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Re: [ietf-smtp] homework, not an experiment, draft-crocker-email-deliveredto

2021-08-03 07:25:34
Viktor Dukhovni writes:

> On 2 Aug 2021, at 9:34 pm, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
>
>> In particular, it is not unreasonable for the LDA to record an encoded
>> HMAC of the recipient address in the localpart, thereby making more
>> difficult abuse of "Delivered-To:" to elicit bounces of the message to
>> the purported envelope sender (because it is then harder for the
>> attacker to predict the magic "Delivered-To:" value).
>
> Huh, interesting point. Do you know of an LDAs that actually do that? If so we should
> add it to the description of the existing practice if we do a draft.
>
> When I look at Postfix and qmail, they both appear to use the plaintext
> locally rewritten recipient address, which may not make much sense to
> software other than the MTA.

Some abuse of Delivered-To to trigger bounces has been reported now and
then, and the idea of obfuscated Delivered-To: had been discussed, but
has not yet been implemented.  The freedom to do that some day remains.

https://mailing.postfix.users.narkive.com/RMb6WBxb/delivered-to-message- header

I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with this, by itself. It's better than nothing. But if the actual goal is to prevent proxy DDOSes, this should be addressed directly: no bounce should be sent via SMTP for mail that was accepted via SMTP.

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