Check S/MIME signatures, and remember who signed

A signed message now says whether that holds up, as it is read. This is
verification only: nothing here signs, encrypts or decrypts, and the
private-key question that blocks those is untouched. Verifying needed
none of it, because the certificate travels inside the message -- which
is why this is the half that could be built.

What it checks. For multipart/signed carrying PKCS#7, the exact bytes of
the signed part -- headers included, canonicalised to CRLF -- are hashed
against the messageDigest attribute, and the signature over the signed
attributes is verified with WebCrypto against the certificate inside the
message. RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 and ECDSA over P-256/384/521, with SHA-256, 384
or 512.

The trust model is the design, and it is deliberately small. A browser
has no system trust store, and the certificate arrives inside the
message, so anyone can self-sign as anyone: on its own a good signature
shows only that the sender held the key they attached. So the word
"verified" is never rendered, and the reassuring case is not the loud
one. What carries the weight is remembering -- the first signed message
from an address pins its fingerprint, later ones are compared, and a
signer that changed is reported with both names and told to check by
another route. Trust on first use, no certificate authority anywhere.

The pins live in the account's settings rather than the browser: one
that only a single device knew would greet the same correspondent as new
everywhere else, which is how people are trained to click past the one
warning that matters. A pin records the message that created it, so the
message that established a signer keeps saying so instead of appearing
to be corroborated by itself -- without that, the very first signed
message anybody receives reads as "the same signer as before", where
before is itself. A changed, mismatched or expired signer is never
pinned, since writing the anomaly into the baseline makes every later
message agree with it.

Three things are declined rather than attempted, and all three say
"could not check" rather than "does not check out", because ignorance
and an accusation are different claims:

  - OpenPGP, by name. The signature carries no key and there is nowhere
    to get the sender's: x:PublicKey is the account's OWN registry, and
    a keyserver or WKD lookup would tell a third party who you
    correspond with -- the leak the image proxy exists to close.
  - SHA-1. Not forgeable in practice today, still not something to put a
    tick beside.
  - RSA-PSS, whose salt length lives in parameters this does not read.
    Guessing wrong would report a good signature as bad.

Nothing validates a chain: no CA bundle is shipped and revocation is not
checked. "Issued by" reports what the certificate claims, and a
self-signed one claims itself.

The DER, CMS, X.509 and MIME readers are hand-written and deliberately
narrow -- no new dependency, and the whole verifier is a lazily imported
8.6 kB chunk that a reader of unsigned mail never downloads. The one
place this is easy to get quietly wrong has its own function and its own
test: signed attributes are signed as a SET OF, not as the [0] IMPLICIT
they arrive as, and hashing the message instead would make every
signature "pass".

Tested against real `openssl smime -sign` output rather than hand-built
fixtures -- RSA, ECDSA, a tampered copy, and a valid signature by a
certificate for somebody else -- because a signed message written by
hand only agrees with whatever its author believed the format to be.
Also driven in a browser against the mock, which now serves three real
signed messages so every branch of the banner is reachable.

Translations: 34 new strings in all nine catalogues, 306 entries.
Falling back to English is unchanged at 24 per language.
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-05 01:42:51 -07:00
parent 7aa2e374d4
commit c84f190f76
31 changed files with 2287 additions and 4 deletions
+62
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@@ -1212,6 +1212,68 @@ 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).
## Checking a signature
A signed message says who signed it, and ihasmail checks whether that holds up.
This is S/MIME only, and it stops at reading: nothing here signs, encrypts or
decrypts anything.
**What it checks.** For a `multipart/signed` message carrying a PKCS#7
signature, the exact bytes of the signed part — headers included, canonicalised
to CRLF — are hashed and compared against the `messageDigest` the signature
covers, and the signature over the signed attributes is verified with WebCrypto
against the certificate travelling inside the message. RSA (PKCS#1 v1.5) and
ECDSA over P-256, P-384 and P-521 are supported, with SHA-256, SHA-384 or
SHA-512.
**What a check is allowed to claim, which is the whole design.** A browser has
no system trust store, and the certificate arrives inside the message, so anyone
can self-sign as anyone. On its own a verified signature proves only that
whoever wrote the message held the key attached to it — which is why ihasmail
never renders the bare word *verified*.
What makes it worth anything is remembering. The first signed message from an
address pins that certificate's fingerprint in your settings; later ones are
compared against it. That is trust on first use, and it needs no certificate
authority:
| what happened | what you see |
|---|---|
| first signed message from this address | *"Signed by X, seen here for the first time"* — grey, and deliberately not congratulatory |
| same certificate as before | *"the same signer as before"* — the only case that gets a tick |
| **different certificate than before** | **loud**: both names, and told to check by some other route |
| valid signature, certificate for a different address | **loud**: the signature is not for this sender |
| body changed after signing | **loud**: the signature does not check out |
| signed, but uncheckable | grey, and careful to say *could not check* rather than *did not check out* |
The pins live in the account's settings file rather than in the browser, so the
same correspondent is not greeted as new on every device — which is what trains
people to click past the one warning that matters. A pin records the message
that created it, so the message which established a signer keeps saying so
rather than appearing to be corroborated by itself. A signer that changed, one
whose certificate does not name the sender, or one already expired is never
pinned: writing an anomaly into the baseline would make every later message
agree with it.
**What it will not do.**
- **OpenPGP is not checked**, and says so by name rather than as an unknown
format. The signature does not carry the key, and ihasmail has nowhere to get
a correspondent's public key from — `x:PublicKey` holds the account's *own*
keys, and fetching from a keyserver or WKD would leak who you correspond with
to a third party, which is the exact thing the image proxy exists to prevent.
- **No chain of trust.** Nothing is validated against a certificate authority,
no CA bundle is shipped, and revocation is not checked. "Issued by" reports
what the certificate says, and a self-signed certificate says it issued
itself.
- **SHA-1 signatures are refused**, not reported as valid.
- **RSA-PSS is declined** rather than attempted, because guessing the salt
length wrong would report a good signature as bad — a worse thing to say than
"cannot check".
The verifier is a separate bundle chunk, loaded only when a message's structure
says it is signed, so reading ordinary mail costs nothing for any of this.
## Privacy by default
Remote images blocked, the proxy on, read receipts never automatic, no