Thanks to a mention by a Telegram user, Thunderbird is deprecating XUL addon framework and therefore Enigmail with it by v78 in favor of a built-in OpenGPG implementation.
This brings many questions like:
How does this implementation compare to the former security and usability wise?
How are keys imported?
How do we enable and customize the feature with the prefs file?
Security? I guess less attack surface. Usability? Well, users will have to learn how to use Thunderbird without Enigmail and imaged learn the new said functionalities. As for the other questions I think they are answered in the blog post you provided. Except the last one.
Not great. Now that the torbirdy replacement issue was finally solved⌠(torbirdy replacement) Back to a bit of chaos. Not looking forward to.
These new keys probably needs a separate backup since Thunderbird introduces its own keystore. Perhaps for users of gpg command line it would be best to create the key outside of Thunderbird and then import into Thunderbird. That way one does not have two keys - gpg and Thunderbird. In theory.
Thunderbird will probably stop being compatible with Qubes Split GPG at least until/if someone fixes that, if possible.
Thunderbird is unable to bundle GnuPG software, because of incompatible licenses (MPL version 2.0 vs. GPL version 3+).
Great, licensing is responsible for this mess.
Instead of relying on users to obtain and install external software like GnuPG or GPG4Win, we intend to identify and use an alternative, compatible library and distribute it as part of Thunderbird on all supported platforms.
Well, the issue wasnât Linux distributions where GnuPG is usually installed by default.
Will require updated documentation.
If it wasnât for the updated torbirdy implementation which we rely on for Whonix (torbirdy replacement), Iâd consider swapping e-mail clients. In theory, for Kicksecure an e-mail client with functional gpg integration that can use system gpg could be considered.
Attack surface? Perhaps similar. I donât see how locally installed gpg would cause any more attack surface than Thunderbird integrated gpg. Not even a theoretic argument can be made until someone compares the code bases.
Might be better for those who only use Thunderbird and donât mind to have the keys on the same machine (VM) as the signing keys. (No qubes-split-gpg.) But I am sure this will also add confusion as it uses a keystore separate from gpg command line.
Either new, separate keys. That I suppose will always be easy.
And also they mention many times the ability to import existing keys.
As for locally installed, command line gpg. Not much. Key import from gpg format to Thunderbird own format. Thatâs the most. No other interaction with command line gpg.
It might be wise to wait and see any bugs being ironed out?
That is a good question. I doubt there is much choice for distributions. Unless someone forks Thunderbird, restores the old functionality, which is probably unlikely, I guess everyone has to switch client or go with these changes. A small hope is that support for locally installed gpg is added.
Letâs hope that this change at least doesnât happen before the upgrade from Debian buster to Debian bullseye. Usually Debian stable doesnât do major version upgrades in the stable release of Debian. But is firefox-esr package in Debian an exception? By extension, is the thunderbird package also an exception? I didnât monitor firefox version from firefox-esr closely enough but I think there might be an exception. Which would then mean this change could hit us already during the Debian buster based Whonix 15 release series.
For the record (because Iâve not seen this mentioned beforeâapologies if this has been posted elsewhere):
I just updated from Thunderbird 68.12.0 to 78.2.2 on a test system (stand-alone installation) since the latter version is made available through Mozillaâs own âreleaseâ update channel starting today. Somewhat unexpectedly, I found that itâs impossible to use (i.e. (re-)import) so-called âlaptop keysâ (aka disposable subkeys with an offline master key).
This effectively rules out production use for meâunless a GPG-compatible backend will be provided soon/by when the old 68.x version of Thunderbird will not receive security fixes anymore addressing newly discovered flaws, itâs time to switch to another application on the desktop, I guessâŚ
Personally, I started to look at lists like https:â//âwwwâ.âopenpgpâ.âorg/software/ yesterday to get some ideas. I always kept Mutt around, but as itâs text-based (even though you can bind a key to open a graphical browser to display HTML emails), it might be a hard sell for many users.
Thanks for keeping onto this. I tested 4 different clients in Debian repos today and they all fell short for different reasons.
Sylpheed - Sends messages fine but cannot pull them from server (imap broken)
Claws - wouldnât encrypt messages - wants a security system selected, but doesnât show GPG as an option despite installing the required plugin.
Geary - UI too sparse and it turns out GPG support isnât done yet.
Evolution - very heavy, but the closest TB alternative. Cannot use a key with an email ID different than the one that is signed in. This is a problem for people who migrated email addresses. (Tested that you cannot encrypt an email to yourself using an old key).
Reposted your link as it doesnât click for some reason:
Is there a straight forward way for doing that? The gpa interface doesnât let you edit that. The command line gpg option wasnât intuitive either. Needs to be documented.
Just using the same key on another inbox. Editing the key to add this address would address this.
Is there a straight forward way for doing that? The gpa interface
doesnât let you edit that. The command line gpg option wasnât
intuitive either. Needs to be documented.
I havenât done that via CLI yet, but via Enigmail, and since the
Thunderbird debacle I use Evolution, and hence Seahorse to manage my
keys. The steps via Seahorse (Passwords and Keys) are:
Open it.
Select the desired key.
In the dialog then select âNames and Signaturesâ
Great(?) news â it looks like so-called âlaptop keysâ / offline master keys can still be used, so regarding this isolated issue, it might not be necessary to shop for another email client!
Short summary: After my original bug report #1666124 [1] â which I attributed, but couldnât assign an âS2â severity (âno existing workaroundâ) â has been closed as a duplicate of bug report #1654893 [2] (classified as âenhancementâ because â[Mozillaâs] bugzilla isnât deciding based on previous Enigmail features.â [3]), some kind soul pointed out to me [4] that there indeed is a workaround which follows exactly the same steps as proposed for smartcards [5]. (Letâs hope that this remains an option in the future!)
On one hand, Iâm at odds with the above comment [3] which basically must mean that supporting the full previous functionality of the old Enigmail add-on for Thunderbird v68 is not a current objective â I commented accordingly because at least I missed this position from previous announcements and would really have liked a longer warning time. On the other hand, Iâm not sad that I donât have to import private keys into the Thunderbird keyring at all (you still need to import the public keys, but thatâs an inconvenience at most).
The wiki topic [5] also mentions the Qubes Split GPG configuration, but I currently have no working test environment at hand to verify this myself.
No. Whonix doesnât stop the upgrade. See this thread on what was actually done, not done.
Whonix doesnât interfere with package upgrades from Debian so package security support is same Debian and for other practical reasons, Focus on low-effort maintainability, not sustainable to fork/security support Thunderbird at Whonix project level.
Itâs never a good idea to stick with old software versions because you will miss out on patches when new security vulns inevitably turn up. As long as the gpg implementation isnât broken it is still a viable option and not something to abandon the most usable mail client over.
i havenât played with this too much yet. but, iâve come across some postings that stress thunderbird can still use an external presence of gnupg in some ways. it requires some about:config style tweaks.
it appears that it may address the qubes âsplit keyâ issue. additionally, it appears to allow for storage of keys on external encrypted drives. i havenât tried either of those.
for me, i simply didnât want all of my keys stored in thunderbirdâs config file. while it may be convenient for people who only use gpg for sending and receiving e-mail, i still use it to encrypt and sign files that i place on servers. thus, being able to use it from the command line interface is desirable for me there. i did test this out and it works fine.
the public key management is still rather cumbersome. i donât yet understand why thunderbird allows for the use of an external gnupg instance, but doesnât have a similar setting to store all of the keys outside of thunderbird. so, for the moment, public keys added to the keyring in thunderbird will need to be manually exported if one wants to work with them from the command line.