oh, and keep your gpg (or s/mime) private keys on your person (floppy
disk? usb drive? crypto-card?) rather than in your local machine's home
directory.

but even that has weaknesses :)

Jeff

On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 16:28 -0500, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 15:10 -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 14:36 -0500, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 00:40 -0800, Amish Munshi wrote:
> > > > Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > 
> > > >  You dont have people in the market who 
> > > > can read encrypted mails, but you will definately have admins who will 
> > > > read mails if they are in plain text.
> > > 
> > > then you fire them.
> > 
> > After the damage is done, and *if* you catch him, some long time
> > after the fact.
> > 
> > [snip]
> > > root has access to memory (even gpg has to store the password in memory
> > > while decrypting something) and root also has access to your private
> > > keys.
> > > 
> > > so yes, they can decrypt it.
> > 
> > But it's more difficult to find keys in RAM than to page thru an
> > mbox.
> 
> it doesn't matter - the whole gpg argument is pointless anyway and has
> no bearing on the original discussion.
> 
> we're talking about encrypting the mail only once it arrives on the
> local machine... but presumably the admin can read the mail long before
> it even gets to the user's local machine. so... the point of encrypting
> would be...?????
> 
> since the admin has the ability to page thru the mbox file on the
> server, why even bother trying to page thru memory to find the key on
> the user's local machine in the first place? :)
> 
> this whole discussion is about "make me believe it's more secure even
> tho it isn't" which is a complete waste of our resources.
> 
> if you guys want to send us a patch, go for it - but even you have to
> admit that it doesn't fix the problem.
> 
> the way to solve this is to have everyone send you PGP/MIME (or S/MIME)
> encrypted messages to start with, then it really is "secure" from start
> to finish.
> 
> that is the ONLY solution. period.
> 
> Jeff
> 
-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Novell, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  - www.novell.com

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