Abhilash Raj writes: > Well what i want to make it is that whenever a user sends a mail to the > list it should be singed with his private key so that it can be verified > against his public that he uploads if he wants permissions to post in the > list.
You mean that the user should sign it himself (or with the help of his mail client), is that correct? > As the message is received by mailman its signature is verified and > then its encrypted and sent to each person, wherein those who > haven't uploaded their key will also receive an unencrypted > copy(with a probability that it may not be intended for them or not > authentic mail). I don't understand the use case for having both encrypted and unencrypted copies distributed. Is the encryption intended to be merely authentication? But what Mailman has is by definition the subscriber's public key; anybody might have that. It *could* be kept secret, but I think that's not so easy to prove. I would have imagined that maybe Mailman would resign using its own private key, to authenticate the list, and testify that it had authenticated the sender. I also don't understand what you mean by "not authentic mail". The original signature proves it authentic. The subscribers may not have the appropriate to key to verify, but in that case I don't see why they would want to delegate it to Mailman. I think you have a difficult task in merely specifying what you want this system to do. That's likely to be a couple orders of magnitude harder than the implementation! > Yes, this was on the top of my mind while trying to attempt this > project. I learned about key-servers. I think we could setup one > wherein all the public key would be stored that are uploaded by > users and retrieved when needed. But who watches the watcher? That is, what does the keyserver need to know about the key's owner, and how does the candidate subscriber prove it to the keyserver? I think there are lots of use cases for integrating mailing list managers into the public key infrastructure, but you need to be careful to specify them. I think you probably should start with simple use cases, like proving subscriber identity to the mailing list manager, eg for anti-spam purposes.[1] Footnotes: [1] Even that is not a sure winner, since most users will not know how to do this for themselves. So it will have to be integrated into clients, which themselves might be infected by a virus. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
