Tuesday, May 15, 2018

How to fix Open PGP Hack now

https://EFAIL.de/  is the source and dedicate site that describes the now well know vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails. 

These apps are affected; 
  1. Thunderbird with Enigmail
  2. Apple Mail with GPGTools
  3. Outlook with Gpg4win
The intermediate fix is; 
  1. Disable HTML rendering. The EFAIL attacks abuse active content, mostly in the form of HTML images, styles, etc. Disabling the presentation of incoming HTML emails in your email client will close the most prominent way of attacking EFAIL. Note that there are other possible backchannels in email clients which are not related to HTML but these are more difficult to exploit.
  2. No decryption in email client. The best way to prevent EFAIL attacks is to only decrypt S/MIME or PGP emails in a separate application outside of your email client. Start by removing your S/MIME and PGP private keys from your email client, then decrypt incoming encrypted emails by copy&pasting the ciphertext into a separate application that does the decryption for you. That way, the email clients cannot open exfiltration channels. This is currently the safest option with the downside that the process gets more involved.




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