there's no way to really say
> someone is "not compliant" if they don't do this. But I think it makes
> sense to make it a SHOULD and (as discussed already in Security
> Considerations) make clear the risks in not doing so regularly.

Yes, please move it up. Security considerations is more of a discussion
of the characteristics of the protocol, and implementers are likely to
miss it there. I would also add, since it's a SHOULD: Publishers of
MTA-STS policies MUST NOT depend on updates to be retrieved before the
expiration of the max_age.

-Jim

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