and show them in the account and admin interfaces. this should help with
debugging, to find misconfigured clients, and potentially find attackers trying
to login.
we include details like login name, account name, protocol, authentication
mechanism, ip addresses, tls connection properties, user-agent. and of course
the result.
we group entries by their details. repeat connections don't cause new records
in the database, they just increase the count on the existing record.
we keep data for at most 30 days. and we keep at most 10k entries per account.
to prevent unbounded growth. for successful login attempts, we store them all
for 30d. if a bad user causes so many entries this becomes a problem, it will
be time to talk to the user...
there is no pagination/searching yet in the admin/account interfaces. so the
list may be long. we only show the 10 most recent login attempts by default.
the rest is only shown on a separate page.
there is no way yet to disable this. may come later, either as global setting
or per account.
to facilitate migrations from/to other mail setups.
a domain can be added in "disabled" mode (or can be disabled/enabled later on).
you can configure a disabled domain, but incoming/outgoing messages involving
the domain are rejected with temporary error codes (as this may occur during a
migration, remote servers will try again, hopefully to the correct machine or
after this machine has been configured correctly). also, no acme tls certs will
be requested for disabled domains (the autoconfig/mta-sts dns records may still
point to the current/previous machine). accounts with addresses at disabled
domains can still login, unless logins are disabled for their accounts.
an account now has an option to disable logins. you can specify an error
message to show. this will be shown in smtp, imap and the web interfaces. it
could contain a message about migrations, and possibly a URL to a page with
information about how to migrate. incoming/outgoing email involving accounts
with login disabled are still accepted/delivered as normal (unless the domain
involved in the messages is disabled too). account operations by the admin,
such as importing/exporting messages still works.
in the admin web interface, listings of domains/accounts show if they are disabled.
domains & accounts can be enabled/disabled through the config file, cli
commands and admin web interface.
for issue #175 by RobSlgm
the http basic auth we had was very simple to reason about, and to implement.
but it has a major downside:
there is no way to logout, browsers keep sending credentials. ideally, browsers
themselves would show a button to stop sending credentials.
a related downside: the http auth mechanism doesn't indicate for which server
paths the credentials are.
another downside: the original password is sent to the server with each
request. though sending original passwords to web servers seems to be
considered normal.
our new approach uses session cookies, along with csrf values when we can. the
sessions are server-side managed, automatically extended on each use. this
makes it easy to invalidate sessions and keeps the frontend simpler (than with
long- vs short-term sessions and refreshing). the cookies are httponly,
samesite=strict, scoped to the path of the web interface. cookies are set
"secure" when set over https. the cookie is set by a successful call to Login.
a call to Logout invalidates a session. changing a password invalidates all
sessions for a user, but keeps the session with which the password was changed
alive. the csrf value is also random, and associated with the session cookie.
the csrf must be sent as header for api calls, or as parameter for direct form
posts (where we cannot set a custom header). rest-like calls made directly by
the browser, e.g. for images, don't have a csrf protection. the csrf value is
returned by the Login api call and stored in localstorage.
api calls without credentials return code "user:noAuth", and with bad
credentials return "user:badAuth". the api client recognizes this and triggers
a login. after a login, all auth-failed api calls are automatically retried.
only for "user:badAuth" is an error message displayed in the login form (e.g.
session expired).
in an ideal world, browsers would take care of most session management. a
server would indicate authentication is needed (like http basic auth), and the
browsers uses trusted ui to request credentials for the server & path. the
browser could use safer mechanism than sending original passwords to the
server, such as scram, along with a standard way to create sessions. for now,
web developers have to do authentication themselves: from showing the login
prompt, ensuring the right session/csrf cookies/localstorage/headers/etc are
sent with each request.
webauthn is a newer way to do authentication, perhaps we'll implement it in the
future. though hardware tokens aren't an attractive option for many users, and
it may be overkill as long as we still do old-fashioned authentication in smtp
& imap where passwords can be sent to the server.
for issue #58
