Protected headers with Gnus and OpenPGP

brwendel · 2022-11-20 20:05

Hi, When you send an PGP encrypted mail with Mutt, the Subject line gets protected. Which means that in the headers, the Subject is replaced by "....", and the "real" Subject line is moved to the encrypted part of the email message. When receiving a message with a protected header, upon decryption Mutt recognizes the "real" Subject line and shows that in the list of messages. Does Gnus support any of thexe options? I have been searching for "protected header" but haven't found anything, but perhaps my search capabilities may not be good enough ...

the_quark · 2022-11-20 22:50

I am unfortunately not up-to-date on any of this and can’t answer your question, but this just kinda blew my mind. I worked for PGP Inc. from 1996 - 1998, and did their first official corporate PGP version for Linux. I originally integrated PGP (before there was a GPG) into Mutt as a personal project 25+ years ago, and I’m glad to hear the whole concept is still moving. I don’t know how the standards have evolved in that time, but my recollection is that, at the time, PGP-MIME left the Subject field unencrypted - it was for encrypting the body and attachments, but the headers were considered necessary plaintext to allow for proper message routing. I don’t know if the standards have evolved, or if Mutt’s doing something more proprietary, though.

brwendel · 2022-11-21 20:59

Well, first of all: A Very Big Thank You for your work with PGP and Mutt. It sounds like the PGPi era, is that correct ? Perhaps Mutt is a bit ehead of it's time: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/id/draft-autocrypt-lamps-protected-headers-02.html](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/id/draft-autocrypt-lamps-protected-headers-02.html) Thank you for your reply, and again for having done such important work !