the imap & smtp servers now allow logging in with tls client authentication and
the "external" sasl authentication mechanism. email clients like thunderbird,
fairemail, k9, macos mail implement it. this seems to be the most secure among
the authentication mechanism commonly implemented by clients. a useful property
is that an account can have a separate tls public key for each device/email
client. with tls client cert auth, authentication is also bound to the tls
connection. a mitm cannot pass the credentials on to another tls connection,
similar to scram-*-plus. though part of scram-*-plus is that clients verify
that the server knows the client credentials.
for tls client auth with imap, we send a "preauth" untagged message by default.
that puts the connection in authenticated state. given the imap connection
state machine, further authentication commands are not allowed. some clients
don't recognize the preauth message, and try to authenticate anyway, which
fails. a tls public key has a config option to disable preauth, keeping new
connections in unauthenticated state, to work with such email clients.
for smtp (submission), we don't require an explicit auth command.
both for imap and smtp, we allow a client to authenticate with another
mechanism than "external". in that case, credentials are verified, and have to
be for the same account as the tls client auth, but the adress can be another
one than the login address configured with the tls public key.
only the public key is used to identify the account that is authenticating. we
ignore the rest of the certificate. expiration dates, names, constraints, etc
are not verified. no certificate authorities are involved.
users can upload their own (minimal) certificate. the account web interface
shows openssl commands you can run to generate a private key, minimal cert, and
a p12 file (the format that email clients seem to like...) containing both
private key and certificate.
the imapclient & smtpclient packages can now also use tls client auth. and so
does "mox sendmail", either with a pem file with private key and certificate,
or with just an ed25519 private key.
there are new subcommands "mox config tlspubkey ..." for
adding/removing/listing tls public keys from the cli, by the admin.
an é (e with accent) can also be written as e+\u0301. the first form is NFC,
the second NFD. when logging in, we transform usernames (email addresses) to
NFC. so both forms will be accepted. if a client is using NFD, they can log
in too.
for passwords, we apply the PRECIS "opaquestring", which (despite the name)
transforms the value too: unicode spaces are replaced with ascii spaces. the
string is also normalized to NFC. PRECIS may reject confusing passwords when
you set a password.
so a single user cannot fill up the disk.
by default, there is (still) no limit. a default can be set in the config file
for all accounts, and a per-account max size can be set that would override any
global setting.
this does not take into account disk usage of the index database. and also not
of any file system overhead.
current behaviour isn't intuitive. it's not great to have to attempt parsing
the strings as both localpart and email address. so we deprecate the
localpart-only behaviour. when we load the config file, and it has
localpart-only Destinations keys, we'll change them to full addresses in
memory. when an admin causes a write of domains.conf, it'll automatically be
fixed. we log an error with a deprecated notice for each localpart-only
destinations key.
sometime in the future, we can remove the old localpart-only destination
support. will be in the release notes then.
also start keeping track of update notes that need to make it in the release
notes of the next release.
for issue #18
