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Comments on Can a malicious party add false recipients (who are listed but can't really decrypt) to an encrypted GPG message?

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Can a malicious party add false recipients (who are listed but can't really decrypt) to an encrypted GPG message?

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In gpg(1), one normally adds recipients of an encrypted message with --recipient. Those recipients will be able to decrypt the message, and their key ID will appear unencrypted, so anyone will know that they are able to decrypt it.

gpg(1) also allows adding hidden recipients, with --hidden-recipient. Those recipients will be able to decrypt the message, but a third party won't know that they are able to decrypt it.

I wonder if a malicious party would be able to craft an encrypted message, and falsely claim that someone else would be able to decrypt it (not necessarily with gpg(1), I wonder if one can craft a tool that creates a message that gpg(1) will interpret as valid), listing it as a recipient.

Is that possible?

Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5877969/how-do-i-list-information-for-a-gnupg-encrypted-message

Related: https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/pull/4221

GPG
posted about 1 month ago
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alx‭
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1 comment thread

What malice? (2 comments)
What malice?
Karl Knechtel‭ wrote about 1 month ago
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It's not really clear to me what harm could actually be caused by doing this, if it's possible. Could you describe a more detailed scenario of concern in the question?

alx‭ wrote about 1 month ago · edited about 1 month ago
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Let's say I send you some private message, let's say a bug report about a vulnerability.

Now, Mallory wants to read that message, and also your reply to it. He may take that message, add himself as Cc (AFAIK, the Cc field is not a protected field; see crypt_protected_headers_read in muttrc(5)), and modify the metadata of the encrypted message to add his keyID as a recipient, even when he's not able to decrypt the message.

When you receive my bug report, altered by Mallory, you'll be lead to think that I CCed him, and that I want him to be part of the conversation, and so in your reply, which will likely contain (at least part of) my original report, you will likely encrypt it for both me and Mallory and send it to both.

So, is Mallory able to modify the metadata of an encrypted message to add false recipients to it?

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