HexBrain

Paragon Initiative Enterprises · Report #115214

Missing SPF for https://paragonie.com/

Informativestatus
1upvotes
8 Feb 2016disclosed

Summary

Email is fundamentally insecure. While you can include a SPF record to your DNS records (which themselves are not secure), it's up to the other mail servers and clients to validate these records. If they don't, spoofing is trivial even with these records in place.

An email address's From: header is a poor identity verification mechanism. If we send any sensitive information, we always sign and/or encrypt it with GnuPG. Our GnuPG, not our email address, is our identity verification mechanism.

If we experience any loss of reputation because our colleagues trust the From: header and don't bother to check the PGP signature, then that's egg on their face. This is an acceptable risk, as we're focused on more important things, like SMIMP (a secure-by-default protocol that will, hopefully, replace email).

How it was found

There is no TXT record in DNS zone that defines Sender Policy Framework entry for domain paragonie.com. This makes it easy to spoof your e-mail address.

This report was disclosed publicly on HackerOne and belongs to its author and the program. See the original