EFAIL attacks – Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in PGP and S/MIME Tools, immediately disable and/or uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email.

A few hours ago, I reported the news that security researchers from three universities in Germany and Belgium have found critical vulnerabilities in PGP and S/MIME Tools that could be exploited by attackers to read emails encrypted with OpenPGP and S/MIME.

Pretty Good Privacy is the open source end-to-end encryption standard used to encrypt emails, while S/MIME, Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, is an asymmetric cryptography-based technology that allows users to send digitally signed and encrypted emails.

The existence of the vulnerabilities was also confirmed by the researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that recommended users to uninstall Pretty Good Privacy and S/MIME applications until the issued are fixed.

The experts initially planned on disclosing details on Tuesday morning, but they later decided to publicly share their findings due to wrong information circulating online.

The experts disclosed two variant of the attack dubbed EFAIL, in both scenarios hackers need to be in a position of intercepting encrypted emails, for example hacking the target email account or conducting a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack.

“The EFAIL attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards to reveal the plaintext of encrypted emails. In a nutshell, EFAIL abuses active content of HTML emails, for example externally loaded images or styles, to exfiltrate plaintext through requested URLs.” reads the blog post published by the researchers.

“To create these exfiltration channels, the attacker first needs access to the encrypted emails, for example, by eavesdropping on network traffic, compromising email accounts, email servers, backup systems or client computers. The emails could even have been collected years ago.”

The attacker manipulates the ciphertext in the protected emails and sends a modified message containing custom HTML code to the original receiver or sender.

The first attack technique, dubbed direct exfiltration attack, exploits vulnerabilities in the Apple Mail (for iOS and macOS) and Mozilla Thunderbird email clients. The attacker sends the targeted user a specially crafted multipart email with three HTML body parts. When the victim’s client will open and decrypt the email, the attacker’s code causes the application to send the text to a server controlled by the attacker.

The direct exfiltration technique could be used against both PGP and S/MIME.

The second technique, named a CBC/CFB gadget attack, exploits vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP (CVE-2017-17688) and S/MIME (CVE-2017-17689). In the attack scenario, the victim needs to be in possession of their private key, if the private key has been lost the techniques cannot be used.

“He then sends the manipulated email to one of the original receivers, or to the original sender. He may hide this by choosing new FROM, DATE and SUBJECT fields, and he may hide the manipulated ciphertext by hiding it within an invisible iFrame. Thus the attack mail the victim receives looks unsuspicious” reads the research paper published by the experts.

“Once he opens the email in his client, the manipulated ciphertext will be decrypted – first the private key of the victim is used to decrypt the session key s, and then this session key is used to decrypt the manipulated ciphertext c. The decrypted plaintext now contains, due to the manipulations, an exfiltration channel (e.g., an HTML hyperlink) that will send the decrypted plaintext as a whole or in parts to the attacker,” researchers wrote in their paper on EFAIL.

The CBC/CFB gadget attack is effective against PGP, researchers observed a success rate of 33%.

Test results show the EFAIL attack work against 25 of 35 tested S/MIME email clients and 10 of 28 tested OpenPGP clients.

“Our analysis shows that EFAIL plaintext exfiltration channels exist for 25 of the 35 tested S/MIME email clients and 10 of the 28 tested OpenPGP email clients.” states the blog post.

“While it is necessary to change the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards to reliably fix these vulnerabilities, Apple Mail, iOS Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird had even more severe implementation flaws allowing direct exfiltration of the plaintext that is technically very easy to execute.”

Many security experts downplayed the importance of the EFAIL attack techniques explaining that the attacks work only against buggy email clients.

our judgment. 1. This paper is misnamed. It's not an attack on OpenPGP. It's an

attack on broken email clients that ignore GnuPG's warnings and do silly

things after being warned. 13/ — Robert J. Hansen (@robertjhansen) May 14, 2018

3. The authors made a list of buggy email clients. It's worth looking

over their list of email clients (found at the very end) to see if yours

is vulnerable. But be careful, because it may not be accurate — for

example, Mailpile says they're not vulnerable, but the paper 15/ — Robert J. Hansen (@robertjhansen) May 14, 2018

While we think that stories claiming "PGP is vulnerable" are inaccurate (since the issue was reported in 2001 and is a client side problem), we do take the Efail bug seriously. The researchers have said ProtonMail is not impacted. We are performing independent confirmation also. — ProtonMail (@ProtonMail) May 14, 2018

ProtonMail is safe against the efail PGP vulnerability. The real vulnerability is implementation errors in various PGP clients. PGP (and OpenPGP) is fine. Any service that uses our @openpgpjs library is also safe as long the default settings aren't changed. pic.twitter.com/KlSuZSvDKV — ProtonMail (@ProtonMail) May 14, 2018

EFAIL attacks can be mitigated by not using HTML for incoming emails, patches released by email client developers could prevent the attacks.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – privacy, EFAIL)

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