%ents; ]>
Incident Reporting This specification defines methods for incident reporting among XMPP server deployments. &LEGALNOTICE; 0268 Deferred Standards Track Standards Council XMPP Core NOT_YET_ASSIGNED operators Artur Hefczyc artur.hefczyc@gmail.com artur.hefczyc@tigase.org Florian Jensen admin@flosoft.biz admin@im.flosoft.biz Mickaël Rémond mickael.remond@process-one.net mremond@process-one.net &stpeter; Matthew Wild mwild1@gmail.com mwild1@jaim.at 0.3 2009-11-17 psa

Added security considerations; defined schema.

 0.2 2009-06-05 mw/psa

Added more detailed information about the solution element; removed the suggestion element since the solution element can be used by both reporting entities and receiving entities; added notes about processing of incident reports by receiving entities.

 0.1 2009-04-30 psa

Initial published version.

 0.0.3 2009-04-30 psa

Per Council feedback, moved server rosters to a separate specification.

 0.0.2 2009-04-27 psa/fj

Refactored XML format; added elements for sub-categories, locations, related incidents, solutions, and suggestions.

 0.0.1 2009-04-13 ah/fj/psa/mr/mw

First draft.

As XMPP technologies have been deployed more widely, the open XMPP network has become a more significant target for attacks. This specification defines ways for XMPP server deployments to share information with each other and therefore to handle such attacks in a more real-time fashion. In particular, it defines a format for sharing incident reports among XMPP server deployments. (For some related considerations, see &rfc2350;, &rfc3067;, and &rfc5070;.)

An incident report consists of an XMPP &MESSAGE; stanza containing an <incident/> child element that includes an 'id' attribute whose value is a UUID as described in &rfc4122;. An example is shown below. A server deployment SHOULD send incident reports only to peer servers that it trusts, for example peers that are in its "server roster" as described in &xep0267;.

stpeter@jabber.org operators@conference.jabber.org muc presence long-messages jdev@conference.jabber.org jabber@conference.jabber.org 133BCE2E-E669-4ECE-B0F8-766B9E65630D 2 abuser@abuse.lit loser@abuse.lit lots of MUC spammers from abuse.lit! ]]>

The defined children of the <description/> element are as follows:

Element Name Description
<discuss/> The JID of the server admin who generated the incident report (<admin/>), as well as a &xep0045; room where the incident can be discussed (<muc/>).
<info/> Structured information about the incident. The defined values of the <category/> and <type/> elements shall be provided via a registry. It is envisioned that the <category/> values shall be "muc" for &xep0045; incidents, "pubsub" for &xep0060; incidents, "reg" for account registration (&xep0077;) incidents, and "stanzas" for general XMPP incidents.
<locs/> The place or places on the XMPP network where the incident has occurred (such as a multi-user chat room, a publish-subscribe service, or a general XMPP server), each contained in a separate <loc/> element.
<rels/> The IDs of one or more incidents to which this incident might be related, each contained in a separate <rel/> element.
<severity/> The seriousness of the problem, from 5 (least serious) to 1 (most serious).
<source/> The IPv4 or IPv6 address (optionally including port) and JabberID where the incident originated (multiple instance of each source type can be included).
<text/> A natural-language description of the event. This element SHOULD possess an 'xml:lang' attribute. Multiple <text/> elements MAY be included, each with a different 'xml:lang' value.
<time/> The time when the incident began and ended (include an empty <end/> element if the incident is still happening) and, optionally, was reported. The dates MUST conform to the DateTime profile specified in &xep0082;

If the reporting entity determines a solution to the problem or a receiving entity has a suggested solution to the problem, it SHOULD send out a revised incident report containing a <solution/> element (alternatively, the reporting entity can include a solution in its initial report). The solution element can include any of the elements defined for the <description/> element, such as the <ip/> element (since the XMPP server of a source JID might know the IP address and port of the connected entity).

... 192.0.2.1:53667 iptables -A INPUT -s 192.0.2.1 -j DROP ]]>

Unless explicitly configured to do so, a receiving server SHOULD NOT automatically modify its configuration based on receipt of an incident report, even from a trusted server, but instead SHOULD prompt the human administrators so that they can take appropriate action.

A receiving server MAY accept incident reports from peers that are not on its "trust list", but SHOULD treat such reports with caution and provide them to the human administrator(s) of the server.

A receiving server MAY forward reports that it receives to other servers it trusts.

This technology is designed to help mitigate attacks on the XMPP network. However, incident reporting is itself vulnerable to the following attacks:

This document requires no interaction with &IANA;.

This specification defines the following XML namespace:

  • urn:xmpp:incident:0

Upon advancement of this specification from a status of Experimental to a status of Draft, the ®ISTRAR; shall add the foregoing namespace to the registry located at &NAMESPACES;, as described in Section 4 of &xep0053;.

 &NSVER; ]]>