On 9/7/14 11:09 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 9:21 AM, Pete Resnick<[email protected]> wrote:
Along similar lines to what John Levine said,: Obviously doing e2e crypto
gets you signatures. Since we are blue-skying here, I think it is perfectly
plausible to say, "If you want to send me e2e encrypted messages, you also
have to send me signed messages, and you don't or your signature is not in
my contacts list already, your encrypted mail is going to bounce." I think
it's possible that in the fullness of time, many users go to a contact-list
model of email (a la IM) where the mail simply bounces unless it has a
signature that is already in the contacts list.
I think that is right, but not the whole picture.
A tangential up-level: I haven't gotten through all of the mail on the
list yet (travel and other things have slowed me down), but I do notice
that there has been quite a bit of "whole picture" discussion. I think
that's fine, as blue-skying does involve thinking about how all of the
pieces fit together. But as Stephen and I said in the first message, the
thing we're looking for on this list is to "identify some bit(s) of work
that the IETF could credibly do that'd improve the real-world end-to-end
security and privacy of email. And note that 'credible' there requires
stuff to be both technically sane and to have a sufficient set of
capable folks interested and willing to do work." So while it's
*possible* that a forklift replacement of email as we know it might be
one of those "bits of work", separating out some smaller work items that
could eventually be fit together into a shiny new system are probably
the more interesting ideas. :-)
That said, a couple of questions that have been rattling around in my brain:
I see endymail as a subset of mail. All mail should be encrypted at
the message layer but only whitelisted mail would be e2e encrypted.
This can be done automatically as follows:
A) Some sort of discovery infrastructure maps email addresses to key hashes.
B) Some sort of discovery infrastructure maps key hashes to keys.
I've been wondering about this. When I think about using crypto (whether
encryption or signatures), it seems like requiring a discovery mechanism
was increasing the burden. For many of my correspondents, with whom I'm
currently communicating in the clear, a TOFU key exchange in those
emails (authenticated out-of-band) might be a plausible mechanism.
When we think about this, do we really need to assume that we either use
the old or the new, and never the twain shall meet?
pr
--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478
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