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Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Compressing SMTP streams

Kim Alvefur <zash@zash.se> Fri, 29 January 2016 19:31 UTC

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To: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>, shutup@ietf.org
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From: Kim Alvefur <zash@zash.se>
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Subject: Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Compressing SMTP streams
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Hi,

On 01/29/2016 07:07 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> Compression has been removed completely from TLS v1.3, the outcome of 
>> the room consensus at IETF-89.
> 
> Bummer.
> 
> Well, in that case, here's a straw man proposal.
> 
> The extension name is COMPRESS, the EHLO keyword is COMPRESS and is
> followed by a space-separated list of compression schemes, currently
> consisting only of DEFLATE (RFC 1951.)

The XMPP community having an application layer compression extension
protocol already, <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0138.html>, it is
pretty much like your proposal.

While CRIME may be less applicable to non-HTTP-protocols, such attacks
are not impossible, as demonstrated by Thijs Alkemade a few years back:

https://blog.thijsalkema.de/blog/2014/08/07/https-attacks-and-xmpp-2-crime-and-breach/

http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2014-October/029215.html

The takeaway here is to 1) not allow compression until after any
authentication has been done and 2) flush the compression state between
messages (if the sever supports sending multiple messages over the same
SMTP session).

-- 
Kim "Zash" Alvefur

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