The widely-used OpenPGP and S/MIME email encryption protocols suffer from weaknesses that may ultimately expose the plain text of encrypted messages to attackers, according to a team of eight academics from German and Belgian universities, who have nicknamed the flaws “EFAIL”. “In a nutshell, EFAIL abuses active content of HTML emails, for example externally loaded images or styles, to exfiltrate plain text through requested URLs,” the researchers wrote on efail.de, a newly-launched website dedicated to their findings.

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