DANE-SMTP enabled

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:27:00 +0700

After setting up my mail server I already set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS but was not yet sure about how to deal with DANE.

DANE uses a TLSA entry on the DNS server to publish a services certificate or key. This means that a client can verify that it is talking to the correct server without relying on any kind of CA. All this is based on DNSSEC which ensures the authenticity and data integrity of the DNS entries.

While this concept in general is pretty neat, it has the requirement of DNS entries to be updated when a certificate or key changes. Additionally just simply updating an entry will no be enough, since other DNS servers still might have the old key cached. Therefore a more sophisticated rollover mechanism would be required. Due to the short life of Let’s Encrypt certificates this is even more relevant.

Luckily Certbot provides the option --reuse-key to circumvent the requirement of updating the DNS entries by reusing the existing key. Therefore a TLSA entry can be generated from the current public key and will not require updating as well since the key does not change.

For generation of an according TLSA entry Shumon Huque has a very handy TLSA Record Generator on his website. The entry in this case must be for usage DANE-EE with selector 1 - SPKI. I use a SHA-256 hash and got following result:

_25._tcp.vs.senvang.org. IN TLSA 3 1 1 (
                  5634d5e1ce5f1e4a8ab25cd8335c97ab76e1215e09c157568e5c9a3dc39a
                  a491
)

Alternatively you can generate the hash with openssl:

openssl x509 -in cert.pem -pubkey -noout | openssl ec -pubin --outform der | sha256sum

Obviously this does not resolve the need for a clean rollover when a key change happens, but it massively reduces the frequency and therefore the risk and it gives me time to think about how to get this automated.

Dnssec on SROEMER

DANE-SMTP enabled