Standard form of email signature

Question

A little bit of background: I want to sign my emails for my own safety. None of my intended recipients are users of digital signatures. If one day someone were to impersonate me, I can prove my own identity, and disprove the identity of my impersonator.

I intend to use GPG to produce signatures for my emails. Right now, I am facing a dilemma on how to attach these signatures. Whether to use 'clearsign', 'detached signature', or just plain old 'sign'.

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I will elaborate on my thought process, and the pros and cons I came up with, of each form of signatures.

Clear Signature

Pros:

• No external program required to read messages
• Verification can be done easily

Cons:

• Intrusive and ugly headers

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

some message
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

some signature
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Detached Signature

Pros:

• No external program required to read messages
• No intrusive and ugly headers

Cons:

• To verify messages, the content must be copied and formatted exactly like how it was when used to produce the signature. Reference here.

Normal Sign

Pros:

• No intrusive and ugly headers

Cons:

• Require an external program to read messages
• Or the alternative is, to duplicate the content of the message. One for readability, and another that was baked in the signature, as produced by GPG.
• When using the alternative, produces longer emails.
• When using the alternative, to verify a message, one will need to compare the produced output from the baked content in the signature, and the duplicated plain content in the email.

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If I were to resort to use 'clearsign', when my recipient don't have a clue in the purpose of digital signatures, the ugly headers will make my emails look unprofessional. I want to ensure any digital signature I attach to be as least intrusive as possible.

I could simply remove the headers. However, the process of verifying signatures becomes no less different than 'detached signature', although less error prone.

If I were to use just the normal 'sign' and duplicate the content for plain reading, in some cases, this procedure defeats the whole point of digital signatures through hashing and getting the fingerprint of the message.

What should I do? What's the norm of attaching signatures to emails? Are there other alternatives that I have yet to consider?

Answer 1

PGP/MIME (RFC 4880 and RFC 3156) is (in my humble opinion) the least intrusive way to PGP-sign mail. It puts the signature into an attachment of type application/pgp-signature using the filename signature.asc, which some email clients will be able to verify and others will at least recognize that it's a cryptographic signature.

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However, if you control your server, you could consider using something more broadly adopted: DKIM and DMARC.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail, RFC 6376) signs your message body as well as several headers (typically From, Date, To, and Subject). Keys are served via DNS and signature verification is decently universal as this (alongside DMARC) is a key defense against spoofing attacks like phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC).

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, RFC 7489) sets a policy: what to do when an email fails to verify its DKIM signature (and is not permitted by SPF – you need an SPF record of v=spf1 ?all, denoting that SPF permits nothing, to effectively require DKIM). DMARC can instruct servers to quarantine or reject non-compliant mail. It also has reporting built in so you can observe what mail might be inappropriately blocked.

This ensures all mail sent by your server is cryptographically signed, that it's verified by nearly all recipients, and that you can instruct recipients to block or quarantine mail that isn't provably from you.