Hi
On Monday 4 November 2013 at 10:43:43 PM, in <mid:[email protected]>, Uwe Brauer wrote: > - NSA (among others) has abused its resource to > read email worldwide at a very large scale. Indeed. > - so if a lot of people, say 30 % of all users > would encrypt their email, then NSA statistical > approach would *not* work that smooth and this > is a good thing. Why do you describe it as a statistical approach? I guess 30% was plucked out of the air. It would seem self-evident that if a sizeable proportion of emails travelled encrypted, the NSA etc. would have to do more work to read them. > - so encrypting email should be easy and look > trustful for a majority of users I like the idea, but have a bit of an issue with security made too easy. Security has to be inconvenient; just a lot more so for a would-be attacker than for the person using the security. > - usually public/private key based methods are > considered relative secure (Even Snowden claimed > that you could rely on them), this does not mean > that the NSA could not read your email. They would > usually try to enter your machine installing a > keylogger or something like this. But this is > beyond the statistical method I mentioned above. Hopefully, if it was more effort and more cost to read an individual's mail, that individual might be left alone unless they are a suspect. But what about an individual two or three communication hops from a suspect? > - if I understand correctly the real problem is > not security of the the cipher but the > authenticity of the sender and so the most > common attack is a man in the middle attack. This > is true for both smime and gpg. So comparing > fingerprints of public key is a good thing, > which most of us, I presume, don't do. For most people's communication, it is not encrypted so the main problem is simply being read in transit, and/or stored. Once you start encrypting, even without putting the effort in for sender authentication, it takes more effort to snoop on your mail than on the majority of people's. > - from my own experience I am convinced that smime > is much easier than gpg[2] for reasons I am not > going to repeat here. (I got 7 out of 10 of my > friends/colleagues to use smime, but 0 of 10 to > use gpg.) Depending on the software people are using. I'm willing to accept that there are probably more people for whom S/MIME is easier to use. > - one of the reasons some of them hesitated was > the fact that the certificates were offered by > some commercial company they did not know and > trust.[3] They would have had installed it from > a government based organisation, say the > ministry of justice though. I think "know" is the key factor, but "know and trust" is even better. I suspect a whole lot of people would also be perfectly comfortable if a certificate were available from the company that supplied their operating system, or their email application or webmail account. Or maybe from their bank or ISP. > - so if some government based organisation would > do what say commodo does it would send a signal > to the public that it takes privacy seriously > and I think it would encourage more people to use > smime. The actions of governments and government organisations in so many countries send signals that they are anti-privacy, or at least not pro-privacy. I think this small contradictory signal would be in severe danger of being drowned out. But now I understand what you meant. > - Private certificates, are unfortunately no > solution. Yes it is possible with openssl to > generate them, I have done that myself. However > it is very difficult till impossible to convince > the main email programs, such as outlook, > thunderbird or Apple mail to use them or to use > public keys sent by such certificates. [4] The email app I am using to write this message can (almost trivially) generate and use self-signed certificates for the email accounts it has configured. The difficulty is getting other people to persuade their MUA to accept them. > Footnotes: [1] I must add that I don't share your > general view about government based organisations. > I still hope that abuse is the exception not the > rule.. I think I mentioned in one of my other postings that I was using hyperbole to make my point. I'm not quite _that_ paranoid, but I believe in exercising a healthy skepticism. -- Best regards MFPA mailto:[email protected] Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
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