Huge Cajones Remailer writes:

It'd be nice to have more specifics about the whole situation, but regardless - any preliminary threat assessments? Exactly how widely exploited do you think this has been?

Tim's post (although refuted by Marc) raises some serious issues since I suspect that Joe Public has his secret key sitting in c:\pgp\secring.pgp

Of course that's IDEA-encrypted (or maybe something better in PGP 5) so the attacker would need a lot of compute power to brute-force the key. I wouldn't worry too much about someone getting my secring.pgp. However I would worry about them getting my mail folder, my .rhosts, my /etc/password, etc.

Some coherent input on the possible impact of this would be appreciated.

Yes, a description of the exploit would be very helpful. It should be fairly easy to hack a proxy to search and destroy the Java/Javascript CaptiveX attacklet as it's being received. -- Eric Murray ericm@lne.com Network security and encryption consulting. PGP keyid:E03F65E5

At 06:08 PM 6/13/97 -0700, Eric Murray wrote:

Of course that's IDEA-encrypted (or maybe something better in PGP 5) so the attacker would need a lot of compute power to brute-force the key. I wouldn't worry too much about someone getting my secring.pgp. However I would worry about them getting my mail folder, my .rhosts, my /etc/password, etc.

This is one area where evil mail reader clients like Microserf Mail do better than decent mail clients. The MSMail mailbox is one huge file, structure undocumented, encrypted with an algorithm strong enough to defeat Stacker/Doublespace and prevent you from repairing the file if it's corrupted* but not strong enough to keep the NSA out. MSMail encourages you to send MSWord attachments and Powerpoint graphics instead of just writing text, so it's not uncommon to have a 100MB mailbox in a typical corporate marketdroid environment. If someone steals my Eudora mailboxes, they'll need to snarf a few MB of accumulated mail (though much of the good stuff will be saved in files), but even if they only get part of the file, it's readable. Someone who steals my MSMAIL.MMF will get 100+MB of noise, hiding a relatively small amount of signal, and if they only get part of it before losing the connection, it'll probably be corrupt. [*Actually, my MSMAIL.MMF _is_ corrupted - MSMail has a self-repair / garbage collector feature enabled by hitting magic keys at startup, which on my mailbox is a bit overenthusiastic -- it deletes all the attachments, leaving only the headers/text of messages and the icons for the now-missing attachments. So I can't use it...] # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)