Hi all,

I was looking at a CERT security advisory today that describes an attack
using the application/pgp-encrypted mime type to decrypt sensitive
information, however the attack scenario, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/122919
https://efail.de/efail-attack-paper.pdf

What exactly is the threat? All I can put together is an attacker can
encrypt a malicious html email which, when rendered, makes http requests.
Not always a good thing, but no different than if a victim renders
non-encrypted html email anyway. Is that correct?

The paper seems to suggest that an attacker collecting encrypted data
(emails) of a victim may then decipher them if the malicious html/pgp email
is decrypted by the victim, because secret data (private key) is sent to
the attacker's webserver.

Could someone clarify how this attack scenario plays out? Are these
pgp/html mail clients actually so broke that they would send crypto secrets
as part of an http request while rendering a malicious email?

-George



-- 
George Georgalis, (415) 894-2710, http://www.galis.org/

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