  We employ a functional approach to investigate the confinement problem in
quenched Landau gauge QCD. We demonstrate analytically that a linear rising
potential between massive quarks is generated by infrared singularities in the
dressed quark-gluon vertex. The selfconsistent mechanism that generates these
singularities is driven by the scalar Dirac amplitudes of the full vertex and
the quark propagator. These can only be present when chiral symmetry is broken.
We have thus uncovered a novel mechanism that directly links chiral symmetry
breaking with confinement.
