I don't think you need all that much to get good secure private email. You need a client that can make PEM pretty seamless; reduce it to a button that says "encrypt when possible." You need the client to be able to generate a keypair, upload the public half, and pull down (seamlessly) recipient public keys. You need a server to store and return those keys. You need an installed base to kickstart the network effect.
Who has that? Apple certainly; Microsoft could; Google perhaps (although not reading email is against their business model). Maybe even the FB API. It's not perfect -- seems to me the biggest weakness is (a) the client could double-encrypt for TLA's to read, or (b) it could give you the wrong key so your mail only goes to the bad guy -- but it's a hell of a lot better than we have now and I'd say it's more than good enough. Thoughts? _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
