Mitigation of Attacks on Email End-to-End Encryption

Abstract

OpenPGP and S/MIME are two major standards for securing email communication introduced in the early 1990s. Three recent classes of attacks exploit weak cipher modes (EFAIL Malleability Gadgets, or EFAIL-MG), the flexibility of the MIME email structure (EFAIL Direct Exfiltration, or EFAIL-DE), and the Reply action of the email client (REPLY attacks). Although all three break message confidentiality by using standardized email features, only EFAIL-MG has been mitigated in IETF standards with the introduction of AEAD algorithms. So far, no uniform and reliable countermeasures have been adopted by email clients to prevent EFAIL-DE and REPLY attacks. Instead, email clients implement a variety of different ad-hoc countermeasures which are only partially effective, cause interoperability problems, and fragment the secure email ecosystem.