[55621] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Remote email access
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu)
Tue Feb 4 13:19:17 2003
To: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 04 Feb 2003 09:05:17 EST."
<5.2.0.9.2.20030204085747.021c21e8@mail.amaranth.net>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 13:17:36 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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On Tue, 04 Feb 2003 09:05:17 EST, Daniel Senie said:
> This is, IMO, unworkable in the near term. While I support and promote the
> use of TLS with SMTP (and POP), requiring client certs is likely too
> cumbersome for users to manage at this stage. Using STARTTLS to transition
> clients to an encrypted connection works exceptionally well. The server
> does need a cert, but the users are identifying with a methodology they
> understand, usernames and passwords.
I've personally been advocating setting up Sendmail with a self-signed
certificate and opportunistic STARTTLS. Yes, I know it's not immune to
man-in-the-middle attacks - but it's *quite* sufficient to stop passive
sniffing of userids/passwords/text. And it doesn't require much infrastructure.
> The question this raises is whether you're concerned about MTA to MTA
> communication, or MUA to MTA? I'd be happy to see certs in use for MTA-MTA
> (and indeed support this today on my systems when talking to other MTAs
> which are using STARTTLS). However, there are definitely reasons why this
One of my hosts (a fair-sized Listserv server) sent out some 278K connections
to other sites yesterday. Of the 3,453 domains it talked to, 123 were
willing to do STARTTLS, for a deployment rate of 3.5%.
Unfortunately, working across connections, only 0.53% used it. If the 10
busiest sites we talked to deployed STARTTLS, it would jump to some 27% of
the traffic.
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Senior Engineer
Virginia Tech
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