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[RFC] E-Mail #999

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147 changes: 147 additions & 0 deletions rfcs/text/0008-email.md
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# 0008: Email
<!-- Leave this ID at 0000. The ECS team will assign a unique, contiguous RFC number upon merging the initial stage of this RFC. -->

- Stage: **1 (proposal)** <!-- Update to reflect target stage. See https://elastic.github.io/ecs/stages.html -->
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- Date: **Oct 5th 2020** <!-- The ECS team sets this date at merge time. This is the date of the latest stage advancement. -->
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This RFC proposes a new top-level field to facilitate email use cases.

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Stage 0: Provide a high level summary of the premise of these changes. Briefly describe the nature, purpose, and impact of the changes. ~2-5 sentences.
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## Fields
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Another item that came to mind, and I think makes sense to capture for further discussion later:

Would email be worth considering as an additional allowed value for event.category?

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I would say +1 on this.

@ebeahan if we would create this new event.category we should also update which event.type we can combine with it and maybe see if we need new ones?

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Let's mention this in the RFC "Fields" section.


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Email specific fields:

| field | type | description |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `email.bcc.addresses` | wildcard | Addresses of Bcc's |
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| `email.cc.addresses` | wildcard | Addresses of Cc's |
| `email.attachments_count` | long | A field outside the flattened structure to control how many attachments are included in the email |
| `email.attachments` | flattened | A flattened field for anything related to attachments. This allows objects being stored with all information for each file when you have multiple attachments |
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The .attachments.* fields should follow the file.* fields. We can state this approach in the description for now.

We can see later about the implementation, whether it's full reuse, or explicitly defining the fields that make sense for attachments.

| `email.direction` | keyword | Direction of the message based on the sending and receving domains |
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What do we for see as values for this?, and from which address fields (to, cc, bcc) would it be categorized on?
It seems to me like something that could potentially be difficult to implement, and not sure of the value for visualizations (but I could easily be missing something obvious, its been one of those days...)

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Good question, @dainperkins.

I assume the allowed values in there should be "inbound" and "outbound". Perhaps also "unknown" in the case of relays? Actually just like network.direction, "internal" is another class of emails that has a different threat profile. I wonder if there's a need for the value "external" (as in, I'm just an exchange, relaying between Yahoo and Gmail)?

I agree populating this consistently may not be obvious in all scenarios.

I don't think as a third party, our solutions can determine between "inbound", "outbound" and "internal" without specific configuration that says what are "my domains".

But once we know that, I assume the heuristic is pretty straightforward:

  • direction = inbound when from is not one of "my domains"
  • direction = outbound when from = "my domains" and at least one receiver (to, cc, bcc) contains addresses not in "my domains"
  • direction = outbound when from = "my domains" and all receivers are "my domains"

So I'm +1 on adding the field. I think it makes sense. And unless I'm missing something, I think the heuristics are reasonable; and actually, perhaps some of the email-related event sources already provide such values? It's certainly useful for a spam filter to know which emails to filter. Not sure if it shows up in their logs though.

Action item for the RFC, though: let's start listing expected values for this field. I'm providing ideas above as a strawperson, based on what we have in network.direction. But if email data sources have other values for this, let's bring them to the table as well.

| `email.sender.address` | wildcard | Senders email address |
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If I remember correctly, address will contain the full Person Name <person@example.com>.

We're defining the domain breakdown fields here because the sender is potentially a threat, and this is where we'll be looking for known bad domains/TLDs and so on.

But looking at the fields, I wonder if we should do the same with email.reply_to.address and email.return_path.address? They're also relevant to the sender.

We can hold off on adding them for now, but I'm floating the idea to get feedback on whether there's a need for them.

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I think its worth exploring in the upcoming stage for sure if that is appropriate.

| `email.sender.top_level_domain` | keyword | Senders email address |
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| `email.message_id` | keyword | Internet message ID of the message |
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Message IDs can be pretty creative. For example one of the message IDs for this PR's email notifications was <elastic/ecs/pull/999/review/503143839@github.com>.

So I would make this one wildcard.

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nevertheless the message_id captures the uniqueness of a mail.
I can see that different mail servers have specific ways of building this Message ID and could be interesting (for identification purposes) capturing such behaviour (and spot the anomalies). With this said, a multi-field mapping would make sense here:

 | `email.message_id` | keyword | Internet message ID of the message |
| `email.message_id.text` | text | Internet message ID of the message for full text search |

| `email.reply_to.address` | wildcard | Reply-to address |
| `email.return.address` | wildcard | The return address for the message |
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What about renaming this to return_path -- it's a bit more descriptive of what I think you're actually going for here.

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I agree on this point as well, will update it in the next commit.

| `email.size` | keyword | Total size of the message, in bytes, including attachments |
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| `email.subject` | wildcard | Subject of the message |
| `email.recipients.addresses` | keyword | Recipient addresses |
| `email.domains` | keyword | domains related to the email |
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This field really feels like it should be part of the related fields. Something like related.domains (though it currently doesn't exist, so it might be worth keeping here)

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Yeah this field is the outcome of a current discussion we have. Instead of having domain fields for bcc, cc, recipients etc, we decided currently to have them all as an array under one field. This might change in the upcoming stages. Thanks for the pointer, always happy to get feedback

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Yeah, my concern mainly with a related field is that you lose the directionality of the value. Which might be useful for some use-cases.

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We do have the email.direction though, would that be sufficient? We would calculate the direction before moving the different domains into email.domains for example.



Other ECS fields used together with email usecases:
| field | description |
| --- | --- |
| `event.duration` | The duration related to the email event. Could be the total duration in Quarantine, how long the email tok to send from source to destination etc |
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| `process.name` | When the event is related to a server or client. Does not take MTA into account which is part of a ongoing discussion |
| `network.protocol` | Type of email protocol used |
| `tls.*` | Used for TLS related information for the connection to for example a SMTP server over TLS |



## Usage

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Email use cases stretch across all three Elastic solutions - Search, Observe, Protect. Whether it's searching for content within email, ensuring email infrastrucure is operational or detecting email based attacks, there are many possibilities for email fields within ECS.

## Source data

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- **Email Analytics**: [Hubspot](https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/email/email_events_overview), Marketo, Salesforce Pardot
- **Email Server**: [O365 Message Tracing](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/monitoring/trace-an-email-message/run-a-message-trace-and-view-results), [Postfix](https://nxlog.co/documentation/nxlog-user-guide/postfix.html)
- **Email Security**: [Barracuda](https://campus.barracuda.com/product/emailsecuritygateway/doc/12193950/syslog-and-the-barracuda-email-security-gateway/), [Forcepoint](https://www.websense.com/content/support/library/email/v85/email_siem/siem_log_map.pdf), [Mimecast](https://www.mimecast.com/tech-connect/documentation/tutorials/understanding-siem-logs/), [Proofpoint](https://help.proofpoint.com/Threat_Insight_Dashboard/API_Documentation/SIEM_API)

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## Scope of impact

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## Concerns
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When looking at the current fields provided, one of my concerns is it appears that they don't fit well with the rest of ECS. I think this can be partially fixed with the use of aliases, though, I don't believe aliases are standard/common in ECS.

Examples:

email.from -> source
email.to|cc|bcc -> destination
email.latency -> event.duration

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latency might be redundant depending on the specific action being recorded, but I wouldn't equate email.to|from with source and destination (or client/server) network entities

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Agreed, I think email has enough subtleties in both the "senders" (sender, reply_to, return_path) and the receivers (to, cc, bcc) that I don't think it makes sense to put them in [source|destination].user.email. Also, these aren't array fields anyway, so we couldn't capture everything from the get go.

If an email server logs the source.ip from the MX that sent them an email though, that's totally appropriate to capture in that field.


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## Real-world implementations

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People
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The following are the people that consulted on the contents of this RFC.

Marius Iversen | Author
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Jamie Hynds | Sponsor

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## References

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### RFC Pull Requests

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* Stage 0: https://github.com/elastic/ecs/pull/999
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