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Re: [openpgp] A way to securely define cleartext signature charset

2018-09-08 06:20:19
On Fri, Sep 07, 2018 at 03:52:43PM +0200, Andre Heinecke wrote:
Hi,

today I struggled for several hours with "charset guessing" code, that 
handles 
cleartext signatures in outlook and I thought that maybe this situation could 
be improved a bit in the future?

I dislike cleartext signatures as much as the next guy (probably more ;-) ).
The points made in [1] are valid and such messages should not be used.
But realistically I think that they won't go away.

My idea would be to define that after the Hash: header and the blank line 
(which starts the hashing) that there can be:

Optionally a "Charset" Armor Header followed by one blank line,
both included in the message digest.

So a message like:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Charset: UTF-8

This is än example mässäge.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

Hmm, is there any way to guard against a false positive identification of
an "old" message that just happens to start with such a line?  I can't
think of any off the top of my head...

Don't get me wrong, I *do* see the good things about your proposal.

Best regards,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  roam@{ringlet.net,debian.org,FreeBSD.org} 
pp(_at_)storpool(_dot_)com
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