Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
* Ian G [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, why not always sign messages to a list that permits signatures? It's hard to see the benefit, and it is easy to see the potential cost. In a litiguous world, we are (slightly) better off not using messages that are going to haunt us in years to come. As a principle, I'd never advise anyone to sign any message unless they could state what that meant. Well, I for one value the spreading of cryptographic means higher than what might happen due to some misguided lawyer. with all the lost privacy due to so-called protection laws from all the evildoers this has only strengthened my resolve. after all, the lawyers are still there even if one doesn't use cryptographic means. In my world there's just too much lobbyism involved not to take action in the vital field of privacy. Most people using electronic communications either believe that some occasional eavesdropping is ok (for they have nothing to hide; an arguement solely given by the state in some 1984 manner), or they don't grasp the extent of eavesdropping possibilities, or they just don't bother. not bothering is just equally bad as giving in to the state because if one remains passive, it is not likely that one will change one's perception easily switching to actively propagate one's ideals (because of a certain receptiveness to state arguements). and nowadays it's hard enough to change things even if one is actively involved. It could well be that this is a difference in view across the Atlantic. It seems that many (continental) Europeans do not perceive a threat to themselves from things they write; whereas the English-centric world is more NDA obsessed. I guess you mean Non-Disclosure Agreement by NDA. All those acronyms; it's about time the A takes action. I haven't really perceived it the way you describe, but I don't work in an environment where such things could matter at all. I'm in the scientific community (chemistry), and there limits of talk (if you get the meaning) are described pretty well, and this only affects some areas of competition. Given that some individual or even organisation keeps track of its employees' writings in/on public media, I barely see the benefits apart from some cases where it comes to leaking info which is already prohibited by some kind of Non-Disclosure Agreement. those exist here too, but with all the transparency about it, one really has to be utterly stupid to mess things up. From what you write I get the impression that even the slightest hint about even the slightest clue may cause one harm. In my opinion this fuels fear, just like telling a teenager not to ever fall in love because he'll only get hurt anyway. we have misguided lawyers here too, far too many of them in fact, for about over 20 years, and they need to get an income. all that increased sueing stuff can be traced back to the growing numbers of lawyers hitting the open market. not that it offers a solution but there's still the bottom of the ocean or the moon, and mars may be an issue soon... Quite frankly, I wouldn't have thought this topic would emerge the way it has on a cryptography mailinglist. Maybe it's about time to publish my article Why Cryptography Is Important In Modern Life after all (don't hold your breath; with me being pretty busy it's not due until after eastern). Cryptography is a tool, not a religion, notwithstanding the desires of many to deify it. It is the application that delivers benefits, and properly thought out apps generally use as little crypto as they can get away with. Top-down applications thinking says use the tool that does the job whereas bottom-up, toolbox thinking says use this tool because it's so cool! I guess you got me wrong, and I'm not sure I get your top-down, bottom-up analogies. Anyway, I'm not propagating means of cryptography because of a religious hype or something. to clarify this, me and my friends are not amused by officials having the legal means to listen in on email communications, phone conversations, etc. both without prior suspicion and some kind of notification of the person(s) being listened in to, let alone legal backup (it was rendered redundant anyway). because of the terrorist-threat-hype such processes are now accelerated to fit only the state's benefits, yet they sold as a citizen's benefit altogether. we have a saying here (i hope it carries over, i'm not a native english speaker): working at such a hectic pace replaces an intellectual calm. From what I wrote above I guess it can be boiled down to this. Means of cryptography are valued because of the possibility to protect one's privacy that the state obviously has deemed unnecessary, for good citizens surely don't have something to hide. simply put, since we all don't walk the street naked, the state always wins. such a state is out of balance, and checks are most likely still in place where they possibly can't influence a larger picture. someone
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ian G wrote: Chris Palmer wrote: Peter Saint-Andre writes: http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2006-02.html#2006-02-27T22:13 3. I see on your site you use and advertise for CACert. I hope CACert's signing cert(s) are never trusted by my browser, because then my browser would trust any cheap-ass random pseudonym in the world. IMHO trust is something you do, not something your browser does. Unless you're going to delegate trust to the browser manufacturers... Which brings us to my next point... You are probably talking about the Class 1 root that CAcert uses to issue pseudonymous certs. Yes, they can be acquired by any cheap-ass psuedonym (but not randomly, as I think there is a serial number in there which I was told was an unavoidable artifact of x.509). Over on Peter's blog it seems to indicate he is an Assurer ... assuming that is correct [it isn't a cryptographically sound image :) ] then this means he is at least assured which is their term for his identity having been verified. In CAcert, assurance is an action. You show me two government-issued photo IDs (GIPIDs) and I compare them with your visage and physical person; if I think they match, I assure you for some number of points in the web of trust. If you get to a certain number of points, you can use the Class 3 root. If you get even more points, you can become an assurer (someone who does assurances). I happened to use the trusted third party process for assurance (get copies of my GIPIDs witnessed and notarized by two persons who are legally authorized in my jurisdiction to witness and notarize documents), which results in more points initially and the ability to become an assurer more quickly. Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Peter Saint-Andre writes: http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2006-02.html#2006-02-27T22:13 1. Anonymity does matter. You might have heard of a little thing called the First Amendment. ;) It's great that you're proud of what you say, but no matter how proud you are, there could be bad, unfair consequences if you say certain things and/or if you have a certain identity. A little wisely-used anonymity can further an honest debate (such as debating what should be in the Constitution!) and protect people from low-power groups. 2. Email signing, alone, gives you only pseudonymity. 3. I see on your site you use and advertise for CACert. I hope CACert's signing cert(s) are never trusted by my browser, because then my browser would trust any cheap-ass random pseudonym in the world. Which brings us to my next point... 4. Identity is not, and can never be, a substitute for a real judgement about goodness. That I sign my messages doesn't make them any smarter; many good and helpful comments come from such forgeable identities as Steven Bellovin and Ben Laurie. Even fake names that look ridiculously fake, like StealthMonger, sometimes send useful information. When you immediately discount what that person says, you are doing yourself an unfavor. -- https://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer pgp3QSxLKKGry.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
-- Victor Duchovni wrote: My claim is that, while indeed it is easier to set the initial barriers higher when you design with greater hindsight, and some of the tractable, but not widely deployed email security measures will be there in IM systems from the start, never the less IM systems if they are to encroach on the ubiquity of email for ad-hoc communications between strangers (it is far easier to address strangers via email today) will encounter exactly the same intrinsic issues, and that technical measures will have equally partial efficacy. Total perfect and complete solutions will never be possible, but stopping the most flagrant and inconvenient abuses is perfectly feasible, and not even remarkably difficult. These days you see little spam on most Usenet groups, and one of the primary uses of Usenet is ad hoc communication between strangers. SSL works fine, PKI has serious problems. Usenet for the most part works fine, Jabber works fine, email has serious problems The federated structure of jabber, where random people connect to any one of a very large number of privileged servers is similar to the Usenet structure - and the Usenet structure works because for your server to retain your privileges, you need to control spam. I am willing to speculate that people will continue to unfairly tarnish the competence of the email RFC writers, without regard to the intrinsic properties of the medium. It is not so much that they were incompetent, but that they were writing for a more trusting and trustworthy world. Today, we have to do things differently. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PRRq2Za8iG5qzD2wX3ug3xGXEWyekUqHQTZAspUQ 4Mjw8nFOqtf9erylBgQZo+5aUTVPzgKVdij0TQUDs - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:15:36PM +0100, Ian G wrote: Email is hard to get encrypted, but it didn't stop Skype from doing encryped IMs easily. Likewise I have secured email communications with my wife via a single key exchange, so what? Skype has not easily created an interoperable federated system that secures all IM communications end-to-end, and many of the issues in doing that are non-technical. Right. Nor did email create a single federated system that crosses across to mobile phones. There is always a boundary where a system stops. Federated accross millions of account issuing organizations, not technologies, and email did do that, and IM did not. IM is like email from a choice MCI, Sprint or ATT, sure they can control the medium better, but this is a temporary state of affairs... The point is that the non-technical issues we are looking at here are *better* handled at the level of competitive systems, because they have incentives to solve them, whereas technical committees writing RFCs do not. These are closed systems that compete with each other, once they become federated, they can no longer compete on end-to-end security, because that is a property of the interoperability framework, not the individual product. Also with millions of account issuers, the abuse and identity problems become just as bad as for email. The problem is intrinsic, is not the result of lazy RFC writers. -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
--- John W Noerenberg II [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oh really? Then you should be able to send a note to my gmail address. So I have been reading this thread for the last couple days and the above comment gives me a chance to voice something that really needs to be said. Let's face it, a large chunk of emails (including work and official emails) are sent from folks personal yahoo, google, hotmail, AOL, etc etc accounts via web based interfaces. Hell even lots of official work accounts are going webmail now days as anything to make like better for the ignorant worker. We keep talking about tools and email client integration but everybody seems to be missing the obvious. Where are the inline integrated webmail authentication tools and don't say copy / paste. Until we solve this problem, I don't see mom and pop signing their emails automatically and / or transparently. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: Ben Laurie [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:16:55 + [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a distributed set of members last year. We all had each other's public keys (about a dozen or so). What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the endangered species list. I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using. I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a fundamental architectural flaw. OK - I'll bite - why does the sender's identity have any impact on the recipient's ability to decrypt? Because the software needs a unique ID/name to find the correct key to use. In practice (corporate) users can have multiple email names, see my reply to Peter Gutman. This is not the fault of the email architecture, which has been working fine for 30-40 years, but the fault of the X.509 architecture trying to piggyback on an address/name space that is not designed with security/cryptography considerations in mind. I have to admit to not being familiar with S/MIME, but the usual practice is to identify the signing key in the signature. Certainly this is what OpenPGP does. Its also kinda weird to refuse to decrypt just because the signature can't be verified. How does OpenPGP identify the signing key in the incoming email's signature? Here's the output of one of the example programs in OpenPGP:SDK (http://openpgp.nominet.org.uk/), showing the structure of an OpenPGP signed file. I trust it is self-explanatory. ptag new_format=0 content_tag=8 length_type=3 length=0x0 (0) position=0x0 (0) COMPRESSED packet Compressed Data Type: 1 ptag new_format=0 content_tag=4 length_type=0 length=0xd (13) position=0x0 (0) ONE PASS SIGNATURE packet Version: 3 Signature Type: Signature of a binary document (0x0) Hash Algorithm: SHA1 (0x2) Public Key Algorithm: RSA (Encrypt or Sign) (0x1) Signer ID: 0x8337FE6485F4ED64 Nested: 1 ptag new_format=0 content_tag=11 length_type=0 length=0x22 (34) position=0xf (15) LITERAL DATA HEADER packet literal data header format=b filename='to-be-signed' modification time=1141297085 (Thu Mar 2 10:58:05 2006) LITERAL DATA BODY packet literal data body length=16 data= To Be Signed. ptag new_format=0 content_tag=2 length_type=1 length=0x95 (149) position=0x33 (51) SIGNATURE packet Signature Version: 3 Signature Creation Time: time=1141297085 (Thu Mar 2 10:58:05 2006) Signature Type: Signature of a binary document (0x0) Signer ID: 0x8337FE6485F4ED64 Public Key Algorithm: RSA (Encrypt or Sign) (0x1) Hash Algorithm: SHA1 (0x2) hash2: 0xBF33 sig=7344970C0DF62B089E79FFF024137E9D7D8919B6B1F1F29F3CCE8CD34625759EC181452C1A17858E418BA838FD3FED6AD013E7562F0B4E87BCA81D82D22B825A3ED6447E0F31F14DE0321554D558CEDCC339424ADA01B7C7374BBC59DE54E6BE4670D9D9E6FAC6412E927545DF1D2F0A373BFE6D058893CF675554F2DF8BE079 -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
More strongly, if we've never met, and you are not in the habit of routinely signing email, thereby tying a key to your e-persona, it makes no sense to speak of *secure* communication to *you*. Regularly signing email is not necessarily a good idea. I like to be able to repudiate most emails I send... --Anton -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.1.2/274 - Release Date: 03/03/2006 - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
* Bill Stewart: Or you could try using the Google Keyserver - just because there isn't one doesn't mean you can't type in 9E94 4513 3983 5F70 or 9383DE06 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key and see what's in Google's cache. What a peculiar advice. We know for sure that Google logs these requests and stores them indefinitely. 8-( - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 05:58 AM 3/3/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a distributed set of members last year. We all had each other's public keys (about a dozen or so). What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the endangered species list. I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using. I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a fundamental architectural flaw. OK - I'll bite - why does the sender's identity have any impact on the recipient's ability to decrypt? Because the software needs a unique ID/name to find the correct key to use. In practice (corporate) users can have multiple email names, see my reply to Peter Gutman. This is not the fault of the email architecture, which has been working fine for 30-40 years, but the fault of the X.509 architecture trying to piggyback on an address/name space that is not designed with security/cryptography considerations in mind. I have to admit to not being familiar with S/MIME, but the usual practice is to identify the signing key in the signature. Certainly this is what OpenPGP does. Its also kinda weird to refuse to decrypt just because the signature can't be verified. How does OpenPGP identify the signing key in the incoming email's signature? Here's the output of one of the example programs in OpenPGP:SDK (http://openpgp.nominet.org.uk/), showing the structure of an OpenPGP signed file. I trust it is self-explanatory. Assuming this file is attached to an incoming email message, how does the receiver's email software match the Signer ID (= 0x8337FE6485F4ED64) to a X.509 cert in his local cache that is associated with the email sender's name (= [EMAIL PROTECTED])? -- - Alex Alten - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Hi, Basically our customer required us to encrypt any team communications. So we used PGP with email. I know the body of the email was encrypted, and I believe attachments were too. The certs were used to automate the decryption. Basically the PGP plugin would check the incoming mail's sender email name and try to find a local cert that had the same email name in it. Hmm, that sounds like broken software then, since the (probabilistically) unique keyID to locate the appropriate decryption or signature verification key is included in the message/signature - you never have to look at the From: address, and indeed trying to use it for key lookups would be a recipe for disaster because of the problems you pointed out. Peter. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 03:13 AM 3/6/2006 +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote: Basically our customer required us to encrypt any team communications. So we used PGP with email. I know the body of the email was encrypted, and I believe attachments were too. The certs were used to automate the decryption. Basically the PGP plugin would check the incoming mail's sender email name and try to find a local cert that had the same email name in it. Hmm, that sounds like broken software then, since the (probabilistically) unique keyID to locate the appropriate decryption or signature verification key is included in the message/signature - you never have to look at the From: address, and indeed trying to use it for key lookups would be a recipe for disaster because of the problems you pointed out. RFC 3280 states that an end entity's subject key id SHOULD be included. It is not a MANDATORY extension field, see section 4.2.1.2. So the software is not technically broken. Since the key id is derived from the raw public key itself, doesn't that defeat the purpose of automatically authenticating that the encrypted email is really from [EMAIL PROTECTED]? I'm assuming a naive email user on the receiver side that never manually maps the key id to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Most general users sort of understand the email name format, it's a bit much to force them to map a cryptic looking key id to it too. Especially considering the user might have dozens or hundreds of people on their mailing list. Mapping mistakes would be common. I won't mention the questions regarding certificate revocaton vs user email name. :-) - Alex -- - Alex Alten - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Alex Alten [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: At 03:13 AM 3/6/2006 +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote: Basically our customer required us to encrypt any team communications. So we used PGP with email. I know the body of the email was encrypted, and I believe attachments were too. The certs were used to automate the decryption. Basically the PGP plugin would check the incoming mail's sender email name and try to find a local cert that had the same email name in it. Hmm, that sounds like broken software then, since the (probabilistically) unique keyID to locate the appropriate decryption or signature verification key is included in the message/signature - you never have to look at the From: address, and indeed trying to use it for key lookups would be a recipe for disaster because of the problems you pointed out. RFC 3280 states that an end entity's subject key id SHOULD be included. It is not a MANDATORY extension field, see section 4.2.1.2. So the software is not technically broken. Uhh, what does RFC 3280 have to do with PGP, which is what you said you were using? In any case if you are using X.509 certs, you match by subject DN (or issuerAndSerialNumber for S/MIME), all of which serve the same function as the PGP key ID. Since the key id is derived from the raw public key itself, doesn't that defeat the purpose of automatically authenticating that the encrypted email is really from [EMAIL PROTECTED]? You use the PGP keyID or X.509 issuerAndSerialNumber to look up the key or certificate, then display as the signer the identity associated with the key or certificate. What's in the From: address never enters into it, although your software may choose to warn if the From: address doesn't match the email address associated with the key. Peter. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Alex Alten wrote: At 05:58 AM 3/3/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a distributed set of members last year. We all had each other's public keys (about a dozen or so). What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the endangered species list. I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using. I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a fundamental architectural flaw. OK - I'll bite - why does the sender's identity have any impact on the recipient's ability to decrypt? Because the software needs a unique ID/name to find the correct key to use. In practice (corporate) users can have multiple email names, see my reply to Peter Gutman. This is not the fault of the email architecture, which has been working fine for 30-40 years, but the fault of the X.509 architecture trying to piggyback on an address/name space that is not designed with security/cryptography considerations in mind. I have to admit to not being familiar with S/MIME, but the usual practice is to identify the signing key in the signature. Certainly this is what OpenPGP does. Its also kinda weird to refuse to decrypt just because the signature can't be verified. How does OpenPGP identify the signing key in the incoming email's signature? Here's the output of one of the example programs in OpenPGP:SDK (http://openpgp.nominet.org.uk/), showing the structure of an OpenPGP signed file. I trust it is self-explanatory. Assuming this file is attached to an incoming email message, how does the receiver's email software match the Signer ID (= 0x8337FE6485F4ED64) to a X.509 cert in his local cache that is associated with the email sender's name (= [EMAIL PROTECTED])? It is _OpenPGP_ so it does not match it to an X.509 cert. It matches it to an OpenPGP key. -- http://www.links.org/ - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Victor Duchovni wrote: On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:15:36PM +0100, Ian G wrote: Email is hard to get encrypted, but it didn't stop Skype from doing encryped IMs easily. Likewise I have secured email communications with my wife via a single key exchange, so what? Skype has not easily created an interoperable federated system that secures all IM communications end-to-end, and many of the issues in doing that are non-technical. Right. Nor did email create a single federated system that crosses across to mobile phones. There is always a boundary where a system stops. Federated accross millions of account issuing organizations, not technologies, and email did do that, and IM did not. IM is like email from a choice MCI, Sprint or ATT, sure they can control the medium better, but this is a temporary state of affairs... Monolithic consumer IM services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc. are like that. Existing federated IM standards (e.g., Jabber/XMPP) are not. The point is that the non-technical issues we are looking at here are *better* handled at the level of competitive systems, because they have incentives to solve them, whereas technical committees writing RFCs do not. These are closed systems that compete with each other, once they become federated, they can no longer compete on end-to-end security, because that is a property of the interoperability framework, not the individual product. Also with millions of account issuers, the abuse and identity problems become just as bad as for email. The problem is intrinsic, is not the result of lazy RFC writers. Well, in the Jabber/XMPP world we require authentication, servers must stamp the from addresses, and we use (at a minimum) reverse DNS lookups to verify server identities (or use certs with TLS + SASL-EXTERNAL if you want true server-to-server authentication). So I'd say the abuse and identity problems are not as bad in IM (at least the IM technology I'm familiar with) as in email. But you'd hope that we've learned a thing or two since email was invented. ;-) Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Anton Stiglic wrote: More strongly, if we've never met, and you are not in the habit of routinely signing email, thereby tying a key to your e-persona, it makes no sense to speak of *secure* communication to *you*. Regularly signing email is not necessarily a good idea. I like to be able to repudiate most emails I send... As previously mentioned, anonymity and repudiability aren't high on my list of values -- not that anyone cares about my hierarchy of values ;-) But as promised I did blog about it: http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2006-02.html#2006-02-27T22:13 Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 12:53:16PM -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: These are closed systems that compete with each other, once they become federated, they can no longer compete on end-to-end security, because that is a property of the interoperability framework, not the individual product. Also with millions of account issuers, the abuse and identity problems become just as bad as for email. The problem is intrinsic, is not the result of lazy RFC writers. Well, in the Jabber/XMPP world we require authentication, servers must stamp the from addresses, and we use (at a minimum) reverse DNS lookups to verify server identities (or use certs with TLS + SASL-EXTERNAL if you want true server-to-server authentication). So I'd say the abuse and identity problems are not as bad in IM (at least the IM technology I'm familiar with) as in email. But you'd hope that we've learned a thing or two since email was invented. ;-) What is the value of such authentication? Which organizations will you trust? For example, most mail that passes SPF is spam... Authentication by the issuing organization is only useful, if you can keep bad issuers of the net... If federated Jabber becomes universal, the bad guys cannot be excised from the network. The botnets cannot be excised from the network, ... The problem is technology neutral. Loosely along the lines of Goedel's incompleteness theorem, any universally deployed federated communications medium will exhibit spam. MaximEither it is not mature enough, or it has spam./Maxim -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Victor Duchovni wrote: On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 12:53:16PM -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: These are closed systems that compete with each other, once they become federated, they can no longer compete on end-to-end security, because that is a property of the interoperability framework, not the individual product. Also with millions of account issuers, the abuse and identity problems become just as bad as for email. The problem is intrinsic, is not the result of lazy RFC writers. Well, in the Jabber/XMPP world we require authentication, servers must stamp the from addresses, and we use (at a minimum) reverse DNS lookups to verify server identities (or use certs with TLS + SASL-EXTERNAL if you want true server-to-server authentication). So I'd say the abuse and identity problems are not as bad in IM (at least the IM technology I'm familiar with) as in email. But you'd hope that we've learned a thing or two since email was invented. ;-) What is the value of such authentication? Which organizations will you trust? For example, most mail that passes SPF is spam... Authentication by the issuing organization is only useful, if you can keep bad issuers of the net... If federated Jabber becomes universal, the bad guys cannot be excised from the network. The botnets cannot be excised from the network, ... The problem is technology neutral. Loosely along the lines of Goedel's incompleteness theorem, any universally deployed federated communications medium will exhibit spam. I never made the strong claim that the federated Jabber network is or always will remain spam free, only the weaker claim that its abuse and identity problems are and will remain less serious than those of the federated email network as it exists today. There is no magic bullet, and a spam-free utopia is not an option if federated communications are desired. I do not dispute that if Jabber becomes popular enough, there will be rogue servers that don't enforce local authentication (although with server dialback and TLS they can't fake from addresses at other domains, see RFC 3920), and that those who deploy Jabber services will need to blacklist those domains. I do not dispute that there will be spam bots and that server admins or end users will need to block communication with those bots (e.g., using the privacy list protocol defined in RFC 3921). I do not dispute that there will be phishing attacks (e.g., using internationalized addresses that look like but are not identical to familiar addresses) and that client software will need to take appropriate measures to differentiate between legitimate and mimicked addresses (e.g., using petname systems as described in JEP-0165). All I'm saying is that we have a lot of the infrastructure in place (and are building more) to make abuse harder and identity stronger than it is on the existing email network. Is Jabber perfect? No. We're just trying to make it good enough that the bad guys will go elsewhere (which, so far, they have). Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 01:55:16PM -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: I never made the strong claim that the federated Jabber network is or always will remain spam free, only the weaker claim that its abuse and identity problems are and will remain less serious than those of the federated email network as it exists today. Time will tell. All I expect from the ultimate (~3 years out) rollout of email authentication is less backscatter, not less phishing or spam. I do not dispute that if Jabber becomes popular enough, there will be rogue servers that don't enforce local authentication (although with server dialback and TLS they can't fake from addresses at other domains, see RFC 3920), and that those who deploy Jabber services will need to blacklist those domains. Of course new domains are less than $4 each in bulk... How will you lock out throw-away domains? The black-list problem for email is not solved. The good lists are nowhere near 100% effective. Is the equivalent of port 25 blocking tractable for Jabber? Is there a difference between the user-to-server port/protocol and the server-to-server port/protocol in Jabber? I do not dispute that there will be spam bots and that server admins or end users will need to block communication with those bots (e.g., using the privacy list protocol defined in RFC 3921). I do not dispute that there will be phishing attacks (e.g., using internationalized addresses that look like but are not identical to familiar addresses) and that client software will need to take appropriate measures to differentiate between legitimate and mimicked addresses (e.g., using petname systems as described in JEP-0165). Yes petname systems are an important UI tool for preserving the integrity of existing peer communications. If IM is to replace email as some want to claim, it needs to support messages from a fair share of total strangers (we have never met). All I'm saying is that we have a lot of the infrastructure in place (and are building more) to make abuse harder and identity stronger than it is on the existing email network. Is Jabber perfect? No. We're just trying to make it good enough that the bad guys will go elsewhere (which, so far, they have). My claim is that, while indeed it is easier to set the initial barriers higher when you design with greater hindsight, and some of the tractable, but not widely deployed email security measures will be there in IM systems from the start, never the less IM systems if they are to encroach on the ubiquity of email for ad-hoc communications between strangers (it is far easier to address strangers via email today) will encounter exactly the same intrinsic issues, and that technical measures will have equally partial efficacy. I am willing to speculate that the more likely scenario is that IM will not become the ubiquitous medium that email is, and will escape the problem by avoiding scope creep. I am willing to speculate that people will continue to unfairly tarnish the competence of the email RFC writers, without regard to the intrinsic properties of the medium. -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 01:42:56PM -0800, Trevor Perrin wrote: Perhaps this is further support for Iang's contention that we should expect newer, interactive protocols (IM, Skype, etc.) to take the lead in communication security. Email-style message encryption may simply be a much harder problem. This is neither surprising, nor relevant to email. We are at this point reasonably good at encrypting unicast traffic and the associated key management problem is often viable. Encrypting stored data is a substantially more difficult problem. We have increasingly common opportunistic TLS encryption of email traffic, with occasional fully verified secure-channels between some pairs of sites. We could conceivably some day (political barriers primarily at this point) have a secure DNS for secure MX record lookups and key distribution enabling secure channels between most sites. This is viable, traffic encryption is a tractable problem. Encrypting email content, to be stored encrypted, and decrypted when read off-line, or read again later, ... is a problem that the IM and VoIP vendors don't have to solve. They also don't have to solve global federation of universally interoperable systems... -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 5:58 PM -0800 2/24/06, Ed Gerck wrote: A phone number is not an envelope -- it's routing information, just like an email address. Publishing the email address is not in question and there are alternative ways to find it out, such as search engines. Oh really? Then you should be able to send a note to my gmail address. At 1:11 PM -0800 2/25/06, Ed Gerck wrote: Arguments that people give each other their cell phone numbers, for example, and even though there isn't a cell phone directory people use cell phones well, also forget the user's point of view when comparing a phone number with a public-key. And that distinction is? To me a cell-phone number is a string of characters, and a public-key is - a string of characters. Finally, the properties of MY public-key will directly affect the confidentiality properties of YOUR envelope. For example, if (on purpose or by force) my public-key enables a covert channel (eg, weak key, key escrow, shared private key), YOUR envelope is compromised from the start and you have no way of knowing it. This is quite different from an address, which single purpose is to route the communication. And if (on purpose or by force) your cell-phone number is being monitored by an eavesdropper, MY call is compromised from the start and I have no way of knowing it. There is no difference. -- john noerenberg -- All actions are wrought by the qualities of nature only. The self, deluded by egoism, thinketh, I am the doer. -- Bhagavad Gita -- - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
John W Noerenberg II wrote: At 5:58 PM -0800 2/24/06, Ed Gerck wrote: A phone number is not an envelope -- it's routing information, just like an email address. Publishing the email address is not in question and there are alternative ways to find it out, such as search engines. Oh really? Then you should be able to send a note to my gmail address. I did quite not get the irony/humor. All I'm saying about an email address is that (1) it does not work as an envelope (hiding contents); and (2) there's no big problem in using it. You publish your email address every time you send an email from it, which may also make it searchable. At 1:11 PM -0800 2/25/06, Ed Gerck wrote: Arguments that people give each other their cell phone numbers, for example, and even though there isn't a cell phone directory people use cell phones well, also forget the user's point of view when comparing a phone number with a public-key. And that distinction is? To me a cell-phone number is a string of characters, and a public-key is - a string of characters. The distinction should be obvious if you try to tell someone your public-key over the phone, byte by byte for 1024 bits, versus telling her your 8-digit cell phone number. Cheers, Ed Gerck - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ben Laurie [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Florian Weimer wrote: I couldn't find a PGP key server operator that committed itself to keeping logs confidential and deleting them in a timely manner (but I didn't look very hard, either). Of course, since PGP hasn't progressed as faster as our computing resources, I'm nowadays in a position to run my own key server, but this is hardly a solution to that kind of problem. OK, I buy the problem, but until we do something about the totally non-anonymising properties of the 'net, revealing that I want the public key for some person seems to be quite minor - compared, for example, to revealing that I sent him email each time I do. But you don't have to reveal that you sent him email. You can use stealthy communication. Stealthy communication is communication wherein not only is the content concealed from eavesdroppers by encryption, but information about who is communicating with whom, when, or if at all, is concealed, as well. The Internet can be used for stealthy communication. The basic idea is that each potential participant has ongoing traffic to and from a message pool which is propagated world-wide. When the participant has no live traffic to send, dummy traffic is sent instead. The dummy traffic is indistinguishable from the live traffic except by using decryption keys which are chosen by correspondents. The outbound traffic continues autonomously without interruption for months and years and is not correlated to the live traffic, so an observer without the keys cannot determine when or how much live communication is happening. Inbound cover traffic consists of taking a full feed of the message pool at all times without interruption. A Debian Linux package exists which enables stealthy email. It has been in everyday use for years, although not widely. Details on request. I am looking for someone to host it. Any volunteers? -- StealthMonger [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 04:52 PM 2/26/2006, Ben Laurie wrote: Don't forget that the ability to decrypt is just as good as a signature to prove association of the key. All it needs is for one successful trojan that steals your private key/passphrase and plausible deniability is available again. :) Does anybody know if there were followups to the Caligula virus, which was a proof-of-concept that stole PGP keyrings? Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Somebody, probably Florian, wrote: I couldn't find a PGP key server operator that committed itself to keeping logs confidential and deleting them in a timely manner (but I didn't look very hard, either). Keyservers are a peripheral issue in PGP - important for convenience and for quick distribution of revocation lists, but they're very strongly just a tool for convenience. Security through Inconvenience is one flipside of Security through Obscurity, I suppose... If you've got a threat model that includes traffic analysis, then either you and your unindicted co-conspirators need to find other ways to exchange keys, like printing them on business cards, or find a keyserver that lets you suck down all the keys so it's not obvious which key you're looking for, or start using Tor to access the keyservers. Or you could try using the Google Keyserver - just because there isn't one doesn't mean you can't type in 9E94 4513 3983 5F70 or 9383DE06 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key and see what's in Google's cache. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
* Ed Gerck [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2006-02-25 13:11 -0800]: Finally, the properties of MY public-key will directly affect the confidentiality properties of YOUR envelope. For example, if (on purpose or by force) my public-key enables a covert channel (eg, weak key, key escrow, shared private key), YOUR envelope is compromised from the start and you have no way of knowing it. This is quite different from an address, which single purpose is to route the communication. That's I said the postal analogue of the public-key is the envelope. I don't agree with that analogue. An paper envelope does not prevent anybody from opening it (you can open it without any tools and with nearly no effort). The encryption should make it impossible for anybody to see the contents. The recipient might detect that the envelope was opened or replaced, but you must trust that he will detect this (you can't check it yourself). Nicolas -- http://www.rachinsky.de/nicolas - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 07:33:38PM +0100, Ian G wrote: areas. The fact is that SSH came in with a solution and beat the other guy - Telnet secured over SSL. It wasn't the crypto that did this, it was the key management, plain and simple. Very few people I knew at the time moved to SSH because it was more secure and because passwords weren't in plaintext. Most of the people moved because of the things you could do with SSH above and beyond telnet (port forwarding, X11 forwarding etc). In fact, the latter is the main reason I moved - it dated before i started taking an interest in security. Not to say that there weren't *any* who had the security reasons for moving, but then kerberized telnet existed too at that point in time. Cheers, MBM -- Matthew Byng-Maddick [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://colondot.net/ (Please use this address to reply) - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ed Gerck wrote: Ben Laurie wrote: I totally don't buy this distinction - in order to write to you with postal mail, I first have to ask you for your address. We all agree that having to use name and address are NOT the problem, for email or postal mail. Both can also deliver a letter just with the address (CURRENT RESIDENT junk mail, for example). The problem is that pesky public-key. A public-key such as [2. application/pgp-keys]... is N O T user-friendly. True enough about public keys. Not so true about key fingerprints - a 20-char fingerprint is probably not much harder to manage than the usual sorts of contact info (email, postal, IM addresses, phone numbers, etc.). Of course, a fingerprint won't let you encrypt an email without supporting infrastructure for key lookups. However, it *will* let you authenticate a session (e.g., IM, VoIP, SSH) if your parter presents his public key in the handshake. Perhaps this is further support for Iang's contention that we should expect newer, interactive protocols (IM, Skype, etc.) to take the lead in communication security. Email-style message encryption may simply be a much harder problem. Trevor - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a distributed set of members last year. We all had each other's public keys (about a dozen or so). What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the endangered species list. I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using. I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a fundamental architectural flaw. - Alex -- - Alex Alten - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Alex Alten [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. Something's getting lost in this description. What does the value in the From field have to do with you decrypting a message? OTOH the mention of an attachment indicates a detached S/MIME signature, which doesn't have anything to do with encryption. If it is a signature, then the software should verify it with the included cert and display that as the signer. Please correct and resubmit. Peter. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Florian Weimer wrote: * Ben Laurie: I don't use PGP - for email encryption I use enigmail, and getting missing keys is as hard as pressing the get missing keys button. A step which has really profound privacy implications. I couldn't find a PGP key server operator that committed itself to keeping logs confidential and deleting them in a timely manner (but I didn't look very hard, either). Of course, since PGP hasn't progressed as faster as our computing resources, I'm nowadays in a position to run my own key server, but this is hardly a solution to that kind of problem. OK, I buy the problem, but until we do something about the totally non-anonymising properties of the 'net, revealing that I want the public key for some person seems to be quite minor - compared, for example, to revealing that I sent him email each time I do. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Alex Alten wrote: At 05:12 PM 2/26/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Alex Alten wrote: At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a distributed set of members last year. We all had each other's public keys (about a dozen or so). What I really hated about it was that when [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent me an email often I couldn't decrypt it. Why? Because his firm's email server decided to put in the FROM field [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems with replying to his email. It took us hours, with several experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of the problem. No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the endangered species list. I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly the issue is with the s/w you were using. I place the blame squarely on X.509 PKI. The identity aspect of it is all screwed up. No software implementation can overcome such a fundamental architectural flaw. OK - I'll bite - why does the sender's identity have any impact on the recipient's ability to decrypt? Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 07:33:38PM +0100, Ian G wrote: Hence, IM/chat, Skype, TLS experiments at Jabber, as well as the OpenPGP attempts. There are important lessons to be learnt in the rise of IM over email. Likewise the rise of the telephone over paper mail, but the phone does not obviate the need for paper mail. Email is held back by its standardisation, chat seems to overcome spam quite nicely. Where's Gaddi Evron when you need him? This is just not true, the spam volume is rising for both blogs and IM. Email is hard to get encrypted, but it didn't stop Skype from doing encryped IMs easily. Likewise I have secured email communications with my wife via a single key exchange, so what? Skype has not easily created an interoperable federated system that secures all IM communications end-to-end, and many of the issues in doing that are non-technical. The competition between the IM systems is what is driving the security forward. As there is no competition in the email world, at least at the level of the basic protocol and standard, there is no way for the security to move forward. IM is islands of automation, luckily email works globally. Phishing is possible over chat, but has also been relatively easy to address - because the system owners have incentives and can adjust. This is naive, IM will become federated and decentralized and abuse issues will be the same as for email. You can't fence the bad guys out of the network. -- /\ ASCII RIBBON NOTICE: If received in error, \ / CAMPAIGN Victor Duchovni please destroy and notify X AGAINST IT Security, sender. Sender does not waive / \ HTML MAILMorgan Stanley confidentiality or privilege, and use is prohibited. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
bear wrote: On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: Personally I doubt that anything other than a small percentage of email will ever be signed, let alone encrypted (heck, most people on this list don't even sign their mail). I don't think I've said anything here that I will later want to be able to prove incontrovertibly was said by me. In general, signing your mail has a downside in this age of litigous potential mail recipients, and except when your mail regards the disposition of assets, no upside. In the long run, I think the population of people who want to sign their mail is about the same as the population of people who want to post on usenet with their real name and put their street address and phone number at the bottom of every post. Why give the anonymous cowards who are collecting information with robotic trawlers, whether for spam lists or any other reason, proof of exactly who you are? The short answer to your unstated question is: anonymity is not high in my scale of values. The long answer will require some reflection on my part, which I won't post here but at my blog when I have the time. Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre Jabber Software Foundation http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.shtml smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
I have to chime in on a number of points. I'll try to keep commercial plugs to a minimum. * An awful lot of this discussion is some combination of outdated and true but irrelevant. For example, it is true that usability of all computers is not what it could be. But a lot of what has cruised by here is similar to someone saying, Yes, usability is atrocious -- here, look at this screenshot of Windows 3.1. Someone else pipes up, You think that's bad, let me show you this example from the Xerox Alto. What*ever* were they thinking? And then someone else says, Yeah, and if you think that's bad, look at what 'ls' did in Unix V6! Then when someone else says, Y'know, I'm using the latest version of Firefox, and it's actually pretty good the next message says, But what about the Y2K issues, and what happens when in 2038? I swear, guys, this thread is the crypto version of the Monty Python Luxury sketch. * Whitten and Tygar is a great paper, but it was written ages ago on software that was released in 1997. Things aren't perfect now, but let's talk about what's out there now. Even at the time, one of Whitten's main points is how hard it is to apply usability to security, because of how odd it is. As a very quick example, in most forms of user design, you let exploration take a prominent place. But it doesn't work in security because you can't click undo when you do something you didn't intend. * There are new generations of crypto software out there. I produce the PGP products, and PGP Desktop and PGP Universal are automatic systems that look up certs use them, automatically encrypt, and even does both OpenPGP and S/MIME. They're not perfect, and lead to other amusing issues. For example, an hour ago, I was coordinating with someone that I'm meeting at a conference. I got a reply saying, I'm at the airport and can't decrypt your message from my phone. I hadn't realized that I *had* encrypted my message, because my system and my colleague's system had been doing things for us. I habitually send most of my email securely, but I don't think about it. My robots take care of it for me. I tune policies, I don't encrypt messages. If you don't want to use my products, as Ben Laurie pointed out, there's a very nice plugin for Thunderbird called Enigmail that makes doing crypto painless. * There are also new generations of keyservers out there that work on the issues of the old servers to trim defunct keys, and manage other issues. I have out there the PGP Global Directory. Think of it as a mash-up of a keyserver along with Robot CA concepts and user management goodness adapted from modern mailing list servers like Mailman. * A number of us are also re-thinking other concepts such as using short-lived certificates based on the freshness model to constrain lifecycle management issues. * There are many challenges remaining. Heck, the fact that people here apparently have not updated their knowledge any time this century is part of the problem. But let me tell you that email encryption is growing, and growing strongly. However, most of the successes are not happening where you see them. They're happening in business, where communities of partners decide they need to do secure email, and then they do. This is another place where things have changed radically. A decade ago, we thought that security would be a grass-roots phenomenon where end-users and consumers would push security into those stodgy businesses. What's happening now is the exact opposite -- savvy businesses are putting together sophisticated security systems, and that's slowly starting to get end-users to wake up. I'd be happy to discuss at length where things are getting better, where they aren't, and where some issues have been shuffled around. But we do need to talk about what's going on now, not ten years ago. Jon - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
On 2006-02-24, Peter Saint-Andre wrote: Personally I doubt that anything other than a small percentage of email will ever be signed, let alone encrypted (heck, most people on this list don't even sign their mail). That's at least partly because too many mailing lists either reject signed messages out of hand or, worse, have subscribers who use providers that reject signed messages and then spam you with their idiotic bounce messages. Keeping track of which lists allow signed email and which don't is impractical if you subscribe to hundreds of lists, so the simple thing is to tick the don't sign box on list messages. In this case, since Peter's message was signed, I know this list allows signatures. So I'll sign this message. But the signature will be of limited utility, as not one of the several email addresses on my signature is a match for the email address I am sending this from. Again, lists being what they are, I use a different address for most lists and my PGP key would become absurd if I added several hundred addresses to it. I personally would prefer to sign every email I send. I'd also prefer to encrypt all non-public messages. I am fully competent in the use of the current technology, but it turns out to be not practical to use. Greg pgp3qLCcQF5wT.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
From: Peter Saint-Andre [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Feb 24, 2006 3:18 PM Subject: Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use ... We could just as well say that encryption of remote server sessions is rare in everyday use. It's just that only geeks even do remote server sessions, so they use SSH instead of telnet. The thing is that email is in wide use (unlike remote server sessions). Personally I doubt that anything other than a small percentage of email will ever be signed, let alone encrypted (heck, most people on this list don't even sign their mail). I'm certain that only a small percentage of e-mail will ever be signed, so long as the tools to do that are so hard to use, and the value added so small. I find it useful to use encryption all the time on my private data, but virtually never use it for communications, because even among cryptographers the setup hassles are too great, and the value added too small. What we ultimately need is encryption and authentication that are: a. Automatic and transparent. b. Add some value or are bundled with something that does. c. Don't try to tie into the whole horrible set of PKI standards in terms of uniquely identifying each human and bit in the universe, and getting them to sign legally binding messages whose full interpretation requires reading and understanding a 30-page CPS. If email encryption became as transparent as SSL, most e-mail would be encrypted. This would still leave various phishing issues, etc., but eavesdropping and a lot of impersonation and spam and phishing would get much harder. Peter --John Kelsey - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
While there is merit in arguing how to simplify the mechanics of using public key encryption for sending and receiving email, I cannot agree with this assertion: At 10:44 AM -0800 2/24/06, Ed Gerck wrote: My $0.02: If we want to make email encryption viable (ie, user-level viable) then we should make sure that people who want to read a secure communication should NOT have to do anything before receiving it. Having to publish my key creates sender's hassle too ...to find the key. If an individual wants to receive telephone calls, he has to agree to publish his phone number. For many years, we tacitly agreed that our phone numbers would be published. That a phone number was public information wasn't perceived as a problem. But as the number of junk calls increases, the number of people who opt out of phone directories increases. Today, more individuals decide that having a public phone number is a problem. In this regard, public keys are just like cell phone numbers. How many people know your cell phone number? How did they get it? You can't get a cell phone number from directory assistance. So if you want someone to be able to call you on your cell phone, you have to give them the key to your cell phone. If you want someone to send you encrypted email, you have to give them your public key. It's the same thing. Yet cell phones seem to be viable. -- john noerenberg -- It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization - technology, industry, commerce, and so on - also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality. -- Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 -- - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 06:09 PM 2/24/2006 +0100, Ian G wrote: Steven M. Bellovin wrote: Certainly, usability is an issue. It hasn't been solved because there's no market for it here; far too few people care about email encryption. Usability is the issue. If I look over onto my skype window, it says there are 5 million or so users right now. It did that without any of the hullabaloo of the other systems, and still manages to encrypt my comms. By some measures it is the most successful crypto system ever. Actually the usability issue has been solved elsewhere too. We did it over at TriStrata before the firm crashed in 1998. We allowed the system security officer to select the default cipher to use in sending emails (DES, 3DES, Blowfish, RC4, etc.). The receiver could use any cipher for decrypting incoming email. A sys admin installed some filter software into the email client, and except for an initial login dialog (and we even simplified that by hooking the OS login dialog), the user never had to do anything further. The local auth keys that he received during enrollment were encrypted with his password on a small floppy disk, or could be installed on the hard drive automatically. Last I heard (early 2005) one system was operational over in the nuclear engineering department at Ohio State (for DOE work?). Of course one old system rack in the dusty corner of a school building does not a market make. - Alex -- - Alex Alten - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Peter Saint-Andre wrote: Ian G wrote: To get people to do something they will say no to, we have to give them a freebie, and tie it to the unpleasantry. E.g., in SSH, we get a better telnet, and there is only the encrypted version. We could just as well say that encryption of remote server sessions is rare in everyday use. It's just that only geeks even do remote server sessions, so they use SSH instead of telnet. The thing is that email is in wide use (unlike remote server sessions). Personally I doubt that anything other than a small percentage of email will ever be signed, let alone encrypted (heck, most people on this list don't even sign their mail). I don't sign mail not because I can't be bothered, but because it is my policy to not sign mail. If I signed it, it would be substantially harder to deny I wrote it. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ed Gerck wrote: Ben Laurie wrote: Really? I just write Ed Gerck on an envelope and it gets to you? I doubt it. Presumably I have to do all sorts of hard and user-unfriendly things to find out and verify your address. Perhaps I wasn't clear -- with postal mail you just write my name and address in YOUR envelope and it gets to me. With PGP and PKI you have to ask for MY envelope first; further, MY public-key creates the secure envelope that you now need to trust with YOUR secret... I totally don't buy this distinction - in order to write to you with postal mail, I first have to ask you for your address. Apart from content of the blob handed over, the two transactions are identical. If you handled your keys properly I would not need to ask you for anything. My $0.02: If we want to make email encryption viable (ie, user-level viable) then we should make sure that people who want to read a secure communication should NOT have to do anything before receiving it. Having to publish my key creates sender's hassle too ...to find the key. So you think people can use the post to write to you without you publishing your address? BTW, users should NOT be trusted to handle keys, much less to handle them properly. This is what the users themselves are saying and exemplifying in 15 years of experiments. I think users are perfectly capable of handling keys. The problem they have is in choosing operating systems that are equal to the task. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Peter Saint-Andre wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Ian G wrote: To get people to do something they will say no to, we have to give them a freebie, and tie it to the unpleasantry. E.g., in SSH, we get a better telnet, and there is only the encrypted version. We could just as well say that encryption of remote server sessions is rare in everyday use. It's just that only geeks even do remote server sessions, so they use SSH instead of telnet. The thing is that email is in wide use (unlike remote server sessions). Well! Within the context of any given application, we can learn lessons. Just because SSH is only used by geeks is meaningless, really, we need to ground that criticism in something that relates it to other areas. The fact is that SSH came in with a solution and beat the other guy - Telnet secured over SSL. It wasn't the crypto that did this, it was the key management, plain and simple. Telnet was in widespread use - but was incapable of making the jump to secure. Just like email. So if the SSH example were illuminating, we would predict that some completely different *non-compatible* app would replace email. Hence, IM/chat, Skype, TLS experiments at Jabber, as well as the OpenPGP attempts. There are important lessons to be learnt in the rise of IM over email. Email is held back by its standardisation, chat seems to overcome spam quite nicely. Email is hard to get encrypted, but it didn't stop Skype from doing encryped IMs easily. Phishing is possible over chat, but has also been relatively easy to address - because the system owners have incentives and can adjust. The competition between the IM systems is what is driving the security forward. As there is no competition in the email world, at least at the level of the basic protocol and standard, there is no way for the security to move forward. iang - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ben Laurie wrote: I totally don't buy this distinction - in order to write to you with postal mail, I first have to ask you for your address. We all agree that having to use name and address are NOT the problem, for email or postal mail. Both can also deliver a letter just with the address (CURRENT RESIDENT junk mail, for example). The problem is that pesky public-key. A public-key such as [2. application/pgp-keys]... is N O T user-friendly. Arguments that people give each other their cell phone numbers, for example, and even though there isn't a cell phone directory people use cell phones well, also forget the user's point of view when comparing a phone number with a public-key. Finally, the properties of MY public-key will directly affect the confidentiality properties of YOUR envelope. For example, if (on purpose or by force) my public-key enables a covert channel (eg, weak key, key escrow, shared private key), YOUR envelope is compromised from the start and you have no way of knowing it. This is quite different from an address, which single purpose is to route the communication. That's I said the postal analogue of the public-key is the envelope. Ed Gerck wrote: My $0.02: If we want to make email encryption viable (ie, user-level viable) then we should make sure that people who want to read a secure communication should NOT have to do anything before receiving it. Having to publish my key creates sender's hassle too ...to find the key. So you think people can use the post to write to you without you publishing your address? I get junk mail all the time at two different postal addresses, without ever having published either of them. Again, addresses and names are user friendly (for better or for worse) while public-keys are not -- in addition to their different security roles (see above). Ed Gerck wrote: BTW, users should NOT be trusted to handle keys, much less to handle them properly. This is what the users themselves are saying and exemplifying in 15 years of experiments. I think users are perfectly capable of handling keys. The problem they have is in choosing operating systems that are equal to the task. That's another notorious area where users can't be trusted -- and that's why companies lock down their OSes -- or, should a company really allow each user to choose their desired OS? Apart from compatibility issues, which also do not allow users to freely choose even the OS in their homes (Junior wants to play his games too scenario). Cheers, Ed Gerck - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Victor Duchovni wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 01:44:14PM +, Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: Paul, Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Sure I can, but if you want it to be encrypted to you, then you need to publish a key. More strongly, if we've never met, and you are not in the habit of routinely signing email, thereby tying a key to your e-persona, it makes no sense to speak of *secure* communication to *you*. Which you would that be, the one who sent me all those exciting zip files of W32 executables, or the one I think is posting to this list? The only identity you (who hypothetically do not garnish each message with a signature) have is your mailbox. I can bootstrap that (with questionable initial security) to a key via a private unencrypted email message, and over a time as the key is consistently used grow to associate the key with an on-line persona. Don't forget that the ability to decrypt is just as good as a signature to prove association of the key. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Paul, Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Cheers, Ed Gerck Paul Hoffman wrote: At 1:56 PM -0800 2/23/06, Ed Gerck wrote: This story (in addition to the daily headlines) seems to make the case that the available techniques for secure email (hushmail, outlook/pki and pgp) do NOT actually work. That's an incorrect assessment of the short piece. The story says that it does actually work but no one uses it. They briefly say why: key management. Not being easy enough to use is quite different than NOT actually working. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 4:31 PM -0800 2/23/06, Ed Gerck wrote: Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - Fully agree. namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. We disagree on the meaning of the phrase actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. Phil *does* have a problem with key management. He knows how to do it, but his communications partners are not as good as he is. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Yes, I could. But I won't bother. :-) --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ed Gerck wrote: Paul, Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Sure I can, but if you want it to be encrypted to you, then you need to publish a key. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Hi, And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. Phil *does* have a problem with key management. He knows how to do it, but his communications partners are not as good as he is. Phil Z doesn´t know how to do it himself, at least with PGP. He told me that he doesn´t sign people´s keys who ask for it, simply because it would pollute his keyring on his computer, and he couldn´t work with a keyring with thousands of people on it anymore. So PGP obviously has a usability and scalability problem. So he only signs the keys of his friends because of that. I wonder now, why he didn´t tried to solve that usability/scalability problem himself yet, but gave up instead. Best regards, Philipp Gühring - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: Paul, Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Sure I can, but if you want it to be encrypted to you, then you need to publish a key. This IS one of the sticky points ;-) If postal mail would work this way, you'd have to ask me to send you an envelope before you can send me mail. This is counter-intuitive to users. Your next questions could well be how do you know my key is really mine... how do you know it was not revoked ...all of which are additional sticky points. In the postal mail world, how'd you know the envelope is really from me or that it is secure? Cheers, Ed Gerck - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Ed Gerck wrote: Ben Laurie wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: Paul, Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. And what I heard in the story is that even savvy users such as Phil Z (who'd have no problem with key management) don't use it often. BTW, just to show that usability is king, could you please send me an encrypted email -- I even let you choose any secure method that you want. Sure I can, but if you want it to be encrypted to you, then you need to publish a key. This IS one of the sticky points ;-) If postal mail would work this way, you'd have to ask me to send you an envelope before you can send me mail. This is counter-intuitive to users. We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp. Your next questions could well be how do you know my key is really mine... how do you know it was not revoked ...all of which are additional sticky points. For revocation, keyservers again. If I cared whether it was really yours (I don't), then I'd check the signatures, or verify the fingerprint out-of-band. In the postal mail world, how'd you know the envelope is really from me or that it is secure? I don't. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ed Gerck writes: This IS one of the sticky points ;-) If postal mail would work this way, you'd have to ask me to send you an envelope before you can send me mail. This is counter-intuitive to users. I assumed that that was your point, which is why I figured you were trolling. But of course, your analogy is precisely wrong -- I can look people's addresses, physical and electronic. People who want to engage in secure communication publish their keys. I haven't checked Paul's home page; Ben and I both have links to our PGP keys from our web pages. You don't. Your next questions could well be how do you know my key is really mine... how do you know it was not revoked ...all of which are additional sticky point s. In the postal mail world, how'd you know the envelope is really from me or that it is secure? Of course, you know even less about such things in the physical world. But you know that, too. So what is your point? Certainly, usability is an issue. It hasn't been solved because there's no market for it here; far too few people care about email encryption. And they're right -- their email is insecure, but given the environment of the typical desktop system would crypto do any good? We've already seen tailored worms stealing corporate information; we've also seen keystroke loggers and e-theft programs that watch for a login successful screen from your financial provider. How would encrypting email help a businessman in an environment like that? (I know -- have a separate machine used only for encrypting and decrypting files, and use a flash drive to carry ciphertext back and forth. Talk about usability problems) Yes, I can and do send encrypted email. Statistically, I don't do it very often. In all of last year, I sent four such messages, comprising exactly one conversation. My effective security is locked-down hosts, in particular the machine where sensitive inbound mail sits until I pull it down to my laptop. This way, I don't have to trust my employer, my ISP, etc. And I use SSL or SSH -- with checking of the far-side certificates -- for transport. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
Usability should by now be recognized as the key issue for security - namely, if users can't use it, it doesn't actually work. % man gpg | wc -l 1705 % man gpg | grep dry -n, --dry-run Don't make any changes (this is not completely implemented). I rest my case. --dan - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use
At 1:56 PM -0800 2/23/06, Ed Gerck wrote: This story (in addition to the daily headlines) seems to make the case that the available techniques for secure email (hushmail, outlook/pki and pgp) do NOT actually work. That's an incorrect assessment of the short piece. The story says that it does actually work but no one uses it. They briefly say why: key management. Not being easy enough to use is quite different than NOT actually working. --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
