Re: [webfinger] [apps-discuss] Mail client configuration via WebFinger

[Marten Gajda <[e-mail]>]

Note that the idea behind 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-aggregated-service-discovery-03 
is to put the service configuration for all services of a provider into 
a single document.

So you would receive something like this:

{
     "rel " :  "service-configuration",
     "href " : "https://example.com/service-configuration"
}

If a user uses the same account identifier at another provider the 
Webfinger request could return their configuration too (given there is 
some mechanism to add it and the provider actually supports that).

{
     "rel " :  "service-configuration",
     "href " : "https://example.com/service-configuration"
},
{
     "rel " :  "service-configuration",
     "href " : "https://acme-calendar.com/service-configuration"
}

Without that it would be more difficult to setup your account at 
acme-calendar.com with your login "[e-mail]". acme-calendar.com 
would have to issue some kind of user-identifier like 
[e-mail] for auto-configuration purposes, even though you 
don't use it for authentication (because you use [e-mail] for 
authentication). I think that's the idea behind the `acct:` URI scheme, 
but I don't think that you can explain to users why they need another 
user identifier and when to use one or the other.
But that also raises the privacy concerns I mentioned earlier. If the 
request is not authenticated, everyone could see that you have an 
account at acme-calendar.com.

Regarding SSO: There is an RFC that extends SASL based authentication to 
support the token authentication mechanisms as used by OAuth1 and 
OAuth2, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7628
So SSO already works with IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.

Cheers

Marten



Am 03.06.2016 um 15:40 schrieb Paul E. Jones:
> Marten,
>> So how would the UI work?
>>
>> 1) User enters user identifier, most likely an email address, like 
>> mailto:[e-mail] and hits "next"
>>
>> 2) Client sends a Webfinger request to 
>> https://exampe.com/.well-known/webfinger?... to see if there is a 
>> configuration document
>>
>>   -> response 404 Not Found
>>    a) Client falls back to "manual setup" or another 
>> auto-configuration mechanism
>>
>>   -> response 401 Unauthorized
> One should not get 401 querying the WebFinger information for the 
> user.  What should happen is that the server should return a JSON 
> object that contains a link relation that might look like this:
> {
>     "rel " :  "mail-config",
>     "href " : 
> "https://mailserver.example.com/config?user=paulej%40packetizer.com"
> }
> Or something like that.  The mail client should query that URI it is 
> that one that should result in a potential 401.  The JSON format that 
> would come back here would need to be something we define.  It could 
> be based on JRD, but would not have to be.
> Otherwise, I think the flow looks right.
>>
>>    b) Client asks for password at "example.com" and goes back to step 
>> 2 (this time with authentication)
>>
>>   -> response 200 Ok
>>    c) client moves on to next step
>>
>> 3) (optional) Client presents found services to the user to let him 
>> select the services to set up
>>
>> 4) Client runs the setup handler for each selected service
>>
>>
>> I think in general that could work but it raises two questions:
>>
>> 1) How to make sure the user really understands that he's 
>> authenticating at example.com in step 2b? If the user tries to 
>> configure calendar sync with "acme-calendar.com" where his login 
>> happens to be mailto:[e-mail] he might not be prepared to 
>> being asked for his example.com password. Maybe I'm just paranoid or 
>> overcautious, but I think that it might easily happen that the users 
>> sends his acme-calendar.com password to example.com in that case 
>> (since Basic authentication is still the most common mechanism, the 
>> client basically sends the password in plain text).
> Yeah, that's a valid concern.  The only thing I can suggest is that 
> the Subject CN from the certificate is presented to the user.  
> Alternatively, there could be two passwords: one that is the 
> "configuration password" and one that is the email password.  However, 
> I don't think two passwords will help us. If I want to hack somebody 
> and can gain access to their WF config, I can auto-config their email 
> client to point to my own IMAP server and just retrieve the password 
> that way.
> So, I think we have to rely on the certificate presented to the mail 
> client and the user will have to know to trust it. The mail provider 
> can tell the user "when configuring email, ensure that the 
> configuration server is mailconfig.example.com and do not provide a 
> password if that is not the name of the configuration server indicated."
> If the mail config information is not protected with a password, we 
> probably would want the customer to verify that the SMTP server 
> information is correct before the password is provided.  These would 
> be the steps users would take if performing manual configuration, but 
> the software presents that information to the user without the user 
> having to enter it.
>>
>> 2) How does the client know which credentials to use to set up the 
>> individual services in step 4? Should the client ask the user for the 
>> credentials for each service or can it assume that some of them share 
>> the same credentials? Is that something an auto-configuration 
>> document can help with?
> It would be nice if there is a config indicator that says "SMTP server 
> and IMAP server passwords are the same", so the client does not have 
> to ask.
> If we use a "config password" then we could even have the server tell 
> the client the password for services, which would transparently allow 
> those to be different.  Alternatively, the client will have to ask 
> each about each one.
> For calendaring services, then yes: the client would have to ask the 
> user.  It could ask if it's the same or different than the email 
> password or the config password.  For some services, the 
> authentication mechanisms will be entirely different (like Google 
> Calendar).  The mail client will just have to know how to access the 
> service.  For that reason, I'm a little hesitant to suggest including 
> calendaring service config along with the email config data.  We could 
> have each of those services listed in the users' WebFinger document. 
> For example, I might have this entry in my WF document:
> {
>     "rel" : "calendar"
>     "href" : "urn:whatever:google"
> }
> Note I did not provide a URL.  The reason is that this is an entirely 
> different service that has an entirely different access method.  Maybe 
> the client can ask the user "is [e-mail] 
> <mailto:[e-mail]> our user ID for your Google calendar?"  
> In my case, I don't think it is.  Certainly, it's not my gmail ID.  
> And, I would not want to advertise that to the world, necessarily.  
> Anyway, I think we should limit the scope of what we try to do to 
> things that are standard OR we define a generic URN that a client will 
> just have to know how to deal with.
>> Ideally the server supports some kind of SSO mechanism like OpenID 
>> Connect, so you don't need to enter your password multiple times. But 
>> a working auto-configuration is really the precondition for this, 
>> because an OpenID Connect implementations needs a way to discover the 
>> OAuth2 scope tokens to request from the server and auto-configuration 
>> is really the way to do that, IMO. For this it would be helpful to 
>> have some mechanism to request a broader scope from the user (without 
>> allowing him to switch to a different account), but that's a 
>> different topic I guess.
> I definitely like the idea of SSO.  But, I struggle to see how we 
> would use this in practice with mail autoconfig since SMTP, IMAP, and 
> POP servers require a password, anyway.  If we use that as a means to 
> have those passwords provided behind the scenes (as I indicated 
> above), that might be a good argument for using OpenID Connect.  In 
> that way, the ISP can also ensure that passwords are REALLY complex 
> and unknown even to the user.  Not a bad practice, in that we can view 
> those passwords as complex tokens.
> Would that kind of use of OpenID Connect to retrieve the password be 
> workable?  (I'll admit I don't have so much experience with OpenID 
> Connect.  I implemented OpenID 2.0, but that's not ideal for what we'd 
> want to accomplish here.  I don't have a good feel for how Connect 
> might make this better.)
> Paul
>
>
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