Alpha testers wanted: GNU Emacs, RMAIL, and PGP

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  I have just finished writing a fancy new package for GNU Emacs
(pgpmail).  It requires PGP, RMAIL, and sendmail.  You must be able to
run a program from within Emacs.  Pgpmail automaticaly checks message
signatures and decrypts messages, it helps automate signing outgoing
messages (and strips the signatures a bit too!).  Pgpmail also helps
fix a known security hole -- it doesn't send you passphrase on the
command line, but uses the environment instead.

  If you would like to be an early alpha tester for my software, *and*
feel you would provide lots of testing please reply to me directly.

j'  
- --
                O I am Jay Prime Positive jpp@markv.com 
1250 bit key fingerprint =  B8 95 E0 AF 9A A2 CD A5  89 C9 F0 FE B4 3A 2C 3F
 524 bit key fingerprint =  8A 7C B9 F2 D5 46 4D ED  66 23 F1 71 DE FF 51 48
Public keys by `finger jpp@markv.com' or mail to pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu
Your feedback is welcome, directly or via symbol JPP on hex@sea.east.sun.com

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Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 23:28:36 PDT
   From: jpp@markv.com
   Sender: jpp@markv.com

     I have just finished writing a fancy new package for GNU Emacs
   (pgpmail).  It requires PGP, RMAIL, and sendmail.  You must be able to
   run a program from within Emacs.  Pgpmail automaticaly checks message
   signatures and decrypts messages, it helps automate signing outgoing
   messages (and strips the signatures a bit too!).  Pgpmail also helps
   fix a known security hole -- it doesn't send you passphrase on the
   command line, but uses the environment instead.

I may be missing something, but isn't this less secure than using the
command line? Anyone on the system can do a "ps -e" whilst you are
encrypting to get the environment of the pgp process.

If you use the -z option to pass the passphrase to pgp, that argument
gets cleared by pgp immedaitely when it executes, so it is not
available for very long.

An even better way would be to use the file descriptor method of
giving the passphrase to pgp.

Not sure how you would do this in elisp, but that's how I did it in
NXPGP (pgp front end for NeXT). Well, the newest version anyway, which
is still being beta tested (anyone want to help?).


-Sam

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Learn something new every day.  On *my* (SCO unix) system it is easy
to read the command line via ps.  On *my* system ps -e reports on
every process, not the environment.  I can find no reference to
'environment' in the ps man page.  Finaly, after talking with a more
knowledgeable-than-I unix guru, I felt that the environment was a
safer place to put the passphrase.

But, since there is at least one place where this is not true (and
after reading some BSD man pages, it seems there a quite a few), I
will have to *improve* my code.  I will offer all three ways
(environment, command line, and file-descriptor) to input a
passphrase.  (And will try to figure out how to read the environment
of other processes under Sys V...)  I would apreciate input from unix
gurus out there about which systems make the environment hard to read,
and which easy; and similar stuff about the command line, and pipes.

Thanks for your help making pgpmail even better!

j'
- --
                O I am Jay Prime Positive jpp@markv.com 
1250 bit key fingerprint =  B8 95 E0 AF 9A A2 CD A5  89 C9 F0 FE B4 3A 2C 3F
 524 bit key fingerprint =  8A 7C B9 F2 D5 46 4D ED  66 23 F1 71 DE FF 51 48
Public keys by `finger jpp@markv.com' or mail to pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu
Your feedback is welcome, directly or via symbol JPP on hex@sea.east.sun.com

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