Subject: [Uta] Adam Roach's Yes on draft-ietf-uta-smtp-tlsrpt-18: (with COMMENT)

From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 20:28:18 -0700

Adam Roach has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-uta-smtp-tlsrpt-18: Yes

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COMMENT:
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Thanks to everyone who worked on this document. The mechanism seems useful, and
I hope it aids in the deployment of TLS-secured email transfer. I have a mix of
editoral and substantive comments.

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§1.1:

This document also uses lowercase forms of these words. Consider using the
boilerplate from RFC 8174.

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§3:

>  If the reporter does not support one
>  of the report mechanisms, then it SHOULD NOT attempt delivery to
>  those rua destinations.

This seems tautological. If this is intended to restrict some action that is not
impossible by its own nature, then it needs rephrasing. Otherwise, it should
probably just be removed.

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§4.4:

>  o  "total-successful-session-count": The aggregate number (integer)
>     of successfully negotiated TLS-enabled connections to the
>     receiving site.
>
>  o  "total-failure-session-count": The aggregate number (integer) of
>     failures to negotiate a TLS-enabled connection to the receiving
>     site.
>
>  o  "failed-session-count": The number of (attempted) sessions that
>     match the relevant "result-type" for this section.

Although these use the word "number," its use seems to be colloquial rather
than technical. It is probably worthwhile, for avoidance of doubt (and to
prevent errant string encodings), to add ", encoded as a JSON number" to the
end of each of these.

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§4.4:

>  dec-octet = DIGIT ; 0-9 / %x31-39 DIGIT ; 10-99 / "1" 2DIGIT ;
>  100-199 / "2" %x30-34 DIGIT ; 200-249 / "25" %x30-35 ; 250-255

Presumably, this is ANBF? Please indicate that. Also, in ABNF, comments start
with a semicolon and continue to the end of the line, which makes this
production syntactically invalid.

I beleive you want the following instead:

   dec-octet = DIGIT              ; 0-9
              / %x31-39 DIGIT     ; 10-99
              / "1" 2DIGIT        ; 100-199
              / "2" %x30-34 DIGIT ; 200-249
              / "25" %x30-35      ; 250-255

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§4.5:

>  For the MTA-STS policy, an array of JSON strings that represents the
>  policy that is declared by the receiving site, including any errors
>  that may be present.

This isn't a sentence. Perhaps insert "this is" before "an array"?

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§5.2:

>  The report SHOULD be subjected to GZIP compression for both email and
>  HTTPS transport.

This "SHOULD" makes it necessary to include GZIP as a normative reference. I
believe the correct reference here is RFC 1952. While it is Informational, it is
already in the downref registry, which saves us a lot of headache.

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§5.4:

>  Alternately, if a receiving system offers "Accept-Encoding" value of
>  "gzip"...

Offers it where?

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§6.4:

>  Security considerations: Security considerations relating to SMTP TLS
>  Reporting are discussed in Section 7.

Please also cite RFC 6713 Section 4.

>                     Magic number(s):  n/a

Please replace "n/a" with "first two bytes are 0x1f, 0x8b."

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§6.5:

>  This document creates a new registry, "STARTTLS Validation Result
>  Types".  The initial entries in the registry are:

This table omits a column for the defining document and/or party to contact,
which is usually present for "Expert Review" registries. Is that intentional?

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Appendix B:

Please use IPv6 or a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 in your example. See
https://www.iab.org/2016/11/07/iab-statement-on-ipv6/ for further guidance.

Please select addresses from the ranges reserved by RFC 3849 (and RFC 5737, if
necessary), rather than the allocated addresses (owned by Yahoo, Alisoft, and
Windstream) and private-use addresses currently in the example.