Hector Martin

That doesn’t seem to be the case here at all.

GPG supports MDCs and returns an error when they're suspiciously missing or wrong. We've already gone over the reasons why it can't fail early without returning any plaintext. It's not perfect, but most of the problem here is MUAs, not PGP.

You’re missing the problem that the text/pipe interface is likely the API bug that reliably creates this failed behavior across most (almost all?) implementations. Bad interfaces yield bad behaviors.

It’s a critical failure being returned as a mostly untyped non-blocking comment.

Ok well, what was the success rate of your claimed API defense?

This would've literally happened to *any* API with a streaming design. All the available error signaling mechanisms were used. It doesn't matter if it's text or C functions. If the caller chooses to ignore error codes, that's the caller's fault.

No, it wouldn’t have happened in any API that blocked plaintext retrieval by default, like modern anything does.