[jadmin] Google Talk federation policy proposal

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Jacek Konieczny wrote:

> First, I don't think using TLS for s2s should be a requirement.
> Diallback is a quite good mechanism for domain "authentication". It may
> be broken by DNS spoofing, but DNS spoofing doesn't seem to be effective
> enough to be useful for spammers. Requiring certificate signed by
> a provided CA list is telling people who to trust and where should they
> buy their certificates. Most CAs won't give you certificate usefull
> for virtual-hosting XMPP server (serving multiple domains) and probably
> no XMPP server certificate would make use of such certificates anyway. 

Well, there's always CAcert -- no purchase required.

Another option would be for Google to initiate connections outbound to 
any server, but accept inbound connections only from domains to which it 
has issued a "client certificate". Google would define a process by 
which you could obtain such a client certificate, and your domain would 
present that when it attempts to connect to talk.google.com.

> What is needed for a good federation policy is:
> - working abuse reporting procedure. When an incident is reported
>   the source server contact address for its administrators should be
>   known and the administrators must be able to block abuser for good
>   (so it won't use the same account again and won't create 100 new
>   accounts in the next minute)

So for that we need:

1. defined contact addresses via the JEP we need to write (see thread on 
the Standards-JIG list)

2. an easier way for server administrators to disable user accounts 
(JEP-0133?)

> - no easy identity theft -- passwords should not be sent in clear-text
>   and it should not be possible to hijack any XMPP session.

Yes, and we already have that via TLS+SASL (even SASL plain) or SSL (on 
port 5223) and jabber:iq:auth (even plaintext password login). Notice 
that this is what talk.google.com does today.

> - a way to disconnect any server braking the policy from the federation
>   (white or black list, as you suggest)

It seems that this is a role the JSF could play.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml