P-Asserted-Identity vs history info - sip

I'm newbie in SIP field. So, please forgive if there is old/easy questions.
Please take a basic call-flow as below to analysis.
phone A -- calls -- phone B -- (transfer to ) -- phone C
A, B, C are extension on same PBX.
Question 1. So, in INVITE message, the History-info will contain:
At B
`History-info : <sip: user A #domain.com>`
At C:
`History-info : <sip: user A #domain.com>`
`History-info : <sip: user B #domain.com>`
`History-info : <sip: user C #domain.com>`
Question 2. And, the PAI header will generate in INVITE message of C
and the format is :
P-Asserted-Identity: <sip:user A #domain;user=phone>.
Question 3. I just want to know when does 2 SIP headers: History-info and P-Asserted-Identity (PAI) occur in SIP message ? and which case ?
Question 4. The difference between 2 SIP headers above and the purpose of them. Are they generated on INVITE message or others ?
Please help me make these concerns clearly.

Q1: Not sure what the question is, but if all UAs (extensions) are sending the calls through the PBX, the PBX may add the History-info fields in any request not associated with an established dialog (INVITE, REGISTER, MESSAGE, REFER and OPTIONS, PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, ..)
Q2: The PAI field should be set with the identity of the calling party, which is still extension A for internal calls. In another scenario, like A is calling B and B is redirected to an outside line, the PAI might be overwritten by the PBX with B's outbound number before the call is sent through the external SIP trunk.
Q3: History-info (RFC4244) is an application specific header field, not always present and most commonly injected by your PBX for internal reasons (checking routing, detecting redirect loops, charging, etc). Being an optional field, its availability and purpose in extensions may vary.
PAI field (RFC3325) contains the identity of the caller.
Q4: Q3 explains the difference between them, PAI holds the identity while histinfo fields are holding the indexed tracking of SIP URIs through which the message passed and any additional info.
PAI can appear in INVITE/OPTIONS/SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY, for histinfo see Q1.

Related

adding callid in sip-servlets

I am using sip servlets api to make sip calls,
My requirement is to connect two calls in conference, for this I need to modify call-id for one of the invite request, but it is not allowing me to modify call-id in header part and my code is as follows:
SipServletRequest forkedRequest = linkedSession.createRequest("INVITE");
ipFactory sipFactory = (SipFactory)getServletContext().getAttribute("javax.servlet.sip.SipFactory");
SipURI sipUri = (SipURI)sipFactory.createURI("sip:msml#192.168.149.113");
forkedRequest.setRequestURI(sipUri);
forkedRequest.setContent(secondSdp,"application/sdp");
forkedRequest.addHeader("Call-ID",sipServletResponse.getCallId());
and I was getting following error:
Header[Call-ID] is system header, cant add,cant modify it!!!
Can any one suggest on this? make sure how to modify call-id
SIP Servlets Specification specifically forbids to modify the Call-ID Header which is a System Header. Please read the specification at https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=289
Which conference provider enforces you to have the same Call-ID for 2 different calls to be able to join the same conference ? This seems like a very bad design and against the SIP RFC itself https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3261#section-8.1.1.4

What does X-Sender-Id mean in email raw source (Found in phishing email)?

Somebody in my company is being subject to phishing. My first suggestion was just to change the password. However after awhile I received a fake mail from her address again.
Looking at the raw source of the email I found that there is another person's email in X-Sender-ID and I'm wondering who that might be. Is that the person who sent the email or can it be an account that has been hijacked? (I replaced the email with "somebody#host.com")
X-Virus-Scanned: OK
Received: by smtp5.relay.iad3a.emailsrvr.com (Authenticated sender: somebody-AT-host.com) with ESMTPA id DF2788019C;
Fri, 21 Nov 2014 07:54:42 -0500 (EST)
X-Sender-Id: somebody#host.com
Received: from smtp.emailsrvr.com ([UNAVAILABLE]. [2.133.148.211])
by 0.0.0.0:587 (trex/5.3.2);
Fri, 21 Nov 2014 12:54:46 GMT
What is X-Sender-ID? And what is the email it contains?
My deliberations are based on this RFC which describes the Privacy Enhancement for Emails which you are obviously using.
Basically it says about the X-Sender-ID:
[...] encapsulated header field, required for all
privacy-enhanced messages, identifies a message's sender and provides
the sender's IK identification component.
What does this mean?
First of all you have to check if the mail is properly signed. If thats the case you can be sure that somebody#host.com has a certificate. And you can be sure that the mail you received has been sent from this mail address.
I can't tell you the consequences which result out of this fact as I don't know how your company is deploying the certificates etc. ... the mail address/certificate could also have been hacked and thereby abused.
I hope this helps you for your further research.
While #LMF's answer is useful technical information, I'd like to offer a possible alternative explanation.
Spammers who are not familiar with e-mail (and PHP programmers with no other malicious intent) tend to succumb to cargo cult programming when it comes to email headers. In other words, if there is something they don't understand, they might think it does something useful, and include it in their message template.
Without knowledge about your email infrastructure, or other messages of yours to compare to, I would simply assume everything below the top-most Received: header is forged, and basically without meaning.
If you have a system which runs something called trex (maybe this one?) and it really manages to write a Received: header like that, I might be wrong. The format needlessly deviates from the de-facto standard Sendmail template in a few places, but it's not technically wrong (the format is basically free-form, but introducing ad-hoc syntax makes it harder to guess what the fields mean).
Again, more information about what your typical email (and your correspondent's typical mail) looks like, this is heavy on speculation.
The x-sender-id, along with the x-recipient-id are used to specify which interchange key was used in the broadcast of the message.
X-Sender-ID entity_id : issuing_authority : version
X-Recipient-ID entity_id : issuing_authority : version
The first field contains the identity of the sender or receiver. The first field is mandatory, must be unique, and must be formatted as user#host whereas the host is a fully qualified host address.
The second identifies the name of the authority which issued the interchange key.
The third field specifies the specific type of interchange key which was used. This is represented by an alphanumeric string defined by the issuing authority to label and organize the numerous interchange keys issued by that authority. It is recommmended that they use a timestamp but is not always the case.
If the field values of the x-sender-id second and third field are identical to that of the x-recipient-id they may be only listed in the field which is defined last.
Further Reading
"Distributed Computing & Cryptography: Proceedings of a DIMACS Workshop"

Is there a URI schema for addressing individual email messages?

When someone loses track of an email that has been sent to them, and brings that to the sender's attention, it is common practice for the sender to simply forward or re-send the original email. I want to know if there is any [semi-]standard way to reference a specific email, such that a mail client could open that email if it has a copy of it. This might be in the form of a URI, or possibly some other form. Such a URI might reference the sender, recipient, date, time, or other headers that [should] remain intact between sender and recipient.
The Message-ID is a globally unique identifier for messages.
Note that the Message-ID header is optional, but recommended:
Though listed as optional in the table in section 3.6, every message SHOULD have a "Message-ID:" field.
RFC 2392 specifies the URI scheme mid (which was already reserved in RFC 1738):
The "mid" scheme uses (a part of) the message-id of an email message to refer to a specific message.
An example from RFC 2392:
previous message, shows how the approach you propose can be used to accomplish ...

Persistence of custom headers within an email thread

I this is probably a strange question, but I thought I'd go ahead and ask. Say, I send an email, using IMAP SMTP, through a special client. This client adds a few custom headers to the email message before sending it on its way. The recipient receives this email and responds to me directly (and maybe CC's a few people as well).
My question is this: Given the above example, would these X-headers persist throughout all the new messages within the thread?
One thing I can think of is the client would be aware of the original email message it sent. All subsequent responses to this email would have a "Reply-To" header whose value equals the "Message-Id" of the previous email. I don't see why I couldn't crawl up these thread of replies until I get to the original message sent by the client, thereby deriving the original custom headers.
Maybe I'm over-thinking this. Any suggestions? :)
A message reply does not necessarily contain anything of the original message. The MUA is likely to suggest a modified (e.g. prepended with "Re:") version of the original subject, and obviously the addresses are utilised for appropriate defaults as well. None of the other content of the message forms part of the reply (unless the sender deliberately includes it, as with quoting or forwarding). Any X- headers that you have in your message will certainly not be included in the reply (unless you have control over that MUA).
However, your plan of tracking the original message is certainly feasible: see Section 3.6.4 of RFC 5322. Every message should (not must) have a Message-ID header, and should have In-Reply-To and References headers when appropriate.
The "Message-ID:" field contains a single unique message identifier. The "References:" and "In-Reply-To:" fields each contain one or more unique message identifiers, optionally separated by [whitespace].
In-Reply-To is mention to identify the message (or messages) that is (are) being replied to, while References identifies the entire thread of conversation. The References header is meant to contain the entire contents of the References header of the message being replied to, so you only need the last message to identify the entire thread.
Note that In-Reply-To and Reply-To are not the same thing (the latter specifies the address that the sender wishes replies to be sent to).
Assuming that you have the original message, then you should be able to use the References header of any reply to identify the original message. Not every MUA will handle References or In-Reply-To correctly, but most will.
As far as I know, there's no reason to think any email client would propagate any header lines it doesn't understand. Most will preserve the subject (usually adding "Re: " if necessary) and derive their "To: " and "Cc: " lines from the previous message's headers, but that's about it. I suppose some (but not all) will generate an "In-Reply-To" line, but that's as far as it goes.
Your idea of having a client crawl back through the thread looking for specific headers sounds like it might be do-able, but you'd have to write your own email client if you want that feature, and you'd still be blocked by the fact that not all email clients preserve message threading in any way.

What heuristics should I use to prevent an autoresponder war?

I am currently extending an e-mail system with an autoresponse feature. In a dark past, I've seen some awesome mail loops, and I'm now trying to avoid such a thing from happening to me.
I've looked at how other tools ('mailbot', 'vacation') are doing this, grepped my own mail archive for suspicious mail headers, but I wonder if there is something else I can add.
My process at this point:
Refuse if sender address is invalid (this should get rid of messages with <> sender)
Refuse if sender address matches one of the following:
'^root#',
'^hostmaster#',
'^postmaster#',
'^nobody#',
'^www#',
'-request#'
Refuse if one of these headers (after whitespace normalization and lowercasing) is present:
'^precedence: junk$',
'^precedence: bulk$',
'^precedence: list$',
'^list-id:',
'^content-type: multipart/report$',
'^x-autogenerated: reply$',
'^auto-submit: yes$',
'^subject: auto-response$'
Refuse if sender address was already seen by the autoresponder in the recent past.
Refuse if the sender address is my own address :)
Accept and send autoresponse, prepending Auto-response: to the subject, setting headers Precedence: bulk and Auto-Submit: yes to hopefully prevent some remote mailer from propagating the autoresponse any further.
Is there anything I'm missing?
In my research so far I've come up with these rules.
Treat inbound message as autogenerated, ignore it and blacklist the sender if...
Return-Path header is <> or missing/invalid
Auto-Submitted header is present with any value other than "no"
X-Auto-Response-Suppress header is present
In-Reply-To header is missing
Note: If I'm reading RFC3834 correctly, your own programs SHOULD set this, but so far it seems some autoresponders omit this (freshdesk.com)
When sending outbound messages, be sure to...
Set the Auto-Submitted: auto-generated header (or auto-replied as appropriate)
Set your SMTP MAIL FROM: command with the null address <>
Note some delivery services including Amazon SES will set their own value here, so this may not be feasible
Check the recipient against the blacklist built up by the inbound side and abort sending to known autoresponders
Consider sending not more than 1 message per unit time (long like 24 hours) to a given recipient
Notes on other answers and points
I think ignoring Precedence: list messages will cause false positives, at least for my app's configuration
I believe the OP's "auto-submit" rule is a typo and the official header is Auto-Submitted
References
RFC3834
This SO question about Precedence header has several good answers
Wikipedia Email Loop Article
desk.com article
Comments welcome and I'll update this answer as this is a good question and I'd like to see an authoritative answer created.
Update 2014-05-22
To find if an inbound message is an "out-of-office" or other automatic reply, we use that procedure:
First, Find if header "In-Reply-To" is present. If not, that is an auto-reply.
Else, check if 1 of these header is present:
X-Auto-Response-Suppress (any value)
Precedence (value contains bulk, or junk or list)
X-Webmin-Autoreply (value 1)
X-Autogenerated (value Reply)
X-AutoReply (value YES)
Include a phrase like "This is an automatically-generated response" in the body somewhere. If your message body is HTML (not plain text) you can use a style to make it not visible.
Check for this phrase before responding. If it exists, odds are good it's an automated response.