Ars Technica is reporting that there are
critical PGP and S/MIME bugs which can reveal encrypted e-mails. Their advice is to uninstall the plugins, for the time being. More information will be released tomorrow (Tuesday at 07:00 UTC, 3:00 AM EDT, midnight PDT).
Little is publicly known about the flaws at the moment. Both Schinzel and the EFF blog post said they will be disclosed late Monday night California time in a paper written by a team of European security researchers. Schinzel's Twitter messages used the hashtag #efail, a possible indication of the name the researchers have given to their exploit.
The EFF also published a warning, Attention PGP Users: New Vulnerabilities Require You To Take Action Now:
A group of European security researchers have released a warning about a set of vulnerabilities affecting users of PGP and S/MIME. EFF has been in communication with the research team, and can confirm that these vulnerabilities pose an immediate risk to those using these tools for email communication, including the potential exposure of the contents of past messages.
The full details will be published in a paper on Tuesday at 07:00 AM UTC (3:00 AM Eastern, midnight Pacific). In order to reduce the short-term risk, we and the researchers have agreed to warn the wider PGP user community in advance of its full publication.
The EFF also gives additional advice on disabling PGP in Thunderbird with Enigmail as well as other mail and mail-like clients.
takyon: The embargo is broken and the full details, including the paper (PDF), have been published.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Apparition on Monday May 14 2018, @08:50AM (3 children)
HTML e-mail: Continuing to ruin e-mail since the early 2000s.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @02:06PM (1 child)
If you think email encryption is essential for you, yet you enable HTML emails, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with your thinking.
The HTML and MIME parsing of email clients is so full of crap, you've already thrown a lot of security by enabling it.
Sure, encrypting email will still be better than not (especially since it WILL leave evidence of the attack, so you can't have someone mass-sniff you), but the problem is HTML email. The other problem is the utter carelessness with which email clients handle HTML email. There should be no scripts, not external links, no nothing enabled by default.
And the people sending HTML email with no plain-text fallback should be burned at a stake...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @04:27PM
And the people sending HTML email should be burned at a stake...
There, fixed that for you....
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 14 2018, @04:38PM
HTML e-mail isn't the problem. The real problem is with e-mail clients. We need e-mail clients to automatically run any executable attachments as soon as the e-mail arrives in the inbox. No need to wait until the e-mail is read. That way any e-mail attacks can be mitigated by an executable attachment, sent by the attacker, which protects from the attack.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.