On 04.06.18 07:08, mech wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since MDC checks got introduced we encounter sporadic problems when
> encrypting mails to collegues with really really (~2001) old GPG keys
> that include UIDs that according to --edit-key -> showprefs are not
> MDC-enabled by default (too old hashes like CAST5).
> 
> The respective gpg key has multiple UID, some private email addresses
> and some addresses used within our company. The email addresses are
> often identical except for upper/lower cases. I guess the UIDs were
> created over the years because some names contain German umlauts, others
> do not (probably all Latin1, UTF-8 encoding history is in this key ;-))
> 
> As far as I understand gpg will an symmetric encryption suitable for all
> recipients looking at the public keys of all.
> 
> For some reason when encrypting emails to multiple recipients (including
> this collegue) it sometimes (not always) happens that an non-MDC hash is
> used. Then non recipient, not even the sender, can read the mail with an
> MDC-hardend Thunderbird/Enigmail solution. I guess gpg randomly picks a
> UID that matches the email address and sometimes the old CAST5-style UID
> number (4) and everything breaks appart :-(
> 
> When as a sender I delete UID (4) from my keyring the problem
> disappears. However I'm not sure, if that's safe to do for the
> private-key owner to do so and re-publish the key. Won't that break
> something for him? We also don't know why some UIDs have different algos.
> 
> What solution is possible for this>
> * Is it possible to change the UIDs preferences somehow? Can one use
> setpref for that and republish?

I'd say the best way is to update the keys and re-distribute them. Each
user should run:

gpg --edit-key 0xYourKeyId setpref save

and then re-publish their key.

> * shall we ask all senders to use --force-mdc in their gpg.conf?
> * should one set --cipher-algo aes256 (or any other using MDC by
> default?), but Enigmail FAQ says that's not a good idea...
> * can one safely delete an UID as private-key owner and republish?
> * will Enigmail instead of blocking non-MDC emails probably display a
> "are you sure warning?" dialog that one could skip? (because actually
> there are probably old non-MDC encrypted emails, that one could never
> read again with current Enigmail versions)

That's does not really help: I can easily send you an email with a
seemingly old date that you cannot reliably distinguish from truly old
mails.

I have described two options for how to decrypt or re-encrypt old emails
without MDC. Read the following support topic:
https://sourceforge.net/p/enigmail/forum/support/thread/03ebee57/

-Patrick

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