374434 - Unable to Attach the Public Key of a S/MIME X 509 Digital Certificate. (appologies - unable to find appropriate classification - had to usae security)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[Scott Couston]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.2-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.2
Build Identifier: 1.5.0.10 (20060911)

I have over 10 Email Accounts in Thunderbird. All Email account MUST have valid S/MIME X 509 Digital Certificates issued by Thwate for the purpose of Signing and encryption.

I can find NO functionality to attach the Public Component of ANY Key to any recipient so that further messages can be encrypted to that recipient.

I do hate referring to MS, however even Outlook Express is capable of attaching the correct key by default if necessary.

There appears only token functionality for CA issued Signing/Encryption certificates.

I am also of the belief that is an S/MIME email, so signed; if intercepted by anyone other than the addressee than when received by the recipient they ARE NOT MADE AWARE that the message has been tampered with. Further testing to done by myself.

Please also confirm that a message so signed to recipient that it is IMPOSSIBLE for any other recipient address to open such a message. - This is the essence of   digitally signing email messages.

I am about to outlay a large amount of money to add certified information in my current certificates, however I can not justify this without the above issues being addressed.

If you are going to attract an ever growing demand by not only Government and Military users, considerable work needs to be done to at the very least being able to attach the Public Key so that it can be imported by the recipient and facilitate encrypted messages.

I am being professionally pressured to provide encrypted messages due to my companies work and I would be delighted to not only being able to provide previous encryption; but would like to have more influence on the other IT user and Managers I communicate in .mil and .gov domains

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. No current functionality exists to attach Public S/MIME Key for Encryption
2. No current functionality to denote an address book recipient that encryption is mandatory.
Actual Results:  
Unable to send S/MIME encrypted messages

Expected Results:  
Ability to Attach Public Key and send along with a message the Key for importation to facilitate further encrypted messages.

Provide the ability to:-
1. Certify that a Digitally Signed Message has not been tampered with or opened in transmitting and if that is the case alert recipient.
2. Attach the Public S/MIME Key to facilitate further encryption.
3. Deny opening a message so signed, by a different recipient.
4. The Address book should have a field that forces encryption to an addressee.
5. If I revoke a certificate that has been signed by a S/MIME certificate the message should NOT be viewable - irrespective of encryption.

IF .MIL and .GOV department ARE Ever to adopt Thunderbird a great deal of code needs to be written to facilitate the above before the release of 2.0 and not until then will you have a market place which is huge, hungry and demands security implementation.

I am happy with authority, to put on our servers the .PDF File that Technically describes the Technical Function and Security Requirements of 'GateKeeper' (TM)(partially edited) that is used by most .MIL and .GOV agencies if this will vastly assist in the reediness of the next version of Thunderbird for a hungry audience desperately looking for an alternate to Vista.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

as a bug report I'm going to have to mark this invalid, there's mixed information requests (should use community support forums and documentation) and multiple feature requests (violating the "one issue per bug" rule).

In S/MIME when you "sign" a message you also include the cert. Anyone receiving a signed message can then respond with encrypted mail. We implement the same RFC 2311 standard as microsoft and completely interoperate with Outlook and Outlook Express.

Accounts can be set up to sign all mail by default.

Signing cannot prevent tampering or transit damage to mail, it is designed to reveal that tampering or damage through an invalid or broken signature.  Thunderbird will not display mail with a broken signature.

Signing does not prevent messages from being intercepted and read -- that requires encryption. Thunderbird accounts can be set up to encrypt all mail by default.

Further discussion about S/MIME should happen in the technical newsgroups, bugzilla is not a discussion forum. news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.tech.crypto
http://www.mozilla.org/support/#community