Hector Martin

When you simplify it to “active content” you do a disservice to both the cryptographic sophistication of the attack AND the severity of the vuln (particularly for S/MIME). This is why things don’t ever get fixed.

I'm not considering S/MIME here at all since most of the FUD seems to be about PGP. I couldn't care less about S/MIME and have not analyzed that vector.

The PGP vector is bad enough.

Also: let me be clear. “I can fully decrypt your encrypted PGP emails with almost no user interaction” is not FUD. If you doubt the vuln exists, say so. But don’t say it’s not extremely serious for a crypto vuln.

"I can fully decrypt your encrypted PGP emails with almost no user interaction" is FUD. "I can fully decrypt your encrypted PGP emails if I can guess some plaintext and the zlib stars align and you enable HTML and and you're running outdated TB and Enigmail and blah blah" isn't.

1. You can almost always guess some plaintext. That’s a key point of the paper. 2. Zlib is tough but it’s 1/3 not 1/100,000. Not a huge ask. 3. By outdated, do you mean “a version that was current for the past N years prior to this disclosure” because duh.

The EFF said “disable or uninstall plugins until there’s a patch”. That’s pretty straightforward advice. Not panic.

Except there had been a patch for months already.