DMARC Failure reporting Interval tag
draft-davids-dmarc-fi-tag-01

DMARC Working Group                                            M. Davids
Internet-Draft                                                 SIDN Labs
Updates: 7489 (if approved)                            November 24, 2016
Intended status: Standards Track
Expires: May 28, 2017

                  DMARC Failure reporting Interval tag
                      draft-davids-dmarc-fi-tag-01

Abstract

   This document extends the DMARC (RFC7489) record format by defining
   an additional tag.  This new tag, the "fi" tag, is to be used in
   conjunction with the "ruf" tag used for message-specific failure
   reporting.  It provides a Domain Owner with a simple way of
   requesting limitation of the rate at which such reports are sent.

Status of This Memo

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

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on May 28, 2017.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 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
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   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of

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   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Conventions Used In This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Extension to the General Record Format  . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Formal Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  Domain Owner Example  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   8.  Discussion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   9.  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   10. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     10.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     10.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     10.3.  URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7

1.  Introduction

   DMARC [RFC7489] enables Domain Owners to request for detailed failure
   reports for individual messages by means of the "ruf" tag.  There may
   be various reasons to permanently configure such a "ruf" tag.  For
   example to facilitate reputation management, monitoring or simply for
   research or operational purposes.

   Failure reports are normally generated and sent almost immediately
   after the Mail Receiver detects a DMARC failure.  These reports are
   useful for quickly notifying the Domain Owners of an authentication
   failure, without waiting for an aggregate report.  However, under
   certain circumstances this property can potentially lead to an
   undesirably high volume of reports.  Especially when a Domain Owner's
   name is spoofed and abused in a large-scale phishing or other
   impersonation attack.

   DMARC [RFC7489] Section 7.3 leaves it to the discretion of
   participating Mail Receivers and report generators if and how they
   take measures against sending high volumes of failure reports.
   However, what a Mail Receiver or report generator considers
   acceptable may exceed the capacity of the receiving Domain Owner.
   The lack of a mechanism for a Domain Owner to influence the volume of
   reports constitutes an obstacle to deployment of the "ruf" tag
   feature.

   This document updates [RFC7489] by defining the "fi" tag, a mechanism
   that allows the Domain Owner to request the limitation of failure

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   reports of no more than one failure report per report generator per
   time interval.

2.  Conventions Used In This Document

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119] when they
   appear in ALL CAPS.  These words may also appear in this document in
   lower case as plain English words, absent their normative meanings.

   The following terms are used, as defined in DMARC [RFC7489].

   Domain Owner and Mail Receiver.

   Also the term "report generator" is applied here the same way as in
   DMARC [RFC7489].

3.  Extension to the General Record Format

   The following tag is introduced as an additional valid DMARC tag for
   use in conjunction with the Reporting URI for Failure ("ruf") tag:

   fi:
      Interval requested between message-specific failure reports
      (plain-text 32-bit unsigned integer; OPTIONAL; if not defined or
      0, then there is no rate limitation requested).  Indicates a
      request to report generators to send message-specific failure
      reports at an interval of approximately the requested number of
      seconds.

   Any intermediate remaining reports SHOULD NOT be sent and MAY be
   discarded, if generated at all.  But discarding message-specific
   failure reports as a consequence of this tag, SHALL NOT affect the
   completeness of information in the aggregated feedback reports.

   A report generator MAY include in the message-specific failure report
   an indication of the number of reports discarde since the last issued
   report.  Where AFRF [RFC6591] is used, the Abuse Reporting Format
   [RFC5965] optional "Incidents"-field may be used to indicate the
   number of discarded reports.

   Report generators that choose to adhere to the "ruf" tag option,
   SHOULD also adhere to the requested "fi" tag setting defined here.
   This tag's content SHALL be ignored if a "ruf" tag is not also
   specified, or if the syntax of the "fi" integer is invalid.

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   Report generators that implement this feature MUST be able to support
   the entire interval range from 0-86400 and MAY support longer
   intervals.

4.  Formal Definition

   The formal definition of the "fi" tag format, using ABNF [RFC5234],
   is as follows:

   Introduced:

                dmarc-finterval = "fi" *WSP "=" *WSP 1*DIGIT

   Which changes the dmarc-record definition to:

        dmarc-record    = dmarc-version dmarc-sep
                          [dmarc-request]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-srequest]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-auri]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-furi]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-adkim]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-aspf]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-ainterval]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-finterval]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-fo]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-rfmt]
                          [dmarc-sep dmarc-percent]
                          [dmarc-sep]
                          ; components other than dmarc-version and
                          ; dmarc-request may appear in any order

5.  Domain Owner Example

   The DMARC policy record with the "fi" tag might look like this when
   retrieved using a common command-line tool:

         % dig +short TXT _dmarc.example.com.
         "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc-feedback@example.com;
          ruf=mailto:auth-reports@example.com; fi=300;"

   To publish such a record, the DNS administrator for the Domain Owner
   might create an entry like the following in the appropriate zone file
   (following the conventional zone file format):

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    ; DMARC record for the domain example.com

    _dmarc  IN TXT ( "v=DMARC1; p=none; "
                     "rua=mailto:dmarc-feedback@example.com; "
                     "ruf=mailto:auth-reports@example.com; fi=300; " )

   The request implies that the Domain Owner is willing to accept no
   more than one message-specific failure report every 5 minutes from
   any report generator.  A report generator in this example would
   typically honour the "fi" tag by sending out a report, storing a
   'last report sent' timestamp for example.com in memory and
   maintaining it as a 'do not sent' flag for a minimum of 300 seconds
   during which period no consecutive reports are to be sent.  After the
   flag has cleared, a report may again be sent.  The cycle then
   repeats.

   Intermediate, unsent reports are discarded.  But they do add to
   statistical counters as if they were sent.  So their details are part
   of any corresponding aggregated reports.

   Any optionally defined indications for the maximum report size in the
   URI will continue to work as defined in [RFC7489].

6.  IANA Considerations

   As per [RFC7489 p.17] Section 6.3 last paragraph, a new version of
   DMARC is not required.  Older implementations that consider the "fi"
   tag as unknown, will ignore it.

   However, this document requires an update to the IANA [RFC5226] DMARC
   Tag Registry [1]:

          Tag Name | Description
          ---------+---------------------------
          fi       | Failure Reporting interval

7.  Security Considerations

   The Domain Owner should be aware that defining a "fi" tag involves a
   trade-off between the benefit of preventing unmanageable incoming
   report flows and the risk of not receiving potentially useful data.
   A large scale attack that triggers reporting rate limitation, might
   result in the non-dispatch of reports regarding other events
   involving the same domain to the same Mail Receiver.

   An attack can involve many different report generators.  The Domain
   Owner should be aware that the "fi" tag limits reporting by each
   individual report generator.  Multiple report generators might still

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   collectively generate a large volume of reports.  Mail Receivers with
   a farm or cluster of several report generators might choose to
   synchronise the 'last sent' timestamp value accross their machines in
   order to better comply with the wishes of Domain Owners and to reduce
   the risk described above.

   An attack can also involve multiple domains belonging to a single
   Domain Owner.  The "fi" tag applies to an individual domain, so the
   deliberate abuse of multiple spoofed domains belonging to Domain
   Owner, might still generate a high volumes of message-specific
   failure reports.

   It therefore it makes sense to define a relatively short TTL for
   DMARC-records, to allow for the possibility of increasing the "fi"-
   value on an ad hoc basis, or to remove the "ruf" (and "fi") tag
   altogether in the even of a problem.

   [TODO: mention the part hereafter, or is it out of scope for this
   draft?]  An attacker that enforces message-specific detailed failure
   ("ruf") reports that are larger than an optionally-defined maximum-
   size specification, may leave the Domain Owner in the darks, because
   no reports will be sent.

   The security of the DMARC TXT-record, which the "fi" tag part of,
   depends on the security of the underlying DNS infrastructure.  In
   that respect it is advisable to make use of DNSSEC.

8.  Discussion

   The DMARC virtual verification draft [draft-akagiri-dmarc-virtual-
   verification] discusses possible values for the "ruf" tag.  The
   authors of that draft are kindly requested to take this draft into
   consideration as part of their discussions.

9.  Acknowledgments

   The author would like to thank Elizabeth Zwicky, Moritz Mueller,
   Maarten Wullink, Cristian Hesselman and Bart Knubben for their
   valuable feedback.

10.  References

10.1.  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>.

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   [RFC5226]  Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an
              IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 5226,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5226, May 2008,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5226>.

   [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>.

   [RFC5965]  Shafranovich, Y., Levine, J., and M. Kucherawy, "An
              Extensible Format for Email Feedback Reports", RFC 5965,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5965, August 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5965>.

   [RFC6591]  Fontana, H., "Authentication Failure Reporting Using the
              Abuse Reporting Format", RFC 6591, DOI 10.17487/RFC6591,
              April 2012, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6591>.

10.2.  Informative References

   [RFC7489]  Kucherawy, M., Ed. and E. Zwicky, Ed., "Domain-based
              Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance
              (DMARC)", RFC 7489, DOI 10.17487/RFC7489, March 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7489>.

10.3.  URIs

   [1] https://www.iana.org/assignments/dmarc-parameters/dmarc-
       parameters.xhtml

Author's Address

   Marco Davids
   SIDN
   Meander 501
   Arnhem  6825 MD
   NL

   Phone: +31 26 352 5500
   Email: marco.davids@sidn.nl

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