On 04.01.18 14:38, Lachezar Dobrev wrote:
> 2018-01-03 19:04 GMT+02:00 Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[email protected]>:
>> On Wed 2018-01-03 14:39:55 +0200, Lachezar Dobrev wrote:
>>>   Recently I've been greeted with a red warning every time I try to
>>> reply to an encrypted message saying:
>>>
>>>   "Beware of leaking sensitive information - partially encrypted email."
>>>
>>>   With a Details button that shows a pop-up:
>>>
>>> """
>>> The message you are editing was partially encrypted. That is, the
>>> message contains unencrypted and encrypted parts. Some encrypted
>>> message parts may even be invisible to you.
>>>
>>> If the sender was not able to decrpyt the message parts originally, it
>>> is likely that you only got the email with some surrounding
>>> unencrypted text in order to make you reveal the encrypted
>>> information.
>>> """
>>>   (the "decrpyt" is a spelling mistake as is)
>>>
>>>   What does this actually mean, and why does it show on every message
>>> I try to reply to?
>>>
>>>   I have checked, and the mail is encrypted with the same two keys
>>> that the reply is going to be encrypted with: one is mine, the other
>>> is the one for the original sender.
>>
>> This is about CVE-2017-17844.  The attack these warnings aim to mitigate
>> against goes like this:
>>
>>  * attacker gets a copy of an encrypted message X that had been sent to
>>    you
>>
>>  * attacker creates a new message Y to you, and embeds encrypted message
>>    X somewhere in the tail of message Y (the long chain of quoted,
>>    attributed text that everyone ignores because top-posting is somehow
>>    the expected norm).
>>
>>  * you receive message Y, and reply to it (composing a new e-mail to the
>>    attacker).
>>
>>  * without the warning, it's likely that enigmail will decrypt the
>>    quoted message and place the cleartext in the new reply message.
>>
>>
>> However, it sounds like you're seeing this warning trigger on every
>> e-mail reply, which seems unlikely to be the intended situation.
>>
>> What do your inbound e-mails look like?  how are they structured?  are
>> they PGP/MIME, or inline PGP?  if they're inline PGP, is there a lot of
>> text around the encrypted blob?
>>
>>      --dkg
> 
>   Hm, that does make sense.
>   I made a test: sent myself a pair of PGP/MIME and a pair of
> Inline-PGP messages (one with signature, another unsigned). Trying to
> reply to the PGP/MIME message works as expected. Trying to reply to
> the Inline-PGP was met with the "Beware..." warning. I also noticed
> that most my peers are using Inline-PGP 'cause android...
>   I also noticed, that when cancelling the replies to the Inline-PGP
> messages Thunderbird asks to save the draft even with no new content,
> while cancelling the replies to the PGP/MIME message goes through. I
> suspect it is due to the way Inline-PGP messages work (the content is
> decrypted in-place).
> 
>   The Inline-PGP mail seems to be really blank:
> """
> To: obfuscated
> From: obfuscated
> Subject: Test
> Message-ID: <obfuscated>
> Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2018 15:15:55 +0200
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101
>  Thunderbird/52.5.0
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> Content-Language: bg
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
> Charset: utf-8
> 
> hQIOAxxQ0nrmqQMHEAf7BkQcd2+kZmXLrDOkUPpHf41/P3cssK4aslN+yuMPEQg5
> ... stripped 16 lines ...
> cBrNYUYb
> =cT46
> -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
> """
> 
>   If I understand correctly this is something I should get accustomed with.

The question is, what is the text that is above and below the decrypted
message. I try not to display the warning if the message was completely
inline-PGP encrypted, but that's pretty hard to do in the message
composition window (where the original message is no longer available).

You could also ask your peers to install K-9 (plus OpenKeychain), or
R2Mail2. Both can create and read PGP/MIME messages just fine.

-Patrick

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