RFC 3629 Make use of XEP-0380: Explicit Message Encryption. Minior editorial fixes. Initial published version approved by the XMPP Council. First draft. This XMPP extension protocol specifies a profile of &xep0373; for OpenPGP
secured Instant Messaging (IM). Unlike similar XEPs, e.g., &xep0384;, this XEP does not
provide Forward Secrecy (FS), but as an advantage in return, allows
users to read their archived conversations (respectively their
encrypted data) later on. Of course, only as long as they still
possess the according secret key. FS and being able to decrypt
archived messages are mutually exclusive, i.e., one can not have
both. The authors therefore consider this XEP complementary to
similar ones which also provide end-to-end encryption but with a
different feature set. If an entity supports exchanging OpenPGP encrypted and signed
instant messages over XMPP, i.e., what is specified herein, it MUST
advertise that fact by announcing a &xep0030; feature of
'urn:xmpp:openpgp:im:0'. It thus includes this feature in response
to a service discovery request. Because of possible downgrade attacks, users should be given an
option to force the usage of the protocol defined herein no matter
if the remote announces support or not. In order to establish an OpenPGP secured IM communication, IM
clients first need to determine the public key of their
interlocutor(s). OpenPGP historically provides public keyservers
which can be used for key retrieval. Additional there are methods
to store OpenPGP key information in the Domain Name
System (DNS). This specification does not restrict the mechanism
of key discovery and retrieval, but compliant clients MUST support
the public key announcement as described in XEP-0373
§ 4. After the required public keys have been discovered, XMPP
clients engage in an OpenPGP secured IM
conversation by exchanging &openpgp; extension elements. They MUST
use the &signcrypt; OpenPGP content element specified in
XEP-0373§ 3.1. The child elements of the OpenPGP content element's &payload;
can be seen as stanza extension elements which are encrypted and
signed. After the &openpgp; element and the including &signcrypt;,
element was verified, they SHOULD be processed similar as if they
had been direct extension elements of the stanza. For example,
direct child elements found in &payload; in the context of IM
could be: But just as with stanza extension elements, child elements of
&payload; can be any extension element. The example above uses
the <body/> element as defined in RFC 6121. Note that it
uses 'jabber:client' as namespace, but since the same
<body/> element is also defined in the 'jabber:server'
namespace, recipients MUST accept both. Clients MUST expect multiple public keys to be announced for a single remote entity. In this case all keys MUST be used for encryption. Clients MAY want to use the mechanism in XEP-0373 § 5 to
synchronize their secret key(s) over multiple devices. Thus, they
should query the user's PEP service for an eventually stored
encrypted secret key. Only &signcrypt; MUST be used for the IM
use case. Encrypted but unsigned messages (&crypt;) do not provide
an advantage over unencrypted ones since the sender can not be
verified. As result of this rule, the user interface of
IM clients implementing the protocol defined herein MUST NOT
provide an option for the user to select between sign+crypt, sign
or crypt. This also increases the usability. In the IM use case every &MESSAGE; equipped with &openpgp;
SHOULD include an unencrypted <body/> explaining that the actual
message is encrypted. Furthermore the message SHOULD contain a
'store' hint as defined in &xep0334; §
4.4 and a "this message contains an encrypted body text" hint
in form of an <encryption/> extension element as specified by
&xep0380;. This document requires no interaction with &IANA;. The ®ISTRAR; includes 'urn:xmpp:openpgp:0' in its registry of protocol namespaces (see &NAMESPACES;). This XEP does not define a Schema, since it exclusively uses elements from
XEP-0373 and other XEPs.
Please refer to the
Acknowledgements section
of XEP-0373 since the two XEPs where designed together.