MBOX-Line: From brong at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar 18 21:34:42 2014
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:52 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] STARTTLS after PREAUTH
In-Reply-To: <53291956.90203@verizon.net>
References: <20140318141305.Horde.iyy0UP8Ostx9TojRZiFyjw1@bigworm.curecanti.org>
	<059bac1f-35eb-4f87-bd5e-e986dfb46b83@flaska.net>
	<20140318152549.Horde.0C2tXb4vwx_29xt0ZbwdEQ4@bigworm.curecanti.org>
	<1395187453.9897.96141249.7BE88CD8@webmail.messagingengine.com>
	<53290DE4.2020909@verizon.net>
	<1395200804.27059.96196209.4345452F@webmail.messagingengine.com>
	<53291956.90203@verizon.net>
Message-ID: <1395203682.4445.96207281.659A22F3@webmail.messagingengine.com>

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014, at 03:13 PM, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> On 3/18/2014 10:46 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> > And then it fell back to the Mozilla ISP database, but there's no 
> > reason I couldn't have MITMed that and stolen the gmail creds too. 
> > Thunderbird is pretty trivially fooled at setup time. Bron. 
> The ISP database requires an https connection IIRC, but that's a minor 
> detail (I thought autoconfig also required https and not http, but 
> again, that's minor).

Yes, it did in my tcpdump, which is good.

> You seem to be coming from the standpoint that a security system that 
> can't protect against everything is no better than one that protects 
> against most things. Autoconfiguration can be fooled, true (even if 
> https were required--we fallback to guessing servers and trying 
> commands, so a DNS hijack setup could easily screw it over). But you 
> have a 5-second window (and I'm being generous here) to do it. And if 
> you miss that chance, you've lost it for another 3 years.
> 
> It's like ssh: ssh is actually weak to being MITM'd on the first 
> connection (based on how people use it): people don't remember the keys, 
> so they'll always say "yes" to the question "are you sure this key is 
> correct?" Does that mean that ssh provides no protection? Of course 
> not--the difficulty of intercepting the ssh connection is made extremely 
> harder and makes attackers pour much more resources into doing so.

No, you're absolutely right there.  It's definitely an improvement.
Thunderbird is one of the better clients out there.

Of course, it could try SRV records first.  There's a standard for that
now, and they could point you at port 993 (ours do) immediately.

Gmail also uses port 993 fwiw.

Bron.

-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong@fastmail.fm

