The main focus in Halon 4.5 release is TLS, hence the name “certy”. Check out the the new features and functions and try them out. Also, the knowledge base is growing with a lot of good how-to’s to help you around.

TLS information has been made accessible in the Halon Platform scripting language, both on the receiving and sending side. Support for X.509 client certificates has been added, allowing you to both verify the sender identity in the SMTP server, as well as identify yourself when sending email through an SMTP client.

Experiment: we configured a busy email system to ask for a client certificate for all inbound connections, and found that approximate 5% of all traffic provides a client identity. Most of the traffic is from Gmail and Office356. We did not collect the percentage of domains, which we leave as an exercise for you.

$peercert = GetTLS();
$haspeercert = isset($peercert["peer_cert"]);
stat("peer-cert", ["yes" => $haspeercert, "no" => !$haspeercert]);

How to enable this feature and start authenticating clients was documented as KB article.

Implementation and facilitation of TLS reporting (tlsrpt) has begun. It is a new standard for reporting TLS failures, mainly focused on MTA-STS and DANE.

The TLSSocket() class now have a getpeercert() function and the ability to specify a client certificate. Now you see why we called it” certy”?

Support for custom SASL authentication mechanism has been added. This allows you to build authentication schemes such as OTP, OAUTHBEARER or CRAM-MD5, but also EXTERNAL to facilitate the client certificate features. The procedure is documented in our knowledge base along with two sample implementations.

Now with custom SASL mechanism support, I did CRAM-MD5, who implements #OAUTHBEARER or #OTP? pic.twitter.com/KoMd0gEJJI

— Halon.io (@halon_io) January 8, 2018

If you haven’t found our knowledge base before, the KB is a place to find how-to’s. The dev team is expanding it as fast as we can, adding topics that customers have asked about.

Finally, I want to highlight the big effort we’ve done to simplify, modernize and overall improve the web administration. This is an ongoing project, and something that we’re paying a lot of attention to. We want to thank, and congratulate, the Bootstrap team for providing such a awesome framework. We managed to get the Bootstrap 4.0 release in, with just a few days of work.

You can read the full changelog on our GitHub of all the other features big and small.