Withdraw the key manager, and keep what probing it established

A Settings section for public keys is furniture, not a feature. Nothing
in ihasmail signs, encrypts, decrypts or verifies with a key, so the
page could only ever tell the reader in its own footnote that adding one
does nothing. It is withdrawn on that reasoning -- the same reasoning
that closed PR #67, reached again with the code in front of us.

So this reverts every user-visible part of it: the section, the lib, the
mock handlers, the component and the 261 catalogue strings. Nothing in
web/ or server/ differs from main now.

What stays is the part that was expensive and is true regardless. The
x:PublicKey registry was probed against a live 0.16.20 on 2026-09-05,
and the findings are now in KNOWN-ISSUES rather than in a closed pull
request -- which is where they sat for the nine days between #67 and
this branch, and why the work was done twice. Consolidated into one
entry, framed as what Stalwart does rather than what ihasmail offers:

  - an ordinary user may read and write their own keys, whatever the
    permissions table says
  - the registry takes S/MIME certificates as well as OpenPGP keys, and
    parses both -- confirmed with a real self-signed X.509 certificate,
    and a malformed one gets its own BER decoding error
  - a key can parse and still be refused, with different words. A
    sign-and-certify key -- what `gpg --quick-generate-key` makes --
    gets "Could not find any suitable keys", which is not a paste error
    and must not be shown as one
  - emailAddresses comes back as {} when empty, an object where a list
    property should be an array. It type-checks, then throws in join()
  - a create answers with the id alone; patching `key` is allowed
  - expiresAt is the registry's field and is not derived from the key

ROADMAP now says plainly that key management has been built and
withdrawn twice, that the registry is not the obstacle, and that
verifying a signature -- which needs only public keys -- is the shortest
route to a key being worth having. Encryption at rest moves from "not
offered yet" to refused: it is a one-way door, since turning it off does
not decrypt what is already there, and that is not a switch to hand an
ordinary user however easy it would be to add.
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-05 01:11:25 -07:00
parent 6a467d9bc4
commit 45c8929697
19 changed files with 14 additions and 1101 deletions
-69
View File
@@ -1212,75 +1212,6 @@ Over Stalwart's own registry objects, so there is no administrator in the loop:
credentials". Doing it properly means implementing OAuth; that is in
[ROADMAP.md](ROADMAP.md).
## Encryption keys
Settings Encryption keys publishes OpenPGP public keys and S/MIME certificates
on the account, over Stalwart's `x:PublicKey` registry: list, add, rename,
remove. Only public material — no private key is stored, requested or sent by
any of it.
Everything below was established against a live Stalwart **0.16.20** on
2026-09-05, rather than taken from the documentation, which is wrong on the
first two:
- **An ordinary user may read *and* write their own keys.** Stalwart's
permissions table lists every `sysPublicKey*` permission as administrative.
The server granted them to a normal account: `x:PublicKey/get` and
`x:PublicKey/query` both answered, and a create carrying a deliberately
malformed key came back `invalidProperties` naming `key` — a rejection of the
key, not of the person. Had the documentation been right this section would
have been useless to everyone but an administrator.
- **Stalwart parses the key itself** and says precisely what is wrong with it:
*"Failed to decode OpenPGP public key: Malformed packet: Malformed CTB: MSB of
ptag not set."* So ihasmail does not validate key material. Anything it
checked would be a second opinion, and the one that counts would still be the
server's — its message is shown verbatim, the way password-policy rejections
already are.
- **Certificates are parsed too, by their own decoder.** The registry is not
OpenPGP-only, though every other message it returns reads as though it were: a
self-signed X.509 certificate registers, reads back and removes cleanly, and a
malformed one is refused with *"Failed to decode X509 certificate: BER
decoding error…"*. So the S/MIME half of this section is real, and the server
is the thing checking it in both formats.
- **A key that parses can still be refused, and says something else.** A
sign-and-certify key with no encryption subkey — which is what
`gpg --quick-generate-key` produces by default — comes back *"Could not find
any suitable keys in OpenPGP public key"*. That is the rejection somebody
exporting from GnuPG is most likely to meet, and it is not a paste error:
the fix is to add an encryption subkey, not to paste more carefully. Showing
the server's own two sentences distinguishes the two; showing "invalid key"
would not.
- **`emailAddresses` arrives as `{}` when it is empty** — an object, where a
JMAP list property should be an array. ihasmail checks the shape rather than
trusting the type, so nothing puts an object through `join()` halfway through
rendering the list.
- **Creating a key answers with its id and nothing else**, so adding one
reloads the list instead of believing what came back. Renaming and removing
both work; removal leaves the registry genuinely empty.
**`expiresAt` is the registry's field, not the key's.** A certificate valid for
a year registers with no expiry set, and the card says so. Reading the real one
means parsing the certificate, which is the second opinion this section exists
not to offer.
The kind badge — OpenPGP or S/MIME — is read from the armour header alone, which
is a label rather than a parse, and the excerpt beside each key is deliberately
not called a fingerprint: computing a real one means parsing the key, and naming
it a fingerprint would invite somebody to verify against it.
**What this does not do.** Nothing signs, encrypts, decrypts or verifies with
these keys. The page says so. Adding one does not by itself start encrypting
your mail — the one thing known to consume a registered key is
`encryptionAtRest`, a field on `x:AccountSettings` beside `description`,
`locale` and `timeZone`. There is no `x:EncryptionAtRest` object whatever the
documentation suggests — asking for one on 0.16.20 is an `unknownMethod` — and
the field's value is a typed object, `{"@type": "Disabled"}`, not a bare string.
ihasmail does not yet offer it, and it carries a caveat of its own: turning it
off does not decrypt what is already there. Signing and decrypting need a private key in a page
served by the same host that would handle it, which is a security model to agree
before it is a feature to build. Verifying a signature needs only public keys
and is tractable on its own. See [ROADMAP.md](ROADMAP.md).
## Privacy by default
Remote images blocked, the proxy on, read receipts never automatic, no