At 05:58 AM 3/3/2006 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>>> Alex Alten wrote:
>>>>> At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>>>>>> Alex Alten wrote:
>>>>>>> At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>>>>>>>> Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen
>>>>>>>> technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an
>>>>>>>> address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to
>>>>>>> a distributed set of members last year. We all had each
>>>>>>> other's
>>>>>>> public keys (about a dozen or so).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent
>>>>>>> me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his
>>>>>>> firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field
>>>>>>> "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Since it didn't match the email name
>>>>>>> in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME
>>>>>>> attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email.
>>>>>>> It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and
>>>>>>> forth, to figure out the root of the problem.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the
>>>>>>> endangered species list.
>>>>>> I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since
>>>>>> clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using.
>>>>> I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it
>>>>> is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a
>>>>> fundamental architectural flaw.
>>>> OK - I'll bite - why does the sender's identity have any impact on the
>>>> recipient's ability to decrypt?
>>>>
>>> Because the software needs a unique ID/name to find the correct
>>> key to use. In practice (corporate) users can have multiple email
>>> names, see my reply to Peter Gutman. This is not the fault of
>>> the email architecture, which has been working fine for 30-40
>>> years, but the fault
>>> of the X.509 architecture trying to piggyback on an address/name
>>> space that is not designed with security/cryptography
>>> considerations in mind.
>> I have to admit to not being familiar with S/MIME, but the usual
>> practice is to identify the signing key in the signature. Certainly this
>> is what OpenPGP does. Its also kinda weird to refuse to decrypt just
>> because the signature can't be verified.
>>
>
> How does OpenPGP identify the signing key in the incoming email's
signature?
Here's the output of one of the example programs in OpenPGP:SDK
(http://openpgp.nominet.org.uk/), showing the structure of an OpenPGP
signed file. I trust it is self-explanatory.
Assuming this file is attached to an incoming email message, how does the
receiver's email software match the Signer ID (= 0x8337FE6485F4ED64) to
a X.509 cert in his local cache that is associated with the email sender's name
(= "[EMAIL PROTECTED]")?
--
- Alex Alten
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