This Maintenance Pack will improve your CompanyCRYPT to version 1.4.2 (Build level 584).
It includes all previous Maintenance Packs since the release of the initial v1.4.0 (Build 537)
General benefits, added features and new functions since last Maintenance Pack:
- LDAP Keyserver available
The scenario jobs "Encryption - Best Effort", "Encryption - User Control" and its combination can now query internet
LDAP services to aquire encryption certificates. The keyserver may also be configured to only query upon given address ranges.
- Company Signing
An additional tab has been added under 'Encryption' to have a single point where to define signing policies. This enables
the 'Best Effort' and 'User Control' scenarios to also perform sign-only tasks on mails that are not encrypted. It is also
possible to configure addresses or address ranges to be excluded from the signing process.
Security issues
version 1.4.1 only:
- Reprocessing service - Decrypt on messages with encrypted inline parts
A missing buffer initialisation could have caused wrong recipients for messages with decrypted inline parts.
(This mainly occurs on wrong address or unable to deliver return notifications). Standard decryption was not affected.
It is highly recommended to apply this Maintenance Pack to restore reliable message processing.
Problems addressed since last Maintenance Pack:
- User Controlled Encryption - Sensitivity setting won't work on it's own
Due to a logic error the subject control had to be activated to make other trigger work, even if there was no keyword
configured. This has been fixed
- MIME encoding 'binary' - Undetermind
The Content-Type-Encoding 'binary' has been found in some messages. Although this is a MIME encoding type, the RFC clearly
states, that it should under no circumstances be used in internet emails. This is mainly to the fact, that 'binary' encoding has
no line length defined and does not require CRLF as line terminators. CompanyCRYPT previously didn't process such messages.
Now the behaviour has been changed to treat such messages as 8bit encoded content. If the sending part keeps the lines within
1024 chars including the trailing CRLF, all things should work smoothly.
- Best Effort - Multiple recipients
In a very few cases the splitting of emails that fall under different encryption policies (PGP, S/MIME, Plain) did completely
fail and result in illegal address formats. This has been fixed.
- Isolated PKS7 signature file - 'Too many encryption layers'
If a PKCS7 signature file was attached to message with no linkable data from which this signature was derived, the decrypt
process refuses the messages after the configured maximum reprocessing steps. This is due to the lack of a proper tagging of
of the data. This has also been fixed.
- Backup - File too large
The backup did include all log files in the log folder. In larger environments these logs may become very large.
With a default history of seven days, one backup file may become as large as 100 MB. Having a history for the backup
files as well, the whole benefit of a backup becomes costly. Therefore the logs are now, by default, excluded from the backup.
If needed a manual switch in the config file may be used to re-enable it.
- MIKE parameter - Reset to default
The new 'Company ID' tab unfortunately also accessed the MIKE parameters. Whenever changes were applied in this tab, the MIKE
parameters (listener address and sender address) were reset to default. This has been fixed.
- Synchronisation - Timeout
In some network environments we encountered 'Traffic-Shaper' or 'Traffic Optimizer' that interfered with the CompanyCRYPT
synchronisation. This led to a timout after a positive handshake. The sync-protocol has been modified to even work with the
modified packages.
Topics covered by previous Maintenance Packs:
1.4.1 (Build 572)
- User-Controlled-Encryption - Outlook parameter not working
Due to a logic error, the encryption could not be triggered using the MIME header parameter 'Sensitivity'.
This has been fixed,
- User-Controlled-Encryption - Wrong return code
When set to raise 'Encrypt fail' upon no available encrypt key the job falsely raised a returncode, that was interpreted as
'Undetermined'. This has been corrected to raise the proper returncode for 'Encrypt fail'.
- Import of private keys - Passphrase with special characters
When adding the feature of uploading a key, the encoding method of the import page was modified. This unfortunately
led to a double encoding of passphrases, which made it impossible to use special characters in passphrases.
This has been fixed.
NOTE: The characters quotation marks (") and pipe symbol (|) can still not be used.
- Address detection - Falsely considered alias name data
In some rare occasions the recipient address was extracted incorrectly from the alias name. This happened when the recipient email
address (enclosed in > <) was also entered in the alias name field (enclosed in ") together with some valid email address
characters like ('). In general the data between double-quote characters should be ignored. The CompanyCRYPT processing therefore
has been changed to reflect this behaviour.
- Automatic key generation - Key reply send from wrong address
The sending address of key replies can be configured. However upon an automatic key generation this setting did not have any
effect and the key reply was always send from the key owner address. This has been corrected.
- Automatic key generation - German 'Umlaut' characters prevented key generation
This applied to the unattended generation of key material, by use of the reference list.
Whenever special characters appeared in some of the key parameters (name, company name, ...) the process would stop and would
not generate the requested key. This has been changed to automatically convert such characters to valid encodings (i.e. UTF-8).
- PGP key reply messages - Displayed key length wrong
The key length displayed in key replies did not show the value from the encryption sub key, instead it showed the value
from the signing sub key (usually smaller). This has been corrected
- Service start on missing configuration file
This applied to both, the Operational and the Reprocess service. In case of a missing Companycrypt.cfg file, the services
would be shown in Windows Service Manager as being in the process of 'Starting'. However, never reaching the 'Started' condition
the stop button never becomes available. The services did detected the missing file condition and stopped working,
but this was not signaled back to Windows, which led to no available buttons to control the service. The only
way to stop the process, was by ending the task using the taskmanager. This has been fixed. The service will stop immediately
after the start, upon a missing configuration file.
Security issues (1.4.1 - Build 572):
- PGP Module (GnuPG) update to v1.4.9
The latest version of GnuPG is part of this update. Besides small performance upgrades no noteworthy changes
in regard to to CompanyCRYPT are part of this release. The following link provides more details.
NOTE: We are aware of the newer version of OpenSSL (v0.9.8h). However this version carries new dependencies
on a Microsoft dll-package (VC-Redistributables) that we want to investigate first. As there are no known imminent
security considerations, we decided to take the time and make sure that this new version will work flawlessly within
CompanyCRYPT before we release it.
General benefits, added features (1.4.1 - Build 572):
- PGP - Partitioned Encoding Format now supported
The PGP corporation (this is the company producing and selling the PGP desktop software) decided to change the handling
of file names when applying 'Inline-PGP' on emails. The file name in this format will not be transmitted in plain text
in the MIME container. Instead it becomes part of the encrypted data. In result the normal CompanyCRYPT decryption process
would decrypt the file, but would not provide the original file name or extension.
It would have been easier for us, if PGP had announced this prior to implementing it in their products, but they preferred
to surprise us and the customers with this new feature. By some accidental whitepaper disclosures from eMail archives and
some reverse engineering, we are now happy to be able to process this kind of data correctly, at least for the existing
PGP implementations (Desktop and PGP Universal). We will see what they come up with in the future.
- New 'Smart' Job - Best Effort Encryption
There is now a job (szenario) available that is independent of static MIMEsweeper address lists. It will simply always encrypt
emails for those recipients, where the key or certificate is available within CompanyCRYPT. If the recipients consist
of a mixed group (PGP, S/MIME, 'No-Key') the eMail will be split up through the Reprocess service.
- WebGUI - Rearangements
In preparation of future improvements (multi domain support) a new tab under Central Accounts has been introduced. Apart from
the possibility to configure the system notification sender address it doesn't provide anything new. The purpose of this change
is to integrate company relevant settings in a single view. This will make them configurable for multiple Company-ID's in the next
update.
- BCC recipient detection
Finally a method has been developed to always get the exact SMTP email address information from the MIMEsweeper. This solves a
long term issue on Site2Site connections, where external BCC recipients sometimes weren't able to open encrypted messages,
because the assigned key for that domain wasn't used. With this new mechanism the processing will be using the correct keys.
- Apple eMail client compatibility
We found Apple email clients that didn't comply with the RFC describing PGP/MIME. When processing mails with this method,
it is expected the encrypted content is correctly MIME encoded. In this case the line endings should be CRLF and not
LF only as some examples showed. When detected, this will now be automatically corrected.
- Key list display
The display color of expired keys is changed to grey (inactive). The red text color will now be used to indicate that a key
or certificate is about to expire in less than 30 days. This way the signaling color red is used more meaningful.
- Online Remote Support
Withour strategic decision for the 'Teamviewer' product family for our support section, we are now happy to provide an
extremely fast and easy to handle way of online support (similar to WebEx session).
To improve this even further the necessary client module is now integrated and startable from the CompanyCRYPT web interface
(Click on 'Remote Support' in the startup view).