<abstract>The Stanza Content Encryption (SCE) protocol is intended as a way to allow clients to securely exchange arbitrary extension elements using different end-to-end encryption schemes.</abstract>
<remark>Accepted by vote of Council on 2019-06-26.</remark>
</revision>
<revision>
<version>0.0.1</version>
<date>2019-06-03</date>
<initials>ps</initials>
<remark><p>First draft.</p></remark>
</revision>
</header>
<section1topic='Introduction'anchor='intro'>
<p>There is a number of different end-to-end encryption mechanisms that can be used to secure user communication against unauthorized access from malicious third parties. Popular examples for this are &xep0384; and &xep0373;.</p>
<p>While the latter allows for encryption of arbitrary extension elements, protocols such as &xep0384; are limited to only encrypt the body of a message. This approach is not very flexible and prevents the combined usage with XMPP extension protocols such as &xep0385; or &xep0308; as their extension elements cannot be included in the encrypted part of the message, therefore leaking information about the message content.</p>
<p>This extension protocol proposes a solution to aforementioned issues by generalizing the OpenPGP Content Elements (eg. <linkurl="https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0373.html#example-2"><signcrypt></link>) introduced by &xep0373; for the use with other encryption protocols.</p>
</section1>
<section1topic='Requirements'anchor='reqs'>
<p>This proposal widens the scope of the security guarantees given by the used encryption mechanism from just the body of the message to all contents of the &content; element. It is intended to serve as a "one size fits all" solution for extension element encryption in XMPP.</p>
<p>In order to achieve its goal, Stanza Content Encryption does the following:</p>
<td>Prevent known ciphertext and message length correlation attacks. The content of this element is a randomly generated sequence of base64 characters of random length between 0 and 200 characters. TODO: sane boundaries?</td>
<td>Prevent replay attacks using old messages. This element MUST have one attribute 'stamp', whos value is a timestamp following the format described in &xep0082;. The timestamp represents the time at which the message was encrypted by the sender.</td>
<td>Receiving clients MUST check whether the difference between the timestamp and the sending time derived from the stanza itself lays within a reasonable margin. The client SHOULD use the content of the timestamp element when displaying the send date of the message</td>
<p>Encryption protocols that make use of Stanza Content Encryption MUST define their own profiles that describe mandatory behaviour of which of these elements are used. They MAY also define and add their own specific affix elements.</p>
<p>Some end-to-end encryption protocols like &xep0384; are historically limited to encryption of the message body only. This approach excludes other extension elements from the protected domain of the payload element, exposing them to potential attackers.</p>
<examplecaption='An imperfectly encrypted message which leaks dangerous information about the conversation through the plaintext OOB extension element'><![CDATA[
<p>Most end-to-end encryption mechanisms are also focussed solely on message content encryption and do not tackle <iq/> requests/replies at all. Stanza Content Encryption can be applied to those as well.</p>
<examplecaption='Unencrypted IQ request'><![CDATA[
<section2topic='Use in <message/> stanzas'anchor='use-case-message'>
<p>The main use case of Stanza Content Encryption is the use of end-to-end encryption protocols in combination with extension protocols that store sensitive information in other places than the message body.</p>
<examplecaption='Finished message stanza containing the <content/> element from the previous example encrypted using a hypothetical encryption protocol and SCE.'><![CDATA[
<section2topic='Use in <iq/> stanzas'anchor='use-case-iq'>
<p>Stanza Content Encryption thrives not only to allow for rich content encryption in <message/> stanzas, but is also applicable to <iq/> queries. A resource might want to query sensitive information from another resource capable of Stanza Content Encryption.</p>
<examplecaption='Sender prepares a &content; element containing the query subject.'><![CDATA[
<examplecaption='The sender then encrypts the &content; element for the recipient and sends the <iq/> containing the result of the encryption.'><![CDATA[
<p>In order to send an encrypted message without leaking extension elements the sender prepares the message by placing the sensitive extension elements inside a &payload; element inside a &content; element.</p>
<p>Depending on the encryption-specific SCE-profile, some affix elements are added as child elements of the &content; element.</p>
<p>The &content; element is then serialized into XML and encrypted using the SCE-specific profile of the encryption mechanism in place. The result is appended to the message.</p>
<p>Since the outer message element does not contain a <body/> element the sender appends an unencrypted <store/> hint as specified in &xep0334;.</p>
<p>The recipient of the message decrypts the content of the &envelope; element to retrieve the &content; element. Depending on the affix profiles specified by the used encryption protocol, the affix elements are verified to prevent certain attacks from taking place.</p>
<p>Next the extension elements of the &content; elements &payload; element are checked against the whitelist/blacklist and any disallowed elements are discarded.</p>
<p>As a last step, the original unencrypted stanza is recreated by replacing the &envelope; element of the stanza with the contents of the &payload; element.</p>
</section1>
<section1topic='Blacklist'anchor='blacklist'>
<p>The receiving client MUST ignore certain elements that may allow for attacks to take place.</p>
<p>Since it is hard to come up with a complete list of blacklisted elements, a general rule of thumb would be the following:</p>
<p>Blacklisted are all elements that need to be read by the server at some point.</p>
<p>Below is an additional list of elements that are definitely forbidden inside the &content; element and MUST instead be placed in the message unencrypted.</p>
<tablecaption='Examples for elements that MUST be ignored by the recipient'>
<tr>
<th>Element</th>
<th>Reason</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Elements of &xep0334;</td>
<td>Those elements are addressed to the server and of no interest for the client</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Origin-ID elements of &xep0359;</td>
<td>These IDs may be used to identify a message even though it cannot be decrypted.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TODO: Other elements?</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
</section1>
<section1topic='Business Rules'anchor='rules'>
<p>Unencrypted &content; elements are NOT ALLOWED as child elements of the stanza and MUST be dropped.</p>
<p>Elements in the &content; elements &payload; element MUST be identified using an element name and namespace. Notably the <body/> element MUST contain a valid namespace (i.e. "jabber:client").</p>
<p>The recipient must verify that the decrypted &content; element contains valid XML before processing it any further. Invalid XML must be rejected.</p>
<p>After verifying the integrity of the &content; element, the recipient needs to make sure that no blacklisted elements are found within the payload. Any forbidden elements MUST be dropped before the message is processed any further.</p>
<p>Furthermore the receiving client MUST ignore any extension elements considered as sensitive which are found outside of the &content; element, especially as direct unencrypted child elements of the enclosing stanza.</p>
<p>Duplicate elements within the &content; element MUST be dropped.</p>
<p>Elements in the &content; element override elements in the enclosing stanza. TODO: Maybe we want to remove this rule by disallowing duplicate elements all together?</p>
<p>Since a message encrypted with SCE MUST NOT contain a <body/> element, it is not eligible for MAM message storage (&xep0313;). Therefore sending entities MUST append an unencrypted &xep0334;<store/> hint as a direct child element to the message.</p>
<p>As a first, naïve approach a recipient of a message containing an &envelope; element could simply reinject the reassambled unencrypted stanza into the XML stream. This might introduce some security issues. Most notably, there is no way to distinguish end-to-end encrypted elements from unencrypted elements.</p>
<p>Implementations should rather handle encrypted elements explicitly.</p>
<p>For the sake of simplicity, the examples in this document are not encrypted. A real-world implementation MUST make use of real cryptographic protocols.</p>
<p>This specification presents a set of affix elements which can be used to counter certain attacks. However it does not dictate any behaviour regarding what elements MUST be used/verified or when.</p>
<p>Different cryptographic protocols come with different possible attack scenarios which must be taken into consideration, so it is left up to those cryptographic protocols to define profiles that describe the use of affix elements.</p>