That's are also a good reason to keep them separate, though in the case of
a third party policy provider a redirect could also be good enough.

Thank you all for the answers.

Ayke

On Sep 16, 2017 10:36, "Daniel Margolis" <[email protected]> wrote:

Jim and Viktor basically get it right, I think.

I don't believe this has any security value in warding off a DOS; anyone
who can inject a TXT record to a non-implementing domain can also inject
the A or CNAME for mta-sts.example.com.

What this does do which has real security value is allow you to make sure
the org that hosts the policy does not have access to a certificate for the
full domain. If mta-sts.example.com is hosted by (say) the mail team and
not the web team, or by some third party mail provider, you may not want
them to have a cert for .example.com.

(Conversely, however, you are not *required *to obtain a new certificate if
you have a wildcard cert for the full domain. So I don't think this imposes
a lot of difficulty here, and anyway, certificates can be had automagically
from LetsEncrypt or similar.)

Dan

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 11:45 PM, Ayke van Laethem <[email protected]
> wrote:

> Those are good points. On large domains it may be more difficult to serve
> a policy file on the bare domain. I'm thinking about smaller domains
> serving their own policy - but those are possibly less relevant for MTA-STS.
>
> Ayke
>
> On Sep 15, 2017 23:00, "Jim Fenton" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On 9/15/17 1:46 PM, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
>> > On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 08:14:40PM +0000, Binu Ramakrishnan wrote:
>> >
>> >> One advantage of using a sub-domain is the ability to delegate STS
>> policy
>> >> serving (and mail hosting) to a 3rd party service provider.
>> > If support for 302 redirects is added, perhaps that case becomes
>> > less compelling?
>> >
>> > Though the redirect to the provider would have to be done by whatever
>> > serves "example.com", rather than "mta-sts.example.com", and it
>> > may in some cases be more difficult to get the redirect to happen
>> > there, so having a subdomain makes it a bit easier to do the job
>> > with a CNAME, if the provider can obtain the requisite certificate.
>> >
>> I see the advantage of including mta-sts as being that it doesn't
>> require access to the domain's main web server. In a large domain, it's
>> easier for the mail operations folks to operate a different web server,
>> and mta-sts could always be CNAMEd back to some other server (such as
>> the main one) if that isn't the case.
>>
>> But this does make me think: what do other .well-known services do? Do
>> they run into this problem?
>>
>>
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