Software Update: The Bat! 9.1.16

Ritlabs has released version 9.1.16 of its email program The Bat. The program supports several pop3 and imap4 accounts, and has a Bayesian spam filter and extensive search and filtering capabilities. There is also support for pgp, end-to-end encryption and the e-mails can be stored encrypted on the hard disk. Furthermore, there are no minimum system requirements. It runs on the oldest hardware, but can also handle the AVX-512 instruction set, which can be found in Intel’s Xeon Phi x200 Knights Landing. The changelog for this release looks like this:

New features

• The /TLS_DISABLE_ECDSA command line parameter to disable the cipher suites with Ellipric Curve DSA server certificates
• The Bat! QR Code generator now includes an ECI block to indicate theat the text has UTF-8 encoding for those texts that could not be encoded with Kanji or ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding, for example Greek or Cyrillic characters separated by spaces or Unicode emoji characters

Improvements

• In an ECDSA signature, if a hash function had larger digest length (in bits) than the field size (which is not a good practice), The Bat! treated these signatures as invalid. It might lead to invalid ECC certificates, eg signed by “sha512ECDSA” algorithm. It might also lead to the following error: “TLS protocol error: Internal error BuildClientKeyExchange”. For more information, see section 6.4 of FIPS.186-4 “ECDSA Digital Signature Generation and Verification”: it is recommended that the security strength associated with the bit length of n and the security strength of the hash function be the same unless an agreement has been made between participating entities to use a stronger hash function. When the length of the output of the hash function is greater than the bit length of n, then the leftmost n bits of the hash function output block shall be used in any calculation using the hash function output during the generation or verification of a digital signature . A hash function that provides a lower security strength than the security strength associated with the bit length of n ordinarily should not be used, since this would reduce the security strength of the digital signature process to a level no greater than that provided by the hash function
• A certificate used to sign a message may also have a “Content Commitment” (non-repudiation) key usage instead of the “Digital Signature”
• When determining connection settings (host, port, encryption type) to an unknown mail server, TLS connection settings didn’t take priority over plain text ones
• File type associations (default programs) can no logner be changed from an application since Windows 8 or later. So, if The Bat! is running under Windows 8 or Windows 10, the relevant elements are not shown in the “Applications” tab. Besides that, the dialog to associate file types no longer appers when The Bat! starts

Fixes

• The Bat! did require “Key Encipherment” or “Key Agreement” in “Key Usage” certificate attribute for TLS even if the certificate was only used to sign ephemeral keys to provide perfect forward secrecy. If a server only supports perfect forward secrecy TLS cipher suites, the certificate used by this server may have no “Key Encipherment” or “Key Agreement” in the “Key Usage” attribute. As a result, the following error is fixed with Google (GMail) servers: “TLS handshake failure. Invalid server certificate (The certificate cannot be used for this purpose)”
• The Bat! QR Code generator didn’t support Kanji character set
• (#0001785) Ctrl+mouse wheel doesn’t zoom in/out in the “plain text” editor and “Windows editor”
• (#0001942) Search in QuickTemplates causes error on closing the window
• (#0001972) The message popup menu does not contain the option “Test filters”
• Added showing of secondary shortcuts (if a popup or menu item has two shortcuts)
• Fixed toolbar position after loading
• Fixed order or items in popup menus
• Added possibility to put toolbars to the right of the main menu
• Fixed deletion of customized sub-menus (tags, colors, etc.)
• Fixed image insert from Browsers into HTML editors
• Fixed an error when selecting some images in toolbar customization
• The default mail server configuration data was missing in The Bat! in all versions released after June 9th, 2019
• Fixed issues with menu images on 175% DPI
• S/MIME did not work since v9.1.10
• The Bat! did try to change associations from the Preferences dialog even if nothing in this configuration was changed by the user