From: Derek Atkins <warlord@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 17:19:12 +0800
To: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)
Subject: Re: A weakness in PGP signatures, and a suggested solution
In-Reply-To: <DFiVHD23w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
Message-ID: <199601180344.WAA26221@charon.MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 2. When PGP verified the signature, it should have an option to look outside
> the signed portion for RFC 822 headers and compare them to the signed copy
> of he headers inside. If this is not in PGP, then then function would have to
> be done by some non-portable wrapper.
> (Of course, if your headers aren't RFC 822, you're out of luck.)

How?  PGP has no idea what is around the PGP message.  Also, the PGP
armor is, by definition, not a cryptographic manipulation, rather it
is just a tool for convenience.  The Armoring done by PGP could just
as easily be done by MIME or UUEncode; the functionality is just the
same as far as PGP is concerned.  The only difference is for the user,
who knows that "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" means feed this data to PGP rather
than feeding it to some other program.

PGP really only looks at the contents between the BEGIN and END.  It
can't do anything else.  In fact, only the PGP Armor code even deals
with that.  By definition, PGP is a binary protocol and deal with
binary data objects.  So how can it look at any "RFC 822 Headers"?
There are no such animals in PGP.  It is perfectly legal to remove all
data before the BEGIN and all data after then END and feed the result
to PGP...

As I said, armor is a convenience to the user only.

PGP will not be modified in this way; it is the job of the mailer
(MUA) to do this sort of thing.  Sorry.

-derek