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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 14 2018, @11:48AM (1 child)
The PDF indicates that these options may have been properly set, upon installation. But, manipulation of an email can change those settings. You open the email, the email enables the downloads first, then proceeds to perform it's other nefarious acts - and you are screwed. The only thing that is going to save you is, if your client forces a confirmation window, because you're not going to see the permissions change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @07:01PM
Um, no. This does not change application settings.
By placing a plaintext block with an img tag without a closing quote for the href attribute, then a block with encrypted text, then a plaintext block closes the rest of the img tag, it creates a URL containing the decrypted text.