Re: [apps-discuss] Review of: draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-03

"Murray S. Kucherawy" <superuser@gmail.com> Mon, 13 May 2013 06:47 UTC

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Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 23:47:12 -0700
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From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <superuser@gmail.com>
To: Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>
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Cc: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@bbiw.net>, Apps Discuss <apps-discuss@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Review of: draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-03
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Hi Ned, thanks for your comments.  I've worked in most of your suggestions,
but have the following to ask further on some of your points:

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com> wrote:

> Eight-Bit Data (section 8.7) needs a bunch of work, and once again it's a
> failure to consider the semantics of where the 8bit shows up. 8bit
> appearing in
> a header is a very different proposition from 8bit in a body. EAI deserves
> a
> shout-out in the former case because it's new, and the latter case is now
> so
> much of a ho-hum for many agents that a recommendation to reject 8bit is
> nothing short of silly.
>
> I'm also far from convinced that rejecting messages because of a single
> null is
> a good idea. I think a fair assessment of the likely intent in this case
> is the
> presence of a null or two is simply a message construction error, and
> silently
> dropping them is a much better bet.
>

Eight bit data is far from something I'm expert on.  Could I ask you to
write up a paragraph or three to include here, or replace what's here?


>
> Header Field Names (section 9.1) is certainly cute, but MIME is actually
> quite clear that the first place a boundary can occur is in the following
> body, not the associated header. I'm not really comfortable with
> this document acting on an assessment of intent of material that is in fact
> completely valid. My suggestion is therefore to refrain from talking about
> rejecting such messages.
>

It's a real attack seen in the wild.  I see your point about MIME and the
location of boundaries, however, so I think this section can just go.



>
> I'm afraid "Missing MIME-Version Field" (section 9.2) is flat-out
> incorrect.
> The intent of a message that has a valid content-type and possibly
> content-transfer-encoding is pretty darned clear, and perhaps more to the
> point, failing to interpret such a message as MIME, given that many other
> agents, e.g., metamail, are going to, is exceedingly poor practice from a
> security standpoint.
>

This is also something real I dealt with at a previous employer.  More
often than not it was seen as part of a spam attack that targeted specific
MUAs.  I'm fine with removing this section however if the advice is
controversial; I don't have access to data to back up how important or
useful this change was.


>
> (If we're up for additions at this late date, it might also be good to add
> a
> section on how to handle bogus base64 or quoted-printable.)
>

Yup, we are.  Do you have anything specific in mind?

-MSK