Page MenuHome GnuPG

Radix64 Line-Truncation Enabling Polyglot Attacks
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

An attacker can craft ASCII-armored OpenPGP data that contains an over-long radix64 line. It will be interpreted differently by GnuPG than by spec-conforming parsers. This enables format-confusion / polyglot attacks.

Related Objects

StatusAssignedTask
Resolved werner

Event Timeline

gniibe created this object in space Restricted Space.
gniibe created this object with visibility "g10code (Project)".
gniibe created this object with edit policy "g10code (Project)".
gniibe mentioned this in Unknown Object (Maniphest Task).Nov 10 2025, 2:51 AM

For someone who considers the rejection is the requirement of the spec., here is a change:

werner claimed this task.
werner triaged this task as Low priority.
werner added a subscriber: werner.

We have seen wrong encodings quite often in the past and thus we won't apply the patch. After all the armor header is a different layer and could also be applied or removed by other software or tools. The integrity of an OpenPGP message does not depend on its concrete outer encoding.

werner shifted this object from the Restricted Space space to the S1 Public space.Fri, Dec 26, 2:59 PM
werner changed the visibility from "g10code (Project)" to "Public (No Login Required)".
werner changed the edit policy from "g10code (Project)" to "Contributor (Project)".