To PGP/MIME or not to PGP/MIME

Posted by Bjarni on November 21, 2014

TL;DR: PGP/MIME has some serious flaws. I propose specifying an alternative method for PGP-encrypting e-mail (including attachments) which improves security while being backwards compatible with legacy ad-hoc PGP encryption, air-gaps and webmail plugins.

How does e-mail encryption work?

The world of e-mail encryption can be surprisingly complicated and convoluted.

The two standards that we have concentrated on the most in Mailpile, are OpenPGP (RFC4880) and the PGP/MIME (RFC3156) standard which describes how to encrypt multi-part e-mail messages using OpenPGP.

In addition to PGP/MIME, there is also the older "ad-hoc" way of sending encrypted content, which is to simply attach PGP-encrypted files as attachments or to paste ASCII-armored blobs of encrypted text into the message body itself.

To illustrate the difference, a PGP/MIME encrypted message with a single attachment looks a bit like this:

| From: Alice <a1234@wonderland.com> | To: Bob <b9973@builders.com> | Cc: Jar Jar Binks <omgwtf@lucasfilm.com> | Subject: I have a secret | Content-Type: multipart/encrypted; | protocol="application/pgp-encrypted"; | boundary="==12345==" | | --==12345== | Content-Type: application/pgp-encrypted | Content-Disposition: attachment | | Version: 1 | | --==12345== | Content-Type: application/octet-stream | Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="msg.asc" | | -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- | Version: GnuPG v1 | E Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="==67890==" E E --==67890== E Content-Type: text/plain; charset='utf-8' E E I am not wearing any socks!! E E --==67890== E Content-Type: image/jpeg E Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="my-toes.jpg" E E [BASE64 ENCODED PICTURE OF NAUGHTY TOES] E --==67890==-- | -----END PGP MESSAGE----- | | --==12345==--

The clear-text bits are preceded with a '|' and the contents of the encrypted part with an 'E'. The same message, sent using ad-hoc encryption, might look like this:

| From: Alice <a1234@wonderland.com> | To: Bob <b9973@builders.com> | Cc: Jar Jar Binks <omgwtf@lucasfilm.com> | Subject: I have a secret | Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="==12345==" | | --==12345== | Content-Type: text/plain; charset='utf-8' | | -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE---- | Digest: sha-1 | E I am not wearing any socks!! | -----END PGP MESSAGE---- | | --==67890== | Content-Type: application/octet-stream | Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="my-toes.jpg.pgp" | E [BASE64 ENCODED, PGP-ENCRYPTED PICTURE OF NAUGHTY TOES] | --==67890==--

There are noticable differences here:

The PGP/MIME encrypted data is formatted as a fragment of MIME data The PGP/MIME encrypted message hides how many parts the message has and any metadata about them: an outsider cannot tell whether there is an attachment or not. In the ad-hoc scheme, only the payloads are encrypted The ad-hoc scheme loses the mime-type of the attachment The ad-hoc scheme leaks the name of the attachment in the clear (or loses it, if it gives the attachment a nondescript name) The ad-hoc scheme does not protect the integrity of the message, an attacher can inject parts or remove parts without Bob being able to detect that anything happened.

What does this all mean?

When the technical characteristics of the two formats are compared, there are two major considerations - security and compatibility.

For ad-hoc encryption, we find:

Ad-hoc encryption is not very secure: it leaks or loses metadata, and message integrity is not guaranteed. Ad-hoc encryption is comptible with legacy mail clients, in that it allows the recipient to manually copy all the encrypted parts and decrypt "offline", giving them the opportunity to communicate with some security even though their mail client does not understand PGP.

Conversely:

PGP/MIME encryption protects attachment metadata and message structure, only the message header is sent in the clear. In practice, PGP/MIME is not compatible with legacy mail clients. If a user saves and manually decrypts the payload, they will end up with a fragment of MIME-encoded data. Tools for working with fragments of MIME are not widely available, so for non-technical users the data is effectively worthless.

What does this mean for Mailpile?

When trying to design and deploy a user-friendly e-mail encryption tool, we can't just consider the interface we present to our own users, we also have to consider the experience of people receiving our mail. If it's illegible, then we have a problem - and that is exactly what is happening here. If we stick with the more secure PGP/MIME, then it's guaranteed that our outgoing messages will be unreadable by a significant number of users, even if they have PGP keys and know how to use them.

Just to clarify, Mailpile absolutely needs to be able to receive and correctly parse PGP/MIME formatted mail. That is not up for debate - all secure mail clients should do this, just like all web browsers should parse and display GIF images. But if better alternatives are available to us, we probably should avoid creating new content using a format that is known to have fundamental flaws.

What is the impact?

Most desktop and some mobile mail clients do support PGP/MIME, but few do so natively - most require a 3rd party plugin, which is a usability concern in and of itself.

When we consider the vast number of webmail users, the situation is much more grim - there a recipient's only option is a variation of the manual download scenario; save attachments and decrypt offline. Webmail encryption plugins, Mailvelope and Google's End-To-End being the most promising at the moment, are merely automating that process and generally do not support PGP/MIME. Although Google's engineers have expressed interest in supporting PGP/MIME eventually, as have Mailvelope's, it is not an easy problem and they make no promises about when or how.

Finally, there is a very small, but disproportionatly important, set of users (whistle-blowers, activists, spies) who have a need to run their Internet tools and their encryption tools on separate machines. An "air gap" is a low-tech, widely understood method of protecting secret key material from being compromised. If we send PGP/MIME formatted mail, air-gapping becomes inconvenient to the point of being infeasible.

Since usable crypto is our goal, and Mailpile users need to be able to communicate with people using other mail clients, I feel that real-world compatibility is marginally more important than dogmatically adhering to standards and protocols.

And by that logic, the question changes...

Can ad-hoc PGP encryption be made as secure as PGP/MIME?

I think maybe it can.

The problems with ad-hoc encryption (aside from the fact that it is not very elegant), are as follows:

Metadata is leaked or lost

Message integrity is not guaranteed

Here are a couple strategies to deal with this:

Put all attachments in a ZIP archive, and encrypt that. Add an encrypted "Email Manifest" which verifies message integrity and carries metadata.

These methods could be combined, or used separately. They are complementary, but the Email Manifest is actually the more important of the two.

Putting attachments in an archive would largely be a matter of convenience for the recipient, as it allows us to stop transmitting file-names in the clear, while allowing the user to use standard, well understood tools to interact with the contents. Without such an archive, we either have to transmit file names in the clear, or ask users to rename files by hand.

The Email Manifest is the more interesting part of this proposal. It not only allows us to verify the integrity of the message, it also gives us the opportunity to correct some of the more egregious deficiencies of PGP/MIME - namely the fact that PGP/MIME transmits the Subject, From, To, CC and many other critical headers in the clear. PGP/MIME is also annoyingly picky and ambiguous about how to treat white-space when verifying signatures.

Mail clients implementing some sort of "Email Manifest protocol" could agree to move critical headers out of the main message and into the encrypted manifest as often as possible, and then reverse the same process upon decryption. We can make sure the Email Manifest's specification deals with white-space in a clear and easy to implement manner.

Another example

To revisit our example, an e-mail sent using an Email Manifest approach might look like this:

| From: a1234@wonderland.com | To: b9973@builders.com | Cc: omgwtf@lucasfilm.com | Subject: Encrypted Message | Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="==12345==" | | --==12345== | Content-Type: text/plain; charset='utf-8' | | -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE---- | Digest: sha-1 | E From: Alice E To: Bob E Cc: Jar Jar Binks E Subject: I have a secret E E I am not wearing any socks!! E E Note: this message should have 1 attachment and a manifest. | -----END PGP MESSAGE---- | | --==67890== | Content-Type: application/octet-stream | Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="attachment-1.pgp" | E [BASE64 ENCODED, PGP-ENCRYPTED PICTURE OF NAUGHTY TOES] | --==67890== | Content-Type: application/pgp-manifest | Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="manifest.pgp" | E Manifest-Version: 1.0 E From: Alice <a1234@wonderland.com> E To: Bob <b9973@builders.com> E Cc: Jar Jar Binks <omgwtf@lucasfilm.com> E Subject: I have a secret E E Inline: text/plain; sha2sum="..."; has-pgp; pgp-has-hints E Attachment-1: image/jpeg; filename="my-toes.jpg"; sha2sum="..." | --==67890==--

This sample demonstrates how both the message structure and sensitive headers could be moved into the Email Manifest.

This example does not use a ZIP archive, so it leaks how many attachments the mail has and how big they are; building an example which does use a ZIP archive is left as an exercise for the reader.

For the benefit of PGP-enabled mail clients unaware of the Manifest, some important header data and human readable integrity hints could be injected into the text part itself, while an Email Manifest-aware client could suppress the duplicate information automatically to avoid clutter.

What does the recipient see?

If a recipient's mail client understands Email Manifests, the message can be rendered just as nicely as if it were sent using PGP/MIME, with the added benefit that protected headers can be marked as secure.

A PGP-aware mail client that doesn't understand the Manifest will see simplified headers, and the text-part of the e-mail will have some extra clutter at the top, From, To, Subject etc, and a notice at the bottom. The attachments may need to be renamed or extracted from a ZIP archive before they are useful. They will also see the Email Manifest itself as an attachment, which they can decrypt and read if they would like to manually confirm the message was delivered intact.

A mail client with no support for PGP, will present the user with encrypted text and attachments they can save to disk for offline processing.

So compared to PGP/MIME, this approach improves the security of Mailpile users (or others supporting Email Manifests), makes life somewhat less convenient for the users of other PGP/MIME-aware mail software, and dramatically improves interoperability with mail clients and plugins that do not understand PGP/MIME, including webmail users.

Conclusion

It is definitely possible to transmit PGP-encrypted messages and attachments over e-mail in a way which is both more interoperable and more secure than the PGP/MIME format.

The question remains - should we?

This is not a standard, but perhaps it could become one. Messages sent this way have the potential to be more secure than PGP/MIME, but some of the features of PGP/MIME will be lost; namely mail-client awareness of attachment types and probably also support for HTML mail. However, that may only be a short-term problem, until PGP plugins are upgraded to understand Email Manifests.

Is the ZIP archive idea good or bad? It makes some things easier and both hides and preserves more metadata, but it complicates implementation and may add extra steps for the recipent. On the other hand, manually renaming files is no fun and ZIP files may be the lesser of two evils if we assume we are indeed abandoning PGP/MIME.

We would like to get feedback on this from people who work with encrypted e-mail on a day to day basis, security trainers and such folks, and from folks writing secure e-mail tools. What do you think? Please mail us at team@mailpile.is or tweet at @MailpileTeam if you have insights to share.

We'll also be following comments on Hacker News.

Thanks!