Re: [Enigmail] Future OpenPGP Support in Thunderbird

On Tue 2019-10-29 19:25:14 +0100, Werner Koch wrote:
> The problem with all that is that _users demanded_ the ability to
> create large keyblocks, because they went to so many key signing parties
> and liked to include arbitrary data.

yeah, there's always a tension between different players in the
ecosystem, and a piece of infrastructure in in the unenviable position
of having to balance equities here.  There is often no "right" answer.
In those cases, evidence-based reasoning -- what are the downsides (and
how severe are they), who experiences them (and how many people), in
what contexts, etc...  these are the only ways to make the decisions,
and we have to accept that the answers might change over time.  Those of
us who work on infrastructure won't necessarily get it right once and be
done.

>> There's a pretty broad consensus that tools should validate input, and
>> that GnuPG needs to take more serious steps than it has in the past to
>> defend against potentially malicious inputs.
>
> You can't.  Neither can a webbroweser avoid downloading huge images or
> other stuff from stupid web pages.

i think the idea that there's no defense against malicious input is
rather defeatist.  There are plenty of counterexamples, where small
changes to how data is handled have provided significant protections --
changing a RAM+CPU-exhaustion attack into a CPU-exhaustion-only attack,
for example, or changing a quadratic amplification attack into a linear
amplification attack, for example.

These small defenses add up, and we should be encouraging more of them,
rather than dismissing work on input validation as impossible.

all the best,

       --dkg

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