Adam Megacz wrote:
> The advent of public-key email security resulted in a network effect:
> it took very little effort to get access to a very large pool of
> people with whom you could communicate securely.  This offset the cost
> of having to maintain a ~/.pgp and a lot more people wound up with
> access to email encryption.
> 
> I guess in this sense I should have said "would immensely accelerate
> adoption" rather than "[lack of] is inhibiting adoption".

The number of people using e-mail encryption is such a small percentage
of the e-mailing population that it is barely worth mentioning.  The PGP
model has not resulted in its inclusion as a default feature in the most
common e-mail clients.

Getting back to OpenAFS.  If you want to use PGP with OpenAFS there
really is nothing stopping you from do so today.  All you have to do
is implement a daemon that provides a function similar to gssklogd
but instead of using GSS-API with X.509 certificates you would use a
protocol that utilizes PGP to perform your authentication.  The daemon
would then generate a token and return it to the client so that it
could be stored in the process authentication group.  OpenAFS is not
an authentication system.   The AFS protection service is simply a
database of name to ID mappings.  The IDs are stored on the ACLs.  How
you choose to allocate AFS IDs is up to the cell administrator.  The
authentication service you choose to use is completely independent of
the OpenAFS protection service and its ID allocation.

Jeffrey Altman

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

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