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posted by takyon on Monday May 14 2018, @07:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the pretty-grotesque-problem dept.

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.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 14 2018, @05:46PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 14 2018, @05:46PM (#679666) Journal

    It's not just that HTML renderers are too complex to trust, it's worse. HTML is designed to link stuff together non-locally. This is totally absurd in a secure context. Yes, there are HTML subsets that should be usable, but they aren't large subsets.

    It's an interesting idea, and someone should design a renderer for a secure subset of HTML, but you'd need a different form of packaging. Say only allow links to things within the same archive. That would let you use most of an existing HTML base, but still be secure. And if you unpackage the archive you could read it with a normal HTML browser.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
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