Hello everyone,

At Posteo, we've implemented OPENPGPKEY and SMIMEA. We are a provider of
email accounts (exclusively on a paid basis) with a strong focus on
privacy and security.

We think it would be better for the local parts to use hashing.

Our two points:
 - The discussion obviously came up because of trying to determine a way
to find entries when users use upper and lower case characters. From our
perspective, this is not a problem that these drafts can solve.
 - Base encoding equates to plaintext transfer and for a security
feature, privacy should not be disregarded.

In detail:
For us it is not a question for these drafts, whether local parts should
be normalised or not. The drafts complement email, and they should
therefore not introduce their own interpretation of email. This runs
contrary to the sense of the RFC system and would in that form
presumably delay or prevent adoption of the drafts. For us it is
perfectly clear that the local parts are either written the same and
match, or not. If the email community thinks that there is a problem
with the local parts, then that is, in my opinion, a matter for another
draft. OPENPGPKEY and SMIMEA should not be used for work on a different
project.

Hashing of local parts is definitely a great advance over plaintext
transfer in terms of security. Even if hashing was not initially
intended as a security feature, it is one. In any case, it distinctly
hinders the possibility of simply reading the data in DNS requests -
data that could convey a lot about the communication behaviour of users.
Hashing is from our perspective a necessary first step, especially when
DNS requests do not occur encrypted. Of course, hashing does not protect
against "decryption" - but it makes a distinct difference whether I need
to make a targeted attack on a hash, or can arbitrarily search through
the plaintext in a stream of data.

We would strongly welcome it if the drafts were to move forward with
hashing, in terms of acceptance as a genuine security feature at the
service of internet users. We need as much security as possible; the
Snowden revelations demonstrated this.

Best regards,

Patrik

Am 22.07.2015 um 12:00 schrieb "Olafur Gudmundsson" <ogud at ogud.com>:


Dear Colleagues


The sense of the room in the IETF-93 meeting was to do do a BASE32
encoding of local part with 60 character labels,
shortest label is the left most label.

If you can NOT live with this path forward now is your last chance to
say so.


By August 1'st the chairs will instruct editors how to proceed.

Warren & Olafur

-- 
Patrik Löhr

Posteo e.K.
Methfesselstr. 38
10965 Berlin

web <https://posteo.de>

Handelsregister: Berlin-Charlottenburg · HRA 47592 B

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Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

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