Re: James Webadmin

Hello Benoit,

I'm happy to provide something back to the James project. Unfortunately 
I read your reply too late to start work on it over the past weekend. 
And currently I work long shifts due to high backlog that has to be 
cleaned up. I try to tinker some lines together over the upcomming 
weekend and provide them over on my github.

Long story short: Setting up your own PKI and some lines of Java to 
setup mutual TLS is quite easy. James already comes with the required 
BouncyCastle libs bcpkix, bcprov and bcutil to do so.
I have to stress: As by the standard any client certificate signed by 
any of the specified root PKI will pass the verification - so using 
Let's Encrypt is discouraged as ANY LE client cert will be valid. To use 
mutual TLS properly one pretty much has to setup thier own PKI to be in 
control of any certificates issued.
Also both Java SSE and BouncyCastle are able to perform basic validity 
checks like CRL or OCSP but these has to be kept up along. As the RFC 
only recommends these to have setup but not actually require them the 
simplest setup is a root ca certificate and two leaf certificates, one 
for the server and one for the client, without all the fancy stuff like 
AIA, CRL-dp or any of the other x.509 extensions.
This can also be done with a few simple openssl commands (and unless 
you're a java dev with a jdk installed that's likely the better 
solution) - but as I'm a hobbyist java dev I always did it this way and 
don't know the openssl commands. So someone with experience in both my 
provide a "translation".

Anyway - I see how I have time and report back if I have some example 
written down.

Have a good one.

Greetings,

Matt

Am 09.02.25 um 22:55 schrieb Benoit TELLIER:
> Hi there
> I had a private discussion couple of week ago with Jean HELOU who complained of webadmin being hard top secure and hé proposer settings up an optional basic auth scheme, easier to use that the jwt bearer token.
> Would this be helping?
> Would this be something you would be willing to contribute, with guidance?
> Idem for repairing the TLS setup, or making it usable with pem files...
>
> -- 
>
> Best regards,
>
> Benoit TELLIER
>
> General manager of Linagora VIETNAM.
> Product owner for Team-Mail product.
> Chairman of the Apache James project.
>
> Mail: [email protected]
> Tel: (0033) 6 77 26 04 58 (WhatsApp, Signal)
>
>
> Le févr. 8, 2025 6:06 PM, de Cryptearth <[email protected]>Hi Ilya,
>
> for me in my very own personal opinion using RSA keys would be fine
> already, or any other established public-key auth like SSH. But JWT
> already is some sorts of this which just has to be implemented
> correctly. I tried to look into it but honestly not really understood
> it. So I guess if someone could give me just an example I likely would
> be able to figure it out on my own.
>
> Another option I already use on other projects: mutual TLS.
> It's easy to setup your own PKI and using client certificates for both
> authentication and identification is part of the TLS standard itself and
> works with established servers like apache httpd. Implementing it in
> java is as easy as to set your own root-ca-cert as trustanchor when
> creating the TLS server socket. The server then requests a client
> certificate signed by the root-ca-cert (even works with intermediate
> certs) during the handshake and if none is presented the connection is
> terminated. All the verification is done by the java SSE itself - nothin
> complicated to implement - just setup two certificates.
>
> Should this be a (or THE) route to implement security on webadmin? I
> don'T think so. It's an open admin control port and no matter if it
> comes with some sort of auth or ident it should always be treated as
> such - which means: only accessible local and protected by firewall at
> the very least. Yes, there still should be some security on top - but it
> often comes down to: if an attacker already got local access to your
> server in most cases you lost already.
>
> So, TLDR: For me if, for some reason, one need remote access to james
> webadmin just use ssh tunneling like
>
> ssh user@host -L8443:localhost:8443
>
> and use the local 8443 and let ssh handle the auth and ident and crypto
> and all that stuff. We already have this tool at hand - and: "Don't roll
> your own crypto!".
>
>
> Am 07.02.25 um 10:26 schrieb Ilya Terskov:
>> yeah guys i tried that in the end but one problem - if i have forwards to
>> other email - it need to delete also, same for aliases, so if doing script
>> it need to do all that and recursively.
>> we sure need 3.9.0 with actions working :) about security on it i think we
>> need just RSA keys just like used in SSH and ofc encryption on this
>> chanel no plaintext for sure :)