Protection mail at rest

[Adam Aviv]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Eric Cronin <ecronin at gizmolabs.org> wrote:
>
> On Jun 3, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Adam Aviv wrote:
>
>> Depending on the level of protection you want, you could just add a
>> script to your .forward to encrypt your email before delivery using
>> PGP/GPG. However, this will leave the headers in the clear, so you
>> will likely want to create an entirely new envelope for the message
>> with the original message encrypted as the body or an attachment.
>
> Does anybody have a recipe for this first mode handy?  plain text e-mails
> seem simple enough, but there needs to be a bit of MIME unwrapping and
> rewrapping to correctly handle attachments so that the client sees/decrypts
> them correctly I think.  I've searched from time to time and never found a
> good HowTo...
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
>


I have written a script that does that in python, as part of the email
handling for the project. It encrypts each message part separately and
then construct a new email with each encrypted part as the payload of
a new MIME multipart message. Contained within is also the encrypted
session key, and necessary info to reconstruct. On the client side,
the message can then be unwrap, decrypted, and the original email
reconstructed. Or the client can request just the headers, the body,
or any attachment (becomes iffy with a combination of 'text/plain' and
'text/html' content type) instead of the entire message.

Depending on how you want to do the wrapping (if you want to meet some
optimization like headers can be requested before the rest of the
message), then the simplest approach is, if a MIME multipart message,
to work with each part individually and encrypt. I decided to encrypt
the headers for each part separatly from the payload, so that the
client can see what the message contains before actually decrypting
it. But, different approaches can be taken depending on the end goal
(i.e. just encrypt the whole thing into a glob, and download the glob
and decrypt it on the client directly into a mbox or maildir that is
locally served).

adam

-- 
Adam Aviv
Ph. D. Candidate
Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania

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