Preventing against injected private keys
========================================

When transferring a secret key, the passphrase authenticates the message.  That
is, the fact that the user knows the passphrase means that the contents are
authentic. This means that to ensure that the message is authentic, the
autocrypt implementation must check that the passphrase is correct.

Unfortunately, GnuPG's --decrypt option doesn't mean that it must decrypt a
packet (and will fail if not), it just means that if GnuPG encounters an
encrypted packet while processing the message, it will try to decrypt it. Thus,
if a message contains just a literal packet, then
GnuPG with the --decrypt option will not fail; it will just emit the contents
of the literal packet.

Another example where something could go wrong is if a key is encrypted with
the user's private key and the passphrase is cached.  In this case, GnuPG will
not use any SK-ESK packet to retrieve the session key, but will use the PK-ESK
packet. In other words, it won't verify
that the passphrase is correct.

There may be other scenarios and other implementations may have other gotchas.

To avoid these issues, it is imperative that the autocrypt implementation
ensure that the OpenPGP implementation actually check that the supplied
passphrase is correct, e.g., by making sure that it decrypts the SK-ESK packet
using the supplied passphrase.

On GnuPG, we recommend using a temporary home directory (using --homedir) when
doing the decryption.  This ensures that the gpg-agent does not have any
passphrases cached.   Furthermore, the --status-fd output should be checked to
make sure that a decryption actually
occured.  This protects against the aforementioned literal data packet attack.

An example of a literal data packet message is provided below. If your
autocrypt implementation imports this private key successfully, then your
implementation is broken.


::

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