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Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

From the original article:

> EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails.

I don't understand how this is being touted as vulnerabilities in OpenPGP and S/MIME.

Sure there is undefined behavior in the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards but if implementations choose an insecure behavior for the undefined behavior, then it is a flaw in the implementation, not the standard.

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This isn't undefined behavior. This is malleability. Attackers get to change some parts of the plain text without needing to know the encryption key.

This is very much an issue with the S/MIME standard, which has no defence against this kind of attack. For PGP it is slightly different, as there is a defense against it (the 'MDC', a sha-1 hash of the plaintext) but it has a soft-fail if the MDC is not present.

Both are issues with the standard. For S/MIME it is a total failure, whilst for PGP the failure is mitigated slightly by an obscure and non-urgent error message. But, it is unreasonable to expect users to act on this kind of error message. Really, what you want here is a hard fail, but that would break backwards compatibility.

The use of CBC without proper authentication sounds like a flaw in the standard to me. Especially the line in the FAQ about being able to create a fresh valid signature for an altered ciphertext is not good.

The "create a fresh valid signature" part talks about creating a new signature with the attacker's identity. Sure, technically it's a valid signature but it won't fool anyone regarding the message's authenticity. This is trivially possible for all schemes where you can detach the signature from the message.

You should not be able to detach the signature when you're using an encryption mode with known-plaintext attacks. If you're not going to make decryption depend on having the original signature, at least use an encryption mode where any changes scramble the rest of the plaintext. Unauthenticated CBC is not acceptable.

>talks about creating a new signature with the attacker's identity

Wait, if the signature isn't created with the same key as the message encryption, how does this even work? Shouldn't the client fail to either decrypt the message or validate the signature?

It's been mentioned by other comments here[0] that the team / group / individual(s) behind this paper didn't even contact the underlying development teams prior to publishing. The whole thing looks like they want to be able to say "yeah we uncovered xyz vulnerability" which they kind of could of, if they had just explained it's relevant to implementation and didn't attack the wrong projects in the process. There seems to be some level of unprofessional conduct[1] coming from the people writing the paper as well where they attack the projects on Twitter to try and silence them when their claims are refuted.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064360

[1]: https://twitter.com/seecurity/status/995936859980222464

(Note: I'm reiterating / summarizing the findings of AnaniasAnanas from here.)

This is false, and you should be embarrassed to have repeated it publicly.

If you'd even taken the time to look at the Efail.de website, you'd see the (extensive) timeline of contacts the Ruhr team made, including liasing with CERT teams, starting last year.

Aren't the point of the standards to ensure there is no room for security holes? It seems kind of strange to make the security dependant on the implementation. Imo, it should be impossible to implement the standard in an insecure way.

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