EFAIL

EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails. Email is a plaintext communication medium whose communication paths are partly protected by TLS (TLS). For people in hostile environments (journalists, political activists, whistleblowers, ...) who depend on the confidentiality of digital communication, this may not be enough. Powerful attackers such as nation state agencies are known to eavesdrop on email communications of a large number of people. To address this, OpenPGP offers end-to-end encryption specifically for sensitive communication in view of these powerful attackers. S/MIME is an alternative standard for email end-to-end encryption that is typically used to secure corporate email communication.