Skip to main content

SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS)
draft-ietf-uta-mta-sts-04

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 8461.
Authors Daniel Margolis , Mark Risher , Binu Ramakrishnan , Alex Brotman , Janet Jones
Last updated 2017-04-05 (Latest revision 2017-02-15)
Replaces draft-brotman-mta-sts
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Formats
Reviews
Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state WG Document
Document shepherd (None)
IESG IESG state Became RFC 8461 (Proposed Standard)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD (None)
Send notices to (None)
draft-ietf-uta-mta-sts-04
Using TLS in Applications                                    D. Margolis
Internet-Draft                                                 M. Risher
Intended status: Standards Track                             Google, Inc
Expires: October 5, 2017                                 B. Ramakrishnan
                                                             Yahoo!, Inc
                                                              A. Brotman
                                                            Comcast, Inc
                                                                J. Jones
                                                          Microsoft, Inc
                                                           April 3, 2017

              SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS)
                       draft-ietf-uta-mta-sts-04

Abstract

   SMTP Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) is a
   mechanism enabling mail service providers to declare their ability to
   receive Transport Layer Security (TLS) secure SMTP connections, and
   to specify whether sending SMTP servers should refuse to deliver to
   MX hosts that do not offer TLS with a trusted server certificate.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on October 5, 2017.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 1]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Related Technologies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Policy Discovery  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  MTA-STS TXT Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  MTA-STS Policies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.3.  HTTPS Policy Fetching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.4.  Policy Selection for Smart Hosts and Subdomains . . . . .   7
   4.  Policy Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     4.1.  MX Certificate Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Policy Application  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     5.1.  Policy Application Control Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   6.  Operational Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     6.1.  Policy Updates  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   8.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     8.1.  Obtaining a Signed Certificate  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     8.2.  Preventing Policy Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     8.3.  Denial of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     8.4.  Weak Policy Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   9.  Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   10. Appendix 1: MTA-STS example record & policy . . . . . . . . .  12
   11. Appendix 2: Message delivery pseudocode . . . . . . . . . . .  12
   12. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     12.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     12.2.  URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16

1.  Introduction

   The STARTTLS extension to SMTP [RFC3207] allows SMTP clients and
   hosts to negotiate the use of a TLS channel for encrypted mail
   transmission.

   While this opportunistic encryption protocol by itself provides a
   high barrier against passive man-in-the-middle traffic interception,
   any attacker who can delete parts of the SMTP session (such as the
   "250 STARTTLS" response) or who can redirect the entire SMTP session

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 2]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   (perhaps by overwriting the resolved MX record of the delivery
   domain) can perform downgrade or interception attacks.

   This document defines a mechanism for recipient domains to publish
   policies specifying:

   o  whether MTAs sending mail to this domain can expect PKIX-
      authenticated TLS support

   o  what a conforming client should do with messages when TLS cannot
      be successfully negotiated

1.1.  Terminology

   The keywords MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD,
   SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY, and OPTIONAL, when they appear in this
   document, are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

   We also define the following terms for further use in this document:

   o  MTA-STS Policy: A commitment by the Policy Domain to support PKIX
      authenticated TLS for the specified MX hosts.

   o  Policy Domain: The domain for which an MTA-STS Policy is defined.
      This is the next-hop domain; when sending mail to
      "alice@example.com" this would ordinarly be "example.com", but
      this may be overriden by explicit routing rules (as described in
      "Policy Selection for Smart Hosts").

2.  Related Technologies

   The DANE TLSA record [RFC7672] is similar, in that DANE is also
   designed to upgrade unauthenticated encryption or plaintext
   transmission into authenticated, downgrade-resistent encrypted
   tarnsmission.  DANE requires DNSSEC [RFC4033] for authentication; the
   mechanism described here instead relies on certificate authorities
   (CAs) and does not require DNSSEC, at a cost of risking malicious
   downgrades.  For a thorough discussion of this trade-off, see the
   section "Security Considerations".

   In addition, MTA-STS provides an optional report-only mode, enabling
   soft deployments to detect policy failures; partial deployments can
   be achieved in DANE by deploying TLSA records only for some of a
   domain's MXs, but such a mechanism is not possible for the per-domain
   policies used by MTA-STS.

   The primary motivation of MTA-STS is to provide a mechanism for
   domains to upgrade their transport security even when deploying

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 3]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   DNSSEC is undesirable or impractical.  However, MTA-STS is designed
   not to interfere with DANE deployments when the two overlap; in
   particular, senders who implement MTA-STS validation MUST NOT allow a
   "valid" or "report-only" MTA-STS validation to override a failing
   DANE validation.

3.  Policy Discovery

   MTA-STS policies are distributed via HTTPS from a "well-known"
   [RFC5785] path served within the Policy Domain, and their presence
   and current version are indicated by a TXT record at the Policy
   Domain.  These TXT records additionally contain a policy "id" field,
   allowing sending MTAs to check the currency of a cached policy
   without performing an HTTPS request.

   To discover if a recipient domain implements MTA-STS, a sender need
   only resolve a single TXT record.  To see if an updated policy is
   available for a domain for which the sender has a previously cached
   policy, the sender need only check the TXT record's version "id"
   against the cached value.

3.1.  MTA-STS TXT Records

   The MTA-STS TXT record is a TXT record with the name "_mta-sts" at
   the Policy Domain.  For the domain "example.com", this record would
   be "_mta-sts.example.com".  MTA-STS TXT records MUST be US-ASCII,
   semicolon-separated key/value pairs containing the following fields:

   o  "v": (plain-text, required).  Currently only "STSv1" is supported.

   o  "id": (plain-text, required).  A short string used to track policy
      updates.  This string MUST uniquely identify a given instance of a
      policy, such that senders can determine when the policy has been
      updated by comparing to the "id" of a previously seen policy.
      There is no implied ordering of "id" fields between revisions.

   An example TXT record is as below:

   "_mta-sts.example.com.  IN TXT "v=STSv1; id=20160831085700Z;""

   The formal definition of the "_mta-sts" TXT record, defined using
   [RFC5234], is as follows:

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 4]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

      sts-text-record = sts-version *WSP %x3B *WSP sts-id [%x3B]

      sts-version     = "v" *WSP "=" *WSP %x53 %x54        ; "STSv1"
                        %x53 %x76 %x31

      sts-id          = "id" *WSP "=" *WSP 1*32(ALPHA / DIGIT)

   If multiple TXT records for "_mta-sts" are returned by the resolver,
   records which do not begin with "v=STSv1;" are discarded.  If the
   number of resulting records is not one, senders MUST assume the
   recipient domain does not implement MTA-STS and skip the remaining
   steps of policy discovery.

3.2.  MTA-STS Policies

   The policy itself is a JSON [RFC4627] object served via the HTTPS GET
   method from the fixed [RFC5785] "well-known" path of ".well-known/
   mta-sts.json" served by the "mta-sts" host at the Policy Domain.
   Thus for "example.com" the path is "https://mta-sts.example.com
   /.well-known/mta-sts.json".

   This JSON object contains the following key/value pairs:

   o  "version": (plain-text, required).  Currently only "STSv1" is
      supported.

   o  "mode": (plain-text, required).  Either "enforce" or "report",
      indicating the expected behavior of a sending MTA in the case of a
      policy validation failure.

   o  "max_age": Max lifetime of the policy (plain-text non-negative
      integer seconds, required).  Well-behaved clients SHOULD cache a
      policy for up to this value from last policy fetch time.  To
      mitigate the risks of attacks at policy refresh time, it is
      expected that this value typically be in the range of weeks or
      greater.

   o  "mx": MX identity patterns (list of plain-text strings, required).
      One or more patterns matching a Common Name ([RFC6125]) or Subject
      Alternative Name ([RFC5280]) DNS-ID present in the X.509
      certificate presented by any MX receiving mail for this domain.
      For example, "["mail.example.com", ".example.net"]" indicates that
      mail for this domain might be handled by any MX with a certificate
      valid for a host at "example.com" or "example.net".  Valid
      patterns can be either fully specified names ("example.com") or
      suffixes (".example.net") matching the right-hand parts of a
      server's identity; the latter case are distinguished by a leading
      period.  In the case of Internationalized Domain Names

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 5]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

      ([RFC5891]), the MX MUST specify the Punycode-encoded A-label
      [RFC3492] and not the Unicode-encoded U-label.  The full semantics
      of certificate validation are described in "MX Certificate
      Validation."

   An example JSON policy is as below:

                      {
                        "version": "STSv1",
                        "mode": "enforce",
                        "mx": [".mail.example.com"],
                        "max_age": 123456
                      }

   Parsers SHOULD accept TXT records and policy files which are
   syntactically valid (i.e. valid key-value pairs separated by semi-
   colons for TXT records and valid JSON for policy files) and
   implementing a superset of this specification, in which case unknown
   fields SHALL be ignored.

3.3.  HTTPS Policy Fetching

   When fetching a new policy or updating a policy, the HTTPS endpoint
   MUST present a X.509 certificate which is valid for the "mta-sts"
   host (as described in [RFC6125]), chain to a root CA that is trusted
   by the sending MTA, and be non-expired.  It is expected that sending
   MTAs use a set of trusted CAs similar to those in widely deployed Web
   browsers and operating systems.

   HTTP 3xx redirects MUST NOT be followed.

   Senders may wish to rate-limit the frequency of attempts to fetch the
   HTTPS endpoint even if a valid TXT record for the recipient domain
   exists.  In the case that the HTTPS GET fails, we suggest
   implementions may limit further attempts to a period of five minutes
   or longer per version ID, to avoid overwhelming resource-constrained
   recipients with cascading failures.

   Senders MAY impose a timeout on the HTTPS GET to avoid long delays
   imposed by attempted policy updates.  A suggested timeout is one
   minute; policy hosts SHOULD respond to requests with a complete
   policy body within that timeout.

   If a valid TXT record is found but no policy can be fetched via
   HTTPS, and there is no valid (non-expired) previously-cached policy,
   senders MUST treat the recipient domain as one that has not
   implemented MTA-STS.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 6]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

3.4.  Policy Selection for Smart Hosts and Subdomains

   When sending mail via a "smart host"--an intermediate SMTP relay
   rather than the message recipient's server--compliant senders MUST
   treat the smart host domain as the policy domain for the purposes of
   policy discovery and application.

   When sending mail to a mailbox at a subdomain, compliant senders MUST
   NOT attempt to fetch a policy from the parent zone.  Thus for mail
   sent to "user@mail.example.com", the policy can be fetched only from
   "mail.example.com", not "example.com".

4.  Policy Validation

   When sending to an MX at a domain for which the sender has a valid
   and non-expired MTA-STS policy, a sending MTA honoring MTA-STS MUST
   validate:

   1.  That the recipient MX supports STARTTLS and offers a valid PKIX-
       based TLS certificate.

   2.  That at least one of the policy's "mx" patterns matches at least
       one of the identities presented in the MX's X.509 certificate, as
       descriped in "MX Certificate Validation".

   This section does not dictate the behavior of sending MTAs when
   policies fail to validate; in particular, validation failures of
   policies which specify "report" mode MUST NOT be interpreted as
   delivery failures, as described in the section "Policy Application".

4.1.  MX Certificate Validation

   The certificate presented by the receiving MX MUST chain to a root CA
   that is trusted by the sending MTA and be non-expired.  The
   certificate MUST have a CN-ID ([RFC6125]) or SAN ([RFC5280]) with a
   DNS-ID matching the "mx" pattern.

   Because the "mx" patterns are not hostnames, however, matching is not
   identical to other common cases of X.509 certificate authentication
   (as described, for example, in [RFC6125]).  Consider the example
   policy given above, with an "mx" pattern containing ".example.net".
   In this case, if the MX server's X.509 certificate contains a SAN
   matching "*.example.net", we are required to implement "wildcard-to-
   wildcard" matching.

   To simplify this case, we impose the following constraints on
   wildcard certificates, identical to those in [RFC7672] section 3.2.3:
   wildcards are valid in DNS-IDs or CN-IDs, but must be the entire

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 7]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   first label of the identifier (that is, "*.example.com", not
   "mail*.example.com").  Senders who are comparing a "suffix" MX
   pattern with a wildcard identifier should thus strip the wildcard and
   ensure that the two sides match label-by-label, until all labels of
   the shorter side (if unequal length) are consumed.

   A simple pseudocode implementation of this algorithm is presented in
   the Appendix.

5.  Policy Application

   When sending to an MX at a domain for which the sender has a valid,
   non-expired MTA-STS policy, a sending MTA honoring MTA-STS applies
   the result of a policy validation failure one of two ways, depending
   on the value of the policy "mode" field:

   1.  "report": In this mode, sending MTAs merely send a report (as
       described in the TLSRPT specification (TODO: add ref)) indicating
       policy application failures.

   2.  "enforce": In this mode, sending MTAs MUST NOT deliver the
       message to hosts which fail MX matching or certificate
       validation.

   When a message fails to deliver due to an "enforce" policy, a
   compliant MTA MUST NOT permanently fail to deliver messages before
   checking for the presence of an updated policy at the Policy Domain.
   (In all cases, MTAs SHOULD treat such failures as transient errors
   and retry delivery later.)  This allows implementing domains to
   update long-lived policies on the fly.

   Finally, in both "enforce" and "report" modes, failures to deliver in
   compliance with the applied policy result in failure reports to the
   policy domain, as described in the TLSRPT specification (TODO: add
   ref).

5.1.  Policy Application Control Flow

   An example control flow for a compliant sender consists of the
   following steps:

   1.  Check for a cached policy whose time-since-fetch has not exceeded
       its "max_age".  If none exists, attempt to fetch a new policy
       (perhaps asynchronously, so as not to block message delivery).
       Optionally, sending MTAs may unconditionally check for a new
       policy at this step.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 8]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   2.  For each candidate MX, in order of MX priority, attempt to
       deliver the message, enforcing STARTTLS and, assuming a policy is
       present, PKIX certificate validation, and certificate validation
       as described in "MX Certificate Validation."

   3.  Upon message retries, a message MAY be permanently failed
       following first checking for the presence of a new policy (as
       indicated by the "id" field in the "_mta-sts" TXT record).

6.  Operational Considerations

6.1.  Policy Updates

   Updating the policy requires that the owner make changes in two
   places: the "_mta-sts" TXT record in the Policy Domain's DNS zone and
   at the corresponding HTTPS endpoint.  As a result, recipients should
   thus expect a policy will continue to be used by senders until both
   the HTTPS and TXT endpoints are updated and the TXT record's TTL has
   passed.

   In other words, a sender who is unable to successfully deliver a
   message while applying a cache of the recipient's now-outdated policy
   may be unable to discover that a new policy exists until the DNS TTL
   has passed.  Recipients should therefore ensure that old policies
   continue to work for message delivery during this period of time, or
   risk message delays.

7.  IANA Considerations

   A new .well-known URI will be registered in the Well-Known URIs
   registry as described below:

   URI Suffix: mta-sts.json Change Controller: IETF

8.  Security Considerations

   SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security attempts to protect against an
   active attacker who wishes to intercept or tamper with mail between
   hosts who support STARTTLS.  There are two classes of attacks
   considered:

   o  Foiling TLS negotiation, for example by deleting the "250
      STARTTLS" response from a server or altering TLS session
      negotiation.  This would result in the SMTP session occurring over
      plaintext, despite both parties supporting TLS.

   o  Impersonating the destination mail server, whereby the sender
      might deliver the message to an impostor, who could then monitor

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017                [Page 9]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

      and/or modify messages despite opportunistic TLS.  This
      impersonation could be accomplished by spoofing the DNS MX record
      for the recipient domain, or by redirecting client connections
      intended for the legitimate recipient server (for example, by
      altering BGP routing tables).

   MTA-STS can thwart such attacks only if the sender is able to
   previously obtain and cache a policy for the recipient domain, and
   only if the attacker is unable to obtain a valid certificate that
   complies with that policy.  Below, we consider specific attacks on
   this model.

8.1.  Obtaining a Signed Certificate

   SMTP MTA-STS relies on certificate validation via PKIX based TLS
   identity checking [RFC6125].  Attackers who are able to obtain a
   valid certificate for the targeted recipient mail service (e.g. by
   compromising a certificate authority) are thus able to circumvent STS
   authentication.

8.2.  Preventing Policy Discovery

   Since MTA-STS uses DNS TXT records for policy discovery, an attacker
   who is able to block DNS responses can suppress the discovery of an
   MTA-STS Policy, making the Policy Domain appear not to have an MTA-
   STS Policy.  The sender policy cache is designed to resist this
   attack by decreasing the frequency of policy discovery and thus
   reducing the window of vulnerability; it is nonetheless a risk that
   attackers who can predict or induce policy discovery--for example, by
   inducing a victim sending domain to send mail to a never-before-
   contacted recipient while carrying out a man-in-the-middle attack--
   may be able to foil policy discovery and effectively downgrade the
   security of the message delivery.

   Since this attack depends upon intercepting initial policy discovery,
   we strongly recommend implementors to prefer policy "max_age" values
   to be as long as is practical.

   Because this attack is also possible upon refresh of a cached policy,
   we suggest implementors do not wait until a cached policy has expired
   before checking for an update; if senders attempt to refresh the
   cache regularly (for instance, by checking their cached version
   string against the TXT record on each successful send, or in a
   background task that runs daily or weekly), an attacker would have to
   foil policy discovery consistently over the lifetime of a cached
   policy to prevent a successful refresh.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 10]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   Resistence to downgrade attacks of this nature--due to the ability to
   authoritatively determine "lack of a record" even for non-
   participating recipients--is a feature of DANE, due to its use of
   DNSSEC for policy discovery.

8.3.  Denial of Service

   We additionally consider the Denial of Service risk posed by an
   attacker who can modify the DNS records for a victim domain.  Absent
   MTA-STS, such an attacker can cause a sending MTA to cache invalid MX
   records, but only for however long the sending resolver caches those
   records.  With MTA-STS, the attacker can additionally advertise a
   new, long-"max_age" MTA-STS policy with "mx" constraints that
   validate the malicious MX record, causing senders to cache the policy
   and refuse to deliver messages once the victim has resecured the MX
   records.

   This attack is mitigated in part by the ability of a victim domain to
   (at any time) publish a new policy updating the cached, malicious
   policy, though this does require the victim domain to both obtain a
   valid CA-signed certificate and to understand and properly configure
   MTA-STS.

   Similarly, we consider the possibility of domains that deliberately
   allow untrusted users to serve untrusted content on user-specified
   subdomains.  In some cases (e.g. the service Tumblr.com) this takes
   the form of providing HTTPS hosting of user-registered subdomains; in
   other cases (e.g. dynamic DNS providers) this takes the form of
   allowing untrusted users to register custom DNS records at the
   provider's domain.

   In these cases, there is a risk that untrusted users would be able to
   serve custom content at the "mta-sts" host, including serving an
   illegitimate MTA-STS policy.  We believe this attack is rendered more
   difficult by the need for the attacker to also serve the "_mta-sts"
   TXT record on the same domain--something not, to our knowledge,
   widely provided to untrusted users.  This attack is additionally
   mitigated by the aforementioned ability for a victim domain to update
   an invalid policy at any future date.

8.4.  Weak Policy Constraints

   Even if an attacker cannot modify a served policy, the potential
   exists for configurations that allow attackers on the same domain to
   receive mail for that domain.  For example, an easy configuration
   option when authoring an MTA-STS Policy for "example.com" is to set
   the "mx" equal to ".example.com"; recipient domains must consider in
   this case the risk that any user possessing a valid hostname and CA-

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 11]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   signed certificate (for example, "dhcp-123.example.com") will, from
   the perspective of MTA-STS Policy validation, be a valid MX host for
   that domain.

9.  Contributors

   Nicolas Lidzborski Google, Inc nlidz (at) google (dot com)

   Wei Chuang Google, Inc weihaw (at) google (dot com)

   Brandon Long Google, Inc blong (at) google (dot com)

   Franck Martin LinkedIn, Inc fmartin (at) linkedin (dot com)

   Klaus Umbach 1&1 Mail & Media Development & Technology GmbH
   klaus.umbach (at) 1und1 (dot de)

   Markus Laber 1&1 Mail & Media Development & Technology GmbH
   markus.laber (at) 1und1 (dot de)

10.  Appendix 1: MTA-STS example record & policy

   The owner of "example.com" wishes to begin using MTA-STS with a
   policy that will solicit reports from senders without affecting how
   the messages are processed, in order to verify the identity of MXs
   that handle mail for "example.com", confirm that TLS is correctly
   used, and ensure that certificates presented by the recipient MX
   validate.

   MTA-STS policy indicator TXT RR:

       _mta-sts.example.com.  IN TXT "v=STSv1; id=20160831085700Z;"

   MTA-STS Policy JSON served as the response body at [1]

              {
                "version": "STSv1",
                "mode": "report",
                "mx": ["mx1.example.com", "mx2.example.com"],
                "max_age": 12345678
              }

11.  Appendix 2: Message delivery pseudocode

   Below is pseudocode demonstrating the logic of a compliant sending
   MTA.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 12]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   While this pseudocode implementation suggests synchronous policy
   retrieval in the delivery path, in a working implementation that may
   be undesirable, and we expect some implementors to instead prefer a
   background fetch that does not block delivery if no cached policy is
   present.

func isEnforce(policy) {
  // Return true if the policy mode is "enforce".
}

func isNonExpired(policy) {
  // Return true if the policy is not expired.
}

func tryStartTls(mx) {
  // Attempt to open an SMTP connection with STARTTLS with the MX.
}

func certMatches(connection, mx) {
  // For simplicity, we are not checking CNs here.
  for san in getSansFromCert(connection) {
    // Return if the server certificate from "connection" matches the "mx" host.
    if san[0] == '*' {
      // Invalid wildcard!
      if san[1] != '.' return false
      san = san[1:]
    }
    if san[0] == '.' && HasSuffix(mx, san) {
      return true
    }
    if mx[0] == '.' && HasSuffix(san, mx) {
      return true
    }
    if mx == san {
      return true
    }
  }
  return false
}

func tryDeliverMail(connection, message) {
  // Attempt to deliver "message" via "connection".
}

func tryGetNewPolicy(domain) {
  // Check for an MTA-STS TXT record for "domain" in DNS, and return the
  // indicated policy.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 13]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

}

func cachePolicy(domain, policy) {
  // Store "policy" as the cached policy for "domain".
}

func tryGetCachedPolicy(domain) {
  // Return a cached policy for "domain".
}

func reportError(error) {
  // Report an error via TLSRPT.
}

func tryMxAccordingTo(message, mx, policy) {
  connection := connect(mx)
  if !connection {
    return false  // Can't connect to the MX so it's not an MTA-STS error.
  }
  secure := true
  if !tryStartTls(mx, &connection) {
    secure = false
    reportError(E_NO_VALID_TLS)
  } else if !certMatches(connection, mx) {
    secure = false
    reportError(E_CERT_MISMATCH)
  }
  if secure || !isEnforce(policy) {
    return tryDeliverMail(connection, message)
  }
  return false
}

func tryWithPolicy(message, domain, policy) {
  for mx in mxes {
    if tryMxAccordingTo(message, mx, policy) {
      return true
    }
  }
  return false
}

func handleMessage(message) {
  domain := ... // domain part after '@' from recipient
  policy := tryGetNewPolicy(domain)
  if policy {
    cachePolicy(domain, policy)
  } else {

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 14]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

    policy = tryGetCachedPolicy(domain)
  }
  if policy {
    return tryWithPolicy(message, policy)
  }
  // Try to deliver the message normally (i.e. without MTA-STS).
}

12.  References

12.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/
              RFC2119, March 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC3207]  Hoffman, P., "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over
              Transport Layer Security", RFC 3207, DOI 10.17487/RFC3207,
              February 2002, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3207>.

   [RFC3492]  Costello, A., "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode
              for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
              (IDNA)", RFC 3492, DOI 10.17487/RFC3492, March 2003,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3492>.

   [RFC4033]  Arends, R., Austein, R., Larson, M., Massey, D., and S.
              Rose, "DNS Security Introduction and Requirements", RFC
              4033, DOI 10.17487/RFC4033, March 2005,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4033>.

   [RFC4627]  Crockford, D., "The application/json Media Type for
              JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)", RFC 4627, DOI 10
              .17487/RFC4627, July 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4627>.

   [RFC5234]  Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
              Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234, DOI 10.17487/
              RFC5234, January 2008,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5234>.

   [RFC5280]  Cooper, D., Santesson, S., Farrell, S., Boeyen, S.,
              Housley, R., and W. Polk, "Internet X.509 Public Key
              Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List
              (CRL) Profile", RFC 5280, DOI 10.17487/RFC5280, May 2008,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5280>.

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 15]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   [RFC5785]  Nottingham, M. and E. Hammer-Lahav, "Defining Well-Known
              Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)", RFC 5785, DOI 10
              .17487/RFC5785, April 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5785>.

   [RFC5891]  Klensin, J., "Internationalized Domain Names in
              Applications (IDNA): Protocol", RFC 5891, DOI 10.17487/
              RFC5891, August 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5891>.

   [RFC6125]  Saint-Andre, P. and J. Hodges, "Representation and
              Verification of Domain-Based Application Service Identity
              within Internet Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509
              (PKIX) Certificates in the Context of Transport Layer
              Security (TLS)", RFC 6125, DOI 10.17487/RFC6125, March
              2011, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6125>.

   [RFC7672]  Dukhovni, V. and W. Hardaker, "SMTP Security via
              Opportunistic DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities
              (DANE) Transport Layer Security (TLS)", RFC 7672, DOI 10
              .17487/RFC7672, October 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7672>.

12.2.  URIs

   [1] https://mta-sts.example.com/.well-known/mta-sts.json:

Authors' Addresses

   Daniel Margolis
   Google, Inc

   Email: dmargolis (at) google.com

   Mark Risher
   Google, Inc

   Email: risher (at) google (dot com)

   Binu Ramakrishnan
   Yahoo!, Inc

   Email: rbinu (at) yahoo-inc (dot com)

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 16]
Internet-Draft                   MTA-STS                      April 2017

   Alexander Brotman
   Comcast, Inc

   Email: alex_brotman (at) comcast.com

   Janet Jones
   Microsoft, Inc

   Email: janet.jones (at) microsoft (dot com)

Margolis, et al.         Expires October 5, 2017               [Page 17]