Upstream applied no content-encryption check at all on decrypt, and ran
every decryption through the liner engine — which registers DES-CBC,
3DES-CBC and RC2-CBC. Those OIDs exist in crypto-engine.js for PKCS#12
password-based encryption; the CMS content path merely reused the same
engine and inherited them. A crafted message could therefore be decrypted
under a broken cipher, and unauthenticated plaintext was handed straight
to the renderer — the EFAIL precondition.
The obvious fix would have been wrong. Accepting only AEAD breaks most
real S/MIME mail: RFC 5751 makes AES-128-CBC the MUST-implement content
cipher, Outlook and Thunderbird default to CBC, and AES-GCM in CMS
(RFC 5084) is barely deployed. An AEAD-only allowlist is a functionality
catastrophe wearing a security fix's clothes.
Three layers instead:
1. Allowlist the AES family and refuse everything else, with the gate
running before any private key is touched. CBC stays for interop;
DES/3DES/RC2 are refused.
2. Take the mail path off the legacy engine. Normal decryption now uses
nativeEngine(); the liner engine is reachable only when a genuine
legacy RSAES-PKCS1-v1_5 key is in play. This removes the weak ciphers
structurally rather than by policy — native WebCrypto handles RSA-OAEP
key transport and AES-CBC/GCM content perfectly well.
3. Refuse to render unauthenticated plaintext as HTML. CBC output is
malleable and HTML is EFAIL's exfiltration channel. The host does block
remote content by default (allowExternalContent starts false), but that
is a user/admin setting this plugin cannot observe, so we don't lean on
it. New renderUnauthenticatedHtml setting (default false) is the
documented opt-out. Our own encrypt path always uses AES-GCM, so mail
we send renders fully; only legacy inbound CBC degrades to text.
Built from source with the repo's own pipeline (esbuild, 1.69 MB) and
packaged to smime-vnc.zip (0.27 MB). All four fixes verified present in
the built bundle. Build output is gitignored — never vendor a prebuilt
bundle, which was the upstream mistake.
Correcting an earlier assumption: this bundle does NOT trip the B-01
pattern scanner (zero matches on all five patterns), so the override is
not needed to install it. B-01 remains correct — it closed a real
entrypoint-only coverage gap — but it isn't load-bearing here.
verify-fixes.mjs now carries 36 assertions covering all three fixes,
including source checks that fail if a guard is removed, if a legacy CBC
OID reappears in the allowlist, or if the mail path stops using the
native engine.
Findings 4 (unlocked keys persisted to IndexedDB), 5 (parser DoS) and 6
(PKCS1v1.5 oracle surface) remain open.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
