The intent to remove the account is stored in the database. At startup, if
there are any such referenes, they are applied by removing the account
directories and the entry in the database. This ensures the account directory
is properly removed, even on incomplete shutdown.
Don't add an account when its directory already exits.
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.
the imap & smtp servers now allow logging in with tls client authentication and
the "external" sasl authentication mechanism. email clients like thunderbird,
fairemail, k9, macos mail implement it. this seems to be the most secure among
the authentication mechanism commonly implemented by clients. a useful property
is that an account can have a separate tls public key for each device/email
client. with tls client cert auth, authentication is also bound to the tls
connection. a mitm cannot pass the credentials on to another tls connection,
similar to scram-*-plus. though part of scram-*-plus is that clients verify
that the server knows the client credentials.
for tls client auth with imap, we send a "preauth" untagged message by default.
that puts the connection in authenticated state. given the imap connection
state machine, further authentication commands are not allowed. some clients
don't recognize the preauth message, and try to authenticate anyway, which
fails. a tls public key has a config option to disable preauth, keeping new
connections in unauthenticated state, to work with such email clients.
for smtp (submission), we don't require an explicit auth command.
both for imap and smtp, we allow a client to authenticate with another
mechanism than "external". in that case, credentials are verified, and have to
be for the same account as the tls client auth, but the adress can be another
one than the login address configured with the tls public key.
only the public key is used to identify the account that is authenticating. we
ignore the rest of the certificate. expiration dates, names, constraints, etc
are not verified. no certificate authorities are involved.
users can upload their own (minimal) certificate. the account web interface
shows openssl commands you can run to generate a private key, minimal cert, and
a p12 file (the format that email clients seem to like...) containing both
private key and certificate.
the imapclient & smtpclient packages can now also use tls client auth. and so
does "mox sendmail", either with a pem file with private key and certificate,
or with just an ed25519 private key.
there are new subcommands "mox config tlspubkey ..." for
adding/removing/listing tls public keys from the cli, by the admin.
