MIME polymorphism
2001-11-28 08:10:12
The two major e-mail security protocols currently proposed - S/MIME
and PGP/MIME - both build on the fundamental framework of
multipart/signed messages specified in RFC 1847. In this framework,
the data to be signed is formatted as a single MIME part (which may,
of course, contain nested sub-parts). This MIME part is then hashed
for the signature. The hash does, in particular, include all the
meta infomration present on the MIME level, including the body
part's content type. That way, the signature does, for instance,
include the information whether some PostScript code which was
signed should be interpreted by a postscript interpreter for display
(application/postscript), or whether this code should just be
displayed as plain text (text/plain). In theory, with
multipart/signed, the actual data and the information how it must be
interpreted is both signed and protected.
This theory fails on two levels: First, knowing a file's content
type is not sufficient to guarantee correct interpretation. This
has been demonstrated before; think about differences in the
interpretation of certain special characters when documents are
exchanged between some Microsoft Word versions for the Windows and
Macintosh platforms. [4]
Second, the theory is based on the assumption that the
interpretation of the MIME meta information contained in Content-*
headers is well-defined. This assumption is violated with malformed
MIME messages which contain contradictory information: When there
are, for instance, multiple boundary parameters for a single
multipart/* attachment, implementations will generally follow the
mantra of being liberal in what they accept, and just choose one.
When there are multiple Content-Type headers present on a single
attachment, implementations will likewise be liberal, and choose one
(or even mix information from the two headers).
Since the choices made differ between MIME implementations, it is
for instance easily possible to create an e-mail mesage with a
multipart/mixed body which seems to contain different content,
depending on whether it's displayed with mutt [5] or pine [6].
Note that this problem does not only apply to digital signatures,
but also to virus scanners: If these try to be liberal with respect
to malformed MIME messages, they may easily check attachments for
viruses which will never be seen by users - and, likewise, they may
not scan those attachments which are actually displayed by users'
software.
To prevent this problem from occuring, security services must not be
liberal in what they accept, or try to hide possible problems from
users. Instead of software silently making choices, ambiguities must
be treated as malicious, and users must be warned.
References:
1. Galvin, Murphy, Crocker, Freed: Security Multiparts for MIME:
Multipart/Signed and Multipart/Encrypted. RFC 1847, October 1995.
2. Freed, Borenstein: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies. RFC 2045, November
1996.
3. Elkins, Del Torto, Levien, Roessler: MIME Security with OpenPGP.
RFC 3156, August 2001.
4. Fox, Zu einem prinzipiellen Problem digitaler Signaturen,
Datenschutz und Datensicherheit (DuD) 7/1998, pp. 386-388.
5. Mutt home page: <http://www.mutt.org/>
6. Pine Information Center: <http://www.washington.edu/pine/>
--
Thomas Roessler http://log.does-not-exist.org/
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