On 09/23/15 17:04, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> It's because, 99.9% of the time, a bad signature doesn't mean a hostile
> adversary -- it means a noisy network.  It means an MTA may have mangled
> a PGP/MIME attachment, it means a cosmic ray flipped a bit, whatever.

The former of which is enormously more likely than the latter...   :)

(Since a cosmic bit-flip is likely to affect only a single message,
while a misconfigured MTA will most likely mangle every susceptible
message that passes through it.)

> I need to think about this some.  I think you're right, but not for the
> reasons you set out.  I think the functional difference comes from what
> a bad signature can tell us about the traffic channel itself -- not what
> it tells us about the traffic.

I wasn't thinking about "what it tells us about the traffic" so much as
"even a failed signature conveys information about the sender's intent".
 Whatever the reason for the failure.  But your point about it telling
us about failures in the traffic channel is well made.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  [email protected]
  [email protected]
  Landline: 603.293.8485

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

_______________________________________________
enigmail-users mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe or make changes to your subscription click here:
https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net

Reply via email to