3 ms·
> By failing to actually specify the actual attack the writer hopes to prevent a rebuttal. I am pretty sure they are talking about EFAIL. EFAIL was itself a wei
by mkhpalm 7y ago
> By failing to actually specify the actual attack the writer hopes to prevent a rebuttal. I am pretty sure they are talking about EFAIL. EFAIL was itself a weird slander of the idea of encrypted email but ultimately did not show any weakness of either PGP or S/MIME. It was instead a cautionary tale about the use of HTML for email.
What you said there can't be stressed enough. Despite that almost no email client in the past decades defaults to allowing active or remote content. But because you could turn all that on with some clients... it somehow means PGP and S/MIME were impossibly insecure.
"Weird" is a good word to describe things.
- cyphar 7y agoEfail worked with the default settings on almost all clients except Mutt. Most email clients do not have a "plain text" mode. They all display emails as HTML and apply some formatting to make the "plain text" mode be monospaced. Also, one of the Efail exploits (the CDC gadget) was a cryptographic vulnerability. The fact you could manipulate the ciphertext to inject HTML tags such that GPG wouldn't scream bloody murder (because the MDC wasn't required and had very odd semantics, where GPG would output data to the caller before it had been authenticated and clients showed it as a warning and still rendered the HTML exploit) was definitely at its core a cryptographic bug. All of this was explained in significant detail in the CCC talk about Efail[1]. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to-end_email_encryption https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to-end_email_...