1. Forum
  2. Usenet
  3. COMP.SECURITY.PGP.DISCUSS

  • Enigmail - The green bar

    From Stefan Claas@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jun 14 19:40:36 2017
    Hi all,

    A question for users who are using Thunderbird with Enigmail.
    Let's assume you have carefully checked the public keys of your
    communication partners and you decided to locally sign each others
    public key, so that you always have the green bar from Enigmail in
    Thunderbirds Window displayed. Now let's assume (theoretically) that
    Mallory get's access to your computer and replaces a public key from
    one of your communication partners with a fake one and which Mallory
    assigns trust level "Ultimate", so that it shows up in Thunderbird /
    Enigmail with a green bar too. How would you detect this? Do you always
    write down the complete Fingerprint of each key on a piece of paper and
    compare it with the result on your monitor?

    Regards
    Stefan

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From imajeff@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Stefan Claas on Fri Sep 29 07:32:48 2017
    On Wednesday, June 14, 2017 at 11:40:37 AM UTC-6, Stefan Claas wrote:
    [...]
    Mallory get's access to your computer and replaces a public key from
    one of your communication partners with a fake one and which Mallory
    assigns trust level "Ultimate", so that it shows up in Thunderbird /
    [...]

    Whenever someone breaches security and gains complete access to do such things it is bad... real bad. This is not a PGP issue but a top security issue on your entire system and you need ways to detect if someone was able to do this or there is nothing
    you can trust on your own system!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Stefan Claas@21:1/5 to imajeff@gmail.com on Sat Sep 30 09:52:47 2017
    On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 07:32:48 -0700 (PDT), imajeff@gmail.com wrote:
    On Wednesday, June 14, 2017 at 11:40:37 AM UTC-6, Stefan Claas wrote:
    [...]
    Mallory get's access to your computer and replaces a public key from
    one of your communication partners with a fake one and which Mallory assigns trust level "Ultimate", so that it shows up in
    Thunderbird /
    [...]

    Whenever someone breaches security and gains complete access to do
    such things it is bad... real bad. This is not a PGP issue but a top
    security issue on your entire system and you need ways to detect if
    someone was able to do this or there is nothing you can trust on your
    own system!

    Agreed. I only wanted to point out this possibility, like for example
    you work in a place where people who want to do bad things would
    do this while you are at your lunch break and forgot to lock your
    computer.

    Regards
    Stefan

    --
    https://www.behance.net/futagoza
    https://keybase.io/stefan_claas

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)