Serge Mister and Robert Zuccherato reports that the OpenPGP protocol is vulnerable to a cryptographic attack when using symmetric encryption in an automated way.
David Shaw reports about the impact:
This attack, while very significant from a cryptographic point of view, is not generally effective in the real world. To be specific, unless you have your OpenPGP program set up as part of an automated system to accept encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then provide a response to the submitter, then this does not affect you at all.
Note that the fix
in GnuPG does note completely
eliminate the potential problem:
These patches disable a portion of the OpenPGP protocol that the attack is exploiting. This change should not be user visible. With the patch in place, this attack will not work using a public-key encrypted message. It will still work using a passphrase-encrypted message.
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