On 3 Feb 2017, at 08:40, Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 09:54:38PM +0000, Mark Boyce wrote:

Hi All

Wondering if there’s a way to pass an unencrypted connections traffic to
an alternative location if a client does not SSL/TLS with the stunnel
server?

So considering stunnel running as a server to wrap an unencrypted SMTP
server.  If the SMTP client/server talks SSL/TLS all is good and as
expected.  If the client tries to talk without encryption it gets
disconnect.

Is there any way to send this traffic elsewhere rather than
disconnecting the client?  So that stunnel is adding an SSL/TLS option
to a service rather than enforcing it. Splitting the traffic to
destination servers based on if the client was encrypted or not.

stunnel itself cannot do this; one might write a trivial wrapper to
do it, but I believe that there might be a larger problem here.

You mention SMTP.  Doesn't the SMTP protocol *require* the server to
send its banner (220 Hi there, I'm an SMTP server, who are you?) before
the client sends its first command?  I think that there are servers
that actually enforce this requirement for spam control - some spambots
are dumb enough to just open a TCP connection and blast a series of
SMTP commands without waiting for the server's greeting (to save on
round-trip times and such), and some servers deliberately delay their
220 greeting for a little while and immediately reject the connection
if the client tries to talk to them before that.

So, um, how does the redirector know whether this is an SSL/TLS client
or not if the server has to send its greeting first? :)  Of course, one
could do something like "wait for a second or two, see if the client
starts an SSL/TLS session; if not, pass it on to the unencrypted server
thing", but this will fail badly if the connection has a really high
latency or the client machine is badly overloaded so that it doesn't
send its SSL/TLS Client Hello in time, and it would also enforce
an additional delay on *every* unencrypted connection.

G'luck,
Peter

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Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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