The Holy Grail of Security? By JENNIFER EVANS Special to Globe and Mail Update Friday, January 10
<http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/tech/RTGAM/20030110/gtevans/> E-mail has been in the news a lot recently as investigators have gone back and found 'smoking guns' in long-discarded messages. ... Those 'confidential' disclaimers on messages are largely pointless, as e-mail is considered by the Canadian government to be a form of insecure communication. Enterprise-wide initiatives to secure e-mail are spotty and unreliable. But despite the obvious threats to intellectual property and corporate security, very few are taking advantage of a solution that offers end-to-end secure e-mail communication, file sharing and other electronic exchanges, a solution that would virtually rid the enterprise of the threat of compromise. Are governments and corporations negligently slow to adapt or does PKI have a major public relations problem? ... Historically the issues with PKI have been its marketing, its ease of use, and its incomprehensibility to the layperson. And not just for the layperson. Three years ago, when I was working for a network security value added reseller, we picked up Entrust as a solution. Entrust was a pioneer in public key infrastructure, and yet a team of experienced security sales people had a very difficult time understanding what it did, much less articulating it to clients and understanding which clients would find it of value. One of the reasons why PKI is so inscrutable is its basis in remote mathematical concepts of encryption, logarithms, terms like 'hash value' and the various types of keys that are used during the process (public key, private key, session key, and so on), not to mention digital signatures and digital certificates, forbidding concepts that are not easily conveyed to the user or the executive. .. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]