Re: Automatic retrieval of certificates (S/MIME)

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Stefan Kamphausen <skampi@gmx.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> today I've been playing around with the S/MIME stuff in Gnus.  While
> it all works as expected there is one glitch that I can't fix anyhow.
>
> When I send a message to a friend using his certificate to encrypt and
> mine to sign the message I have to explicitly state which certificate
> to use for signing (at least this is filled with a reasonable default
> from smime-keys) and which for encryption (this is just a
> read-file-name on the smime-certificate-directory.  It would be very
> nice if those were picked according to the recipients email adress
> taken from the "To:"-header and the "From:" adress respectively.

Yes, although I'm not sure how to implement that.  Mapping e-mail
addresses to S/MIME certificates is not well standardized under Unix.
There is no per-user S/MIME directory on the local machine to use.

If you want to think about how this would work, and perhaps implement
it, that would be very useful.

> Furthermore the sending of the message keeps asking me for another
> round of signature and encryption certificate.  This time it's for the
> saving of the message in the Gcc-Header (at least I think I found that
> by doing some experiments, giving the false encryption argument leads
> to my not being able to decrypt the message when viewing my
> sent-box).  The most confusing part in this is that I can't see from
> the prompts or the message display for which recipient I have to give
> the encryption key.

Your analysis is correct.  There is a variable that you can set so the
GCC'd copy contain the raw MML tags instead of the encoded version.
The reason for encoding things twice is that encoding a message for
mail/news is in theory different from encoding it for GCC.  The same
formatting logic cannot always be used.  So that's why Gnus encode the
message twice.  It is arguable a bug.  On the other hand, a better
solution might be to make S/MIME sign/encrypt so smooth that you
wouldn't care that it is encoded twice.

If you want what is sent through mail, you can use 'Bcc' instead of
'Gcc'.

> Am I missing something here?  I've dived into mml-sec.el and
> mml-smime.el and I think that the insertion of the mml statement
> _might_ already contain the certificates but maybe I just didn't
> understand it.

You can specify the key/cert in the MML tags, if that is what you
meant.  See 'MML Definition' in the Emacs MIME manual.  You can say,
e.g.:

<#part sign=smime keyfile="~/cacert.user.key">

Hm.  I now realize that part of what you are wishing for is already
implemented for the S/MIME partial signing.  When I pressed "Secure
MIME Part" -> "S/MIME Sign Part" it automatically added the 'keyfile'
parameter, because my smime-keys variable says:

 '(smime-keys (quote (("simon@josefsson.org" "~/certs/jas.key+cert" nil) ("jas@extundo.com" "~/cacert.user.key" ("~/cacert.crt")) ("sj@extundo.com" "~/certs/sj.key+cert" nil))))

Can you try if

<#!secure method=smime mode=sign keyfile="foo">

works?  If so, perhaps you can locate the code that add the keyfile
parameter to the MIME part tags, and add it to the full-message MML
tag code.