| Network Working Group | H. Marques |
| Internet-Draft | pEp Foundation |
| Intended status: Standards Track | B. Hoeneisen |
| Expires: September 8, 2019 | Ucom.ch |
| March 07, 2019 |
pretty Easy privacy (pEp): Privacy by Default
draft-birk-pep-03
The pretty Easy privacy (pEp) protocols describe a set of conventions for the automation of operations traditionally seen as barriers to the use and deployment of secure end-to-end interpersonal messaging. These include, but are not limited to, key management, key discovery, and private key handling (including peer-to-peer synchronization of private keys and other user data across devices). pEp also introduces means to verify communication peers and proposes a trust-rating system to denote secure types of communications and signal the privacy level available on a per-user and per-message level. Significantly, the pEp protocols build on already available security formats and message transports (e.g., PGP/MIME), and are written with the intent to be interoperable with already widely-deployed systems in order to facilitate and ease adoption and implementation. This document outlines the general design choices and principles of pEp.
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Secure and private communications are vital for many different reasons, and there are particular properties that privacy-preserving protocols need to fulfill in order to best serve users. In particular, [RFC8280] has identified and documented important principles such as data minimization, the end-to-end principle, and interoperability as integral properties for access to the Internet for human rights purposes. While (partial) implementations of these concepts are already available, today’s applications widely lack privacy support that ordinary users can easily handle. The pretty Easy privacy (pEp) protocols generally conform with the principles outlined in [RFC8280] as a matter of course, and as such can be used to facilitate the adoption and correct usage of secure and private communications technology.
The pretty Easy privacy (pEp) protocols are propositions to the Internet community to create software for peers to automatically encrypt, anonymize (where possible), and verify their daily written digital communications. This is achieved by building upon already existing standards and tools and automating each step a user needs to carry out in order to engage in secure end-to-end encrypted communications. Significantly, the pEp protocols describe how do to this without dependence on centralized infrastructures.
In particular, pEp proposes automatation of key management, key discovery and synchronization of secret key material by an in-band peer-to-peer approach.
To mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) by an active adversary, and as the only manual step users carry out in the course of the protocols, the proposed Trustwords [I-D.birk-pep-trustwords] mechanism uses natural language representations of two peers’ fingerprints for users to verify their trust in a paired communication channel.
[[ Note: The pEp initiators learned from the CryptoParty movement, from which the project emerged, that while step-by-step guides can be helpful for some users to engage in secure end-to-end communications, for the vast majority of users, it is both more effective and more convenient to have these step-by-step procedures put into actual code (as such, following a protocol) and thus automating the initial configuration and whole usage of cryptographic tools.]]
The privacy-by-default principles that pEp introduces are in accordance with the perspective outlined in [RFC7435], aiming to provide opportunistic security in the sense of “some protection most of the time”. This is done, however, with the subtle but important difference that when privacy is weighed against security, the choice defaults to privacy. Therefore, data minimization is a primary goal in pEp (e.g., hiding subject lines and headers unnecessary for email transport inside the encrypted payload of a message).
The pEp propositions are focused on (but not limited to) written digital communications and cover asynchronous (offline) types of communications like email as well as synchronous (online) types such as chat.
pEp’s goal is to bridge different standardized and widely-used communications channels such that users can reach communications partners in the most privacy-enhancing way possible.
While this document describes the general concept of pEp, other documents build on top of this. These documents define other parts of the pEp environment as follows:
In addition, there are documents that do not directly depend on this one, but provide generic functions needed in pEp, e.g., IANA Registration of Trustword Lists [I-D.birk-pep-trustwords].
[[At this stage it is not yet clear to us how many of our implementation details should be part of new RFCs and at which places we can safely refer to already existing RFCs to make clear on which RFCs we already rely.]]
The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
The pEp protocols are to intended specifically to ensure privacy. There exist cases in the secure communications ecosystem, however, where achieving privacy is in direct contradiction to security though. For instance, in PGP’s Web of Trust, relations between people and trust levels are exposed to the public. Additionally, the privacy of queries is not ensured in such a model when obtaining keys from remote locations. Within the pEp protocols, when security and privacy goals are not in conflict, then the protocols are designed to maximize both security and privacy. However, where they contradict each other, privacy goals are chosen as the default over security considerations. However, in implementing these protocols, it is always the case that users SHOULD have the choice to override the default by corresponding options.
In pEp messaging (e.g., when using HTML) content SHALL NOT be obtained from remote locations as this constitutes a privacy breach.
Another important design goal is data minimization, which includes data spareness and hiding all technically concealable information when possible.
The pEp propositions seek to be interoperable with already-widespread message formats and cryptographic protocols and implementations. Seamless communication between users of software which implements pEp and and users of other messaging tools for end-to-end encryption is a design goal.
Therefore, pEp abides by the following guidelines:
Messaging and verification processes in pEp are designed to work in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner, without the involvement of intermediaries.
This means there MUST NOT be any pEp-specific central services whatsoever needed for pEp implementations, both in the case of verification of peers and for the actual encryption.
However, implementers of pEp MAY provide options for interoperation with providers of centralized infrastructures (e.g., to enable users to communicate with their peers on platforms with vendor lock-in).
Trust provided by global Certificate Authorities (e.g., commercial X.509 CAs) SHALL NOT be signaled as trustworthy (cf. [I-D.marques-pep-rating]) to users of pEp (e.g., when interoperating with peers using S/MIME) by default.
Implementers of pEp MUST take special care not to confuse users with technical terms, especially those of cryptography (e.g., “keys”, “certificates” or “fingerprints”), unless users explicitly ask for such terms; i.e., advanced settings MAY be available, and in some cases further options may even be required. However, those SHALL NOT be unnecessarily exposed to users of pEp implementations at first glance.
The authors believe widespread adoption of end-to-end cryptography is much less of a problem if the users are not confronted with the need to understand cryptography; that is to say, a central goal of pEp of the pEp protocol is that users can just rely on the principles of Privacy by Default.
As a consequence, this means that users must not wait for cryptographic tasks (e.g., key generation or public key retrieval) to finish before being able to have their respective message clients ready to communicate. The end result of this is that pEp implementers MUST ensure that the ability to draft, send and receive messages is always preserved – even if that means a message is sent out unencrypted, thus being in accordance with the Opportunistic Security approach outlined in [RFC7435].
In turn, pEp implementers MUST ensure that a discernible privacy status is clearly visible to the user – on a per-contact as well as per-message level – so that users easily understand which level of privacy messages are about to be sent with or were received with, respectively.
[[Note: We are aware of the fact that usually UX requirements are not part of RFCs. However, in order to encourage massive adoption of secure end-to-end encryption while at the same time avoiding putting users at risk, we believe certain straightforward signaling requirements for users to be a good idea, just as is currently done for already-popular instant messaging services.]]
In pEp, users MUST have the ability to have multiple different identities.
pEp users MUST have the option to choose different identities. This allows an Internet user to decide how to reveal himself/herself to the world and is an important element in order to achieve privacy.
These different identities MUST NOT be externally correlatable with each other by default. On the other hand, combining different identities when such information is known MUST be supported (alias support).
A key is an OpenPGP-compatible asymmetric key pair. Other formats and temporary symmetrical keys can be generated by Key Mapping.
Keys in pEp are identified by the full fingerprint (fpr) of the public key.
A user is a real world human being or a group of human beings. If it is a single human being, it can be called person.
A user is identified by a user ID (user_id). The user_id SHOULD be a UUID, it MAY be an arbitrary unique string.
The own user can have a user_id like all other users. If it doesn’t, then it has PEP_OWN_USERID “pEp_own_userId” as user_id.
A user can have a default key. (cf. Section 4.2.1)
An identity is a (possibly pseudonymous) representation of a user encapsulating how this user appears in the network.
An identity is defined by the mapping of user_id to address. If no user_id is known, it is guessed by mapping of username and address.
An identity can have a temporary user_id as a placeholder until a real user_id is known.
An identity can have a default key. (cf. Section 4.2.1)
[[ Note: This is the reason why in current pEp implementations for each (email) account a different key pair is created, which allows a user to retain different identities. ]]
In Appendix A.1 you can find how a pEp identity is defined in the reference implementation of the pEp Engine.
An address is a network address, e.g., an SMTP address or another URI.
[[ Note: It might be necessary to introduce further addressing schemes through IETF contributions or IANA registrations, e.g., implementing pEp to bridge to popular messaging services with no URIs defined. ]]
| pEp | OpenPGP | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| user_id | (no concept) | ID for a person, i.e. a contact |
| username + address | uid | comparable only for email |
| fpr | fingerprint | used as key ID in pEp |
| (no concept) | Key ID | does not exist in pEp |
In order to achieve the goal of widespread adoption of secure communications, key management in pEp MUST be automated.
A pEp implementation MUST ensure that cryptographic keys for every identity configured are available. If a corresponding key pair for the identity of a user is found and said identity fulfills the requirements (e.g., for email, as set out in [I-D.marques-pep-email]), said key pair MUST be reused. Otherwise a new key pair MUST be generated. This may be carried out instantly upon its configuration.
On devices with limited processing power (e.g., mobile devices) the key generation may take more time than a user is willing to wait. If this is the case, users SHOULD NOT be stopped from communicating, i.e., the key generation process SHOULD be carried out in the background.
Private keys in pEp implementations MUST always be held on the end user’s device(s): pEp implementers MUST NOT rely on private keys stored in centralized remote locations. This applies even for key storages where the private keys are protected with sufficiently long passphrases. It is considered a violation of pEp’s P2P design principle to rely on centralized infrastructures (cf. Section 3.4). This also applies for pEp implementations created for applications not residing on a user’s device (e.g., web-based MUAs). In such cases, pEp implementations MUST be done in a way such that the locally-held private key can neither be directly accessed nor leaked to the outside world.
[[ Note: It is particularly important that browser add-ons implementing pEp functionality do not obtain their cryptographic code from a centralized (cloud) service, as this must be considered a centralized attack vector allowing for backdoors, negatively impacting privacy. ]]
Cf. Section 7.1 for a means to synchronize private keys among different devices of the same network address in a secure manner.
Passphrases to protect a user’s private key MUST be supported by pEp implementations, but MUST NOT be enforced by default. That is, if a pEp implementation finds a suitable (i.e., secure enough) cryptographic setup, which uses passphrases, pEp implementations MUST provide a way to unlock the key. However, if a new key pair is generated for a given identity, no passphrase MUST be put in place. The authors assume that the enforcement of secure (i.e., unique and long enough) passphrases would massively reduce the number of pEp users (by hassling them), while providing little to no additional privacy for the common cases of passive monitoring being carried out by corporations or state-level actors.
A private key can be exported from one device for import onto another device. When pEp’s Key Sync (cf. Section 7.1) is not available or not desired to be used, this is largely a manual process.
As the key is available (cf. Section 5.3) implementers of pEp are REQUIRED to ensure that the identity’s public key is attached to every outgoing message. However, this MAY be omitted if the peer has previously received a message encrypted with the public key of the sender.
The sender’s public key SHOULD be sent encrypted whenever possible, i.e., when a public key of the receiving peer is available. If no encryption key of the recipient is available, the sender’s public key MAY be sent unencrypted. In either case, this approach ensures that messaging clients (e.g., MUAs that at least implement OpenPGP) do not need to have pEp implemented to see a user’s public key. Such peers thus have the chance to (automatically) import the sender’s public key.
If there is already a known public key from the sender of a message and it is still valid and not expired, new keys MUST not be used for future communication unless they are signed by the previous key (to avoid a MITM attack). Messages MUST always be encrypted with the receiving peer’s oldest public key, as long as it is valid and not expired.
Implementers of pEp SHALL prevent the display of public keys attached to messages (e.g, in email) to the user in order to prevent user confusion by files they are potentially unaware of how to handle.
Metadata (e.g., email headers) MUST NOT be added to announce a user’s public key. This is considered unnecessary information leakage as it may affect user privacy, which depends also on a country’s data retention laws. Furthermore, this affects interoperability to existing users (e.g., in the OpenPGP field) that have no notion of such header fields and thus lose the ability to import any such keys distributed this way. It SHOULD, though, be supported to obtain other users’ public keys by extracting them from respective header fields of received messages (in case such approaches get widespread).
Keyservers or generally intermediate approaches to obtain a peer’s public key SHALL NOT be used by default. On the other hand, the user MAY be provided with the option to opt-in for remote locations to obtain keys, considering the widespread adoption of such approaches for key distribution.
Keys generated or obtained by pEp clients MUST NOT be uploaded to any (intermediate) keystore locations without the user’s explicit consent.
[[ TODO: This section will explain how to deal with keys no longer valid, e.g. if leaked ]]
The following example roughly describes a pEp scenario with a typical initial message flow to demonstrate key exchange and basic trust management:
As color code changes for an identity, it is also applied to future messages to/from this identity.
----- -----
| A | | B |
----- -----
| |
+------------------------+ +------------------------+
| auto-generate key pair | | auto-generate key pair |
| (if no key yet) | | (if no key yet) |
+------------------------+ +------------------------+
| |
+-----------------------+ +-----------------------+
| Privacy Status for B: | | Privacy Status for A: |
| *Unencrypted* | | *Unencrypted* |
+-----------------------+ +-----------------------+
| |
| A sends message to B (Public Key |
| attached) / optionally signed, but |
| NOT ENCRYPTED |
+------------------------------------------>|
| |
| +-----------------------+
| | Privacy Status for A: |
| | *Encrypted* |
| +-----------------------+
| |
| B sends message to A (Public Key |
| attached) / signed and ENCRYPTED |
|<------------------------------------------+
| |
+-----------------------+ |
| Privacy Status for B: | |
| *Encrypted* | |
+-----------------------+ |
| |
| A and B sucessfully compare their |
| Trustwords over an alternative channel |
| (e.g., phone line) |
|<-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -->|
| |
+-----------------------+ +-----------------------+
| Privacy Status for B: | | Privacy Status for A: |
| *Trusted* | | *Trusted* |
+-----------------------+ +-----------------------+
| |
For end-users, the most important component of pEp, which MUST be made visible on a per-recipient and per-message level, is the Privacy Status.
By colors, symbols and texts a user SHALL immediately understand how private
To establishing trust between peers and to upgrade Privacy Status, pEp defines a handshake, which is specified in [I-D.marques-pep-handshake].
In pEp, Trustwords [I-D.birk-pep-trustwords] are used for users to compare the authenticity of peers in order to mitigate MITM attacks.
By default, Trustwords MUST be used to represent two peers’ fingerprints of their public keys in pEp implementations.
In order to retain compatibility with peers not using pEp implementations (e.g., Mail User Agents (MUAs) with OpenPGP implementations without Trustwords), it is REQUIRED that pEp implementers give the user the choice to show both peers’ fingerprints instead of just their common Trustwords.
pEp includes a Trust Rating system defining Rating and Color Codes to express the Privacy Status of a peer or message [I-D.marques-pep-rating]. The ratings are labeled, e.g., as “Unencrypted”, “Encrypted”, “Trusted”, “Under Attack”, etc. The Privacy Status in its most general form is expressed with traffic lights semantics (and respective symbols and texts), whereas the three colors yellow, green and red can be applied for any peer or message – like this immediately indicating how secure and trustworthy (and thus private) a communication was or ought to be considered.
The pEp Trust Rating system with all its states and respective representations to be followed is outlined in [I-D.marques-pep-rating].
Note: An example for the rating of communication types, the definition of the data structure by the pEp Engine reference implementation is provided in Appendix A.2.
[[ TODO: This section will explain how to deal with the situation when a peer can no longer be trusted, e.g., if a peer’s device is compromised. ]]
An important feature of pEp is to assist the user to run pEp applications on different devices, such as computer, mobile phone or tables, at the same time. Therefore state needs to be synchronized among the different devices.
A decentralized proposition – the pEp Key Synchronization protocol. [E-D.birk-pep-keysync] – defines how pEp users can distribute their private keys among different devices in a secure and trusted manner: this allows Internet users to read their messages across their different devices, when sharing a common address (e.g., the same email account).
[[ TODO: This section will explain how trust and other related state is synchronized among different devices in a secure manner. ]]
pEp aims to be interoperable with existing applications designed to enable privacy, e.g., OpenPGP and S/MIME in email.
In this section a non-exhaustive selection of options is provided.
By default the sender attaches its public key to any outgoing message (cf. Section 5.3). For situations where a sender wants to ensure that it only attaches a public key to an Internet user which has a pEp implementation, a Passive Mode MUST be available.
Using this option, protection can be disabled generally or selectively. Implementers of pEp MUST provide an option “Disable Protection” to allow a user to disable encryption and signing for:
The public key still attached, unless the option “Passive Mode” (cf. Section 9.1) is activated at the same time.
For internal environments there may be a need to centrally decrypt persons’ messages for archiving or other legal purposes (e.g., in the contexts of public offices and enterprises) by authorized personnel. Therefore, pEp implementers MAY provide an “Extra Keys” option where a message gets encrypted with at least one additional public key. The corresponding secret key(s) are intended to be held (safely and securely), e.g., by CISO staff or other authorized personnel for such an organization.
The Extra Keys feature MUST NOT be activated by default for any network address and is intended to be an option only for organizational identities and their corresponding network addresses and accounts – not for addresses used for private purposes. That is, the Extra Keys feature is a feature which SHOULD NOT apply to all identities a user might posses, even if activated.
An option “Blacklist Keys” MUST be provided for an advanced user to be able to disable keys which the user does not want to be used anymore for any new communications. However, the keys SHALL NOT be deleted. It MUST still be possible to verify and decipher past communications.
By attaching the sender’s public key to outgoing messages, Trust on First Use (TOFU) is established. However, this is prone to MITM attacks. Cryptographic key subversion is considered Pervasive Monitoring (PM) according to [RFC7258]. Those attacks can be mitigated, if the involved users compare their common Trustwords. This possibility MUST be made easily accessible to pEp users in the user interface implementation. If for compatibility reasons (e.g., with OpenPGP users) no Trustwords can be used, then a comparatively easy way to verify the respective public key fingerprints MUST be implemented.
As the use of passphrases for private keys is not advised, devices themselves SHOULD use encryption.
[[ TODO ]]
This section records the status of known implementations of the protocol defined by this specification at the time of posting of this Internet-Draft, and is based on a proposal described in [RFC7942]. The description of implementations in this section is intended to assist the IETF in its decision processes in progressing drafts to RFCs. Please note that the listing of any individual implementation here does not imply endorsement by the IETF. Furthermore, no effort has been spent to verify the information presented here that was supplied by IETF contributors. This is not intended as, and must not be construed to be, a catalog of available implementations or their features. Readers are advised to note that other implementations may exist.
According to [RFC7942], “[…] this will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration to documents that have the benefit of running code, which may serve as evidence of valuable experimentation and feedback that have made the implemented protocols more mature. It is up to the individual working groups to use this information as they see fit.”
The following software implementing the pEp protocols (to varying degrees) already exists:
pEp for Android, iOS and Outlook are provided by pEp Security, a commercial entity specializing in end-user software implementing pEp while Enigmail/pEp is pursued as community project, supported by the pEp Foundation.
All software is available as Free Software and published also in source form.
The pEp Foundation provides a reference implementation of pEp’s core principles and functionalities, which go beyond the documentation status of this Internet-Draft. [SRC.pepcore]
pEp’s reference implementation is composed of pEp Engine and pEp Adapters (or bindings), alongside with some libraries which pEp Engine relies on to function on certain platforms (like a NetPGP fork we maintain for the iOS platform).
The pEp engine is a Free Software library encapsulating implementations of:
pEp engine is written in C99 programming language. It is not meant to be used in application code directly. Instead, pEp engine is coming together with a list of software adapters for a variety of programming languages and development environments, which are:
A selection of code excerpts from the pEp Engine reference implementation (encrypt message, decrypt message, and obtain trustwords) can be found in Appendix A.3.
The pEp logo and “pretty Easy privacy” are registered trademarks owned by the non-profit pEp Foundation based in Switzerland.
Primarily, we want to ensure the following:
The pEp Foundation will help to support any community-run (non-commercial) project with the latter, be it organizationally or financially.
Through this, the foundation wants to make sure that software using the pEp trademarks is as safe as possible from a security and privacy point of view.
The authors would like to thank the following people who have provided significant contributions to the development of this document: Volker Birk, Krista Bennett, and S. Shelburn.
Furthermore, the authors would like to thank the following people who who provided helpful comments and suggestions for this document: Alexey Melnikov, Ben Campbell, Brian Trammell, Bron Gondwana, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Enrico Tomae, Eric Rescorla, Gabriele Lenzini, Hans-Peter Dittler, Iraklis Symeonidis, Mirja Kuehlewind, Neal Walfield, Pete Resnick, Russ Housley, and Stephen Farrel.
This work was initially created by pEp Foundation, and then reviewed and extended with funding by the Internet Society’s Beyond the Net Programme on standardizing pEp. [ISOC.bnet]
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC4949] | Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary, Version 2", FYI 36, RFC 4949, DOI 10.17487/RFC4949, August 2007. |
| [RFC7435] | Dukhovni, V., "Opportunistic Security: Some Protection Most of the Time", RFC 7435, DOI 10.17487/RFC7435, December 2014. |
This section provides excerpts of the running code from the pEp reference implementation pEp engine (C99 programming language).
How the pEp identity is defined in the data structure (cf. src/pEpEngine.h):
typedef struct _pEp_identity {
char *address; // C string with address UTF-8 encoded
char *fpr; // C string with fingerprint UTF-8
// encoded
char *user_id; // C string with user ID UTF-8 encoded
char *username; // C string with user name UTF-8
// encoded
PEP_comm_type comm_type; // type of communication with this ID
char lang[3]; // language of conversation
// ISO 639-1 ALPHA-2, last byte is 0
bool me; // if this is the local user
// herself/himself
identity_flags_t flags; // identity_flag1 | identity_flag2
// | ...
} pEp_identity;
Relational table scheme excerpts (in SQL) used in current pEp implementations, held locally for every pEp installation in a SQLite database:
CREATE TABLE person (
id text primary key,
username text not null,
main_key_id text
references pgp_keypair (fpr)
on delete set null,
lang text,
comment text,
device_group text,
is_pep_user integer default 0
);
CREATE TABLE identity (
address text,
user_id text
references person (id)
on delete cascade on update cascade,
main_key_id text
references pgp_keypair (fpr)
on delete set null,
comment text,
flags integer default 0,
is_own integer default 0,
timestamp integer default (datetime('now')),
primary key (address, user_id)
);
CREATE TABLE pgp_keypair (
fpr text primary key,
created integer,
expires integer,
comment text,
flags integer default 0
);
CREATE INDEX pgp_keypair_expires on pgp_keypair (
expires
);
In the following, is an example for the rating of communication types as defined by a data structure (cf. src/pEpEngine.h [SRC.pepcore]):
typedef enum _PEP_comm_type {
PEP_ct_unknown = 0,
// range 0x01 to 0x09: no encryption, 0x0a to 0x0e:
// nothing reasonable
PEP_ct_no_encryption = 0x01, // generic
PEP_ct_no_encrypted_channel = 0x02,
PEP_ct_key_not_found = 0x03,
PEP_ct_key_expired = 0x04,
PEP_ct_key_revoked = 0x05,
PEP_ct_key_b0rken = 0x06,
PEP_ct_my_key_not_included = 0x09,
PEP_ct_security_by_obscurity = 0x0a,
PEP_ct_b0rken_crypto = 0x0b,
PEP_ct_key_too_short = 0x0c,
PEP_ct_compromized = 0x0e, // known compromized connection
PEP_ct_mistrusted = 0x0f, // known mistrusted key
// range 0x10 to 0x3f: unconfirmed encryption
PEP_ct_unconfirmed_encryption = 0x10, // generic
PEP_ct_OpenPGP_weak_unconfirmed = 0x11, // RSA 1024 is weak
PEP_ct_to_be_checked = 0x20, // generic
PEP_ct_SMIME_unconfirmed = 0x21,
PEP_ct_CMS_unconfirmed = 0x22,
PEP_ct_strong_but_unconfirmed = 0x30, // generic
PEP_ct_OpenPGP_unconfirmed = 0x38, // key at least 2048 bit
// RSA or EC
PEP_ct_OTR_unconfirmed = 0x3a,
// range 0x40 to 0x7f: unconfirmed encryption and anonymization
PEP_ct_unconfirmed_enc_anon = 0x40, // generic
PEP_ct_pEp_unconfirmed = 0x7f,
PEP_ct_confirmed = 0x80, // this bit decides if trust
// is confirmed
// range 0x81 to 0x8f: reserved
// range 0x90 to 0xbf: confirmed encryption
PEP_ct_confirmed_encryption = 0x90, // generic
PEP_ct_OpenPGP_weak = 0x91, // RSA 1024 is weak (unused)
PEP_ct_to_be_checked_confirmed = 0xa0, //generic
PEP_ct_SMIME = 0xa1,
PEP_ct_CMS = 0xa2,
PEP_ct_strong_encryption = 0xb0, // generic
PEP_ct_OpenPGP = 0xb8, // key at least 2048 bit RSA or EC
PEP_ct_OTR = 0xba,
// range 0xc0 to 0xff: confirmed encryption and anonymization
PEP_ct_confirmed_enc_anon = 0xc0, // generic
PEP_ct_pEp = 0xff
} PEP_comm_type;
The following code excerpts are from the pEp Engine reference implementation, to be found in src/message_api.h.
[[ Note: Just a selection; more functionality is available. ]]
Cf. src/message_api.h [SRC.pepcore]:
// encrypt_message() - encrypt message in memory
//
// parameters:
// session (in) session handle
// src (in) message to encrypt
// extra (in) extra keys for encryption
// dst (out) pointer to new encrypted message or NULL if
// no encryption could take place
// enc_format (in) encrypted format
// flags (in) flags to set special encryption features
//
// return value:
// PEP_STATUS_OK on success
// PEP_KEY_HAS_AMBIG_NAME at least one of the recipient
// keys has an ambiguous name
// PEP_UNENCRYPTED no recipients with usable key,
// message is left unencrypted,
// and key is attached to it
//
// caveat:
// the ownership of src remains with the caller
// the ownership of dst goes to the caller
DYNAMIC_API PEP_STATUS encrypt_message(
PEP_SESSION session,
message *src,
stringlist_t *extra,
message **dst,
PEP_enc_format enc_format,
PEP_encrypt_flags_t flags
);
Cf. src/message_api.h [SRC.pepcore]:
Cf. src/message_api.h [SRC.pepcore]:
// decrypt_message() - decrypt message in memory
//
// parameters:
// session (in) session handle
// src (in) message to decrypt
// dst (out) pointer to new decrypted message
// or NULL on failure
// keylist (out) stringlist with keyids
// rating (out) rating for the message
// flags (out) flags to signal special decryption features
//
// return value:
// error status
// or PEP_DECRYPTED if message decrypted but not verified
// or PEP_CANNOT_REENCRYPT if message was decrypted (and
// possibly verified) but a reencryption operation is
// expected by the caller and failed
// or PEP_STATUS_OK on success
//
// flag values:
// in:
// PEP_decrypt_flag_untrusted_server
// used to signal that decrypt function should engage in
// behaviour specified for when the server storing the
// source is untrusted
// out:
// PEP_decrypt_flag_own_private_key
// private key was imported for one of our addresses
// (NOT trusted or set to be used - handshake/trust is
// required for that)
// PEP_decrypt_flag_src_modified
// indicates that the src object has been modified. At
// the moment, this is always as a direct result of the
// behaviour driven by the input flags. This flag is the
// ONLY value that should be relied upon to see if such
// changes have taken place.
// PEP_decrypt_flag_consume
// used by sync
// PEP_decrypt_flag_ignore
// used by sync
//
//
// caveat:
// the ownership of src remains with the caller - however, the
// contents might be modified (strings freed and allocated anew
// or set to NULL, etc) intentionally; when this happens,
// PEP_decrypt_flag_src_modified is set.
// the ownership of dst goes to the caller
// the ownership of keylist goes to the caller
// if src is unencrypted this function returns PEP_UNENCRYPTED
// and sets
// dst to NULL
DYNAMIC_API PEP_STATUS decrypt_message(
PEP_SESSION session,
message *src,
message **dst,
stringlist_t **keylist,
PEP_rating *rating,
PEP_decrypt_flags_t *flags
);
Cf. src/message_api.h [SRC.pepcore]:
// get_trustwords() - get full trustwords string // for a *pair* of identities // // parameters: // session (in) session handle // id1 (in) identity of first party in communication // - fpr can't be NULL // id2 (in) identity of second party in communication // - fpr can't be NULL // lang (in) C string with ISO 639-1 language code // words (out) pointer to C string with all trustwords // UTF-8 encoded, separated by a blank each // NULL if language is not supported or // trustword wordlist is damaged or unavailable // wsize (out) length of full trustwords string // full (in) if true, generate ALL trustwords for these // identities. // else, generate a fixed-size subset. // (TODO: fixed-minimum-entropy subset // in next version) // // return value: // PEP_STATUS_OK trustwords retrieved // PEP_OUT_OF_MEMORY out of memory // PEP_TRUSTWORD_NOT_FOUND at least one trustword not found // // caveat: // the word pointer goes to the ownership of the caller // the caller is responsible to free() it // (on Windoze use pEp_free()) // DYNAMIC_API PEP_STATUS get_trustwords( PEP_SESSION session, const pEp_identity* id1, const pEp_identity* id2, const char* lang, char **words, size_t *wsize, bool full );
[[ RFC Editor: This section is to be removed before publication ]]
[[ RFC Editor: This section should be empty and is to be removed before publication ]]