don@allegra.UUCP (Don Mitchell) (01/31/85)
Some people here have thought about secure mail. The danger of doing it wrong is great, but there is now a sizable literature of proven "cryptographic protocols". Ad hoc solutions can look perfect and still have subtle loopholes that the naive programmer will not see. The new UNIX crypt (never-to-be-released) has an option for dealing with mail. It will generate printable Ciphertext when encrypting and filter out junk (mail headers) when decrypting. Berkeley mail, with all its features and misfeatures, fails to perform the simple interactions with UNIX that would make encrypted mail easy. That is, you should be able to pipe your message through any UNIX filter before sending it (you can do that) and after receiving it (you cannot do that). That is good if you don't want to worry about automatic key management. Of course, you should just have to remember one key and have the program store the individual message keys and negotiate new keys with other users via some secure protocol. My worst nightmare is that the same bright people who invented the ARPA mail headers or wrote this atrociously clunky netnews software will decide to solve this problem for us.
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/31/85)
Actually, there's an interesting non-technical problem with encrypted mail as well. I'll betcha that many sites would cut off mail feeds if they found large quantities of encrypted mail flowing through their systems. Many system administrators, already concerned about what sort of stuff is flowing through their systems, might be ordered by management to cut off any mail if they were unable to demonstrate that they weren't being used for illicit activities of various sorts. There is at least one court case involving encryption in just this way pending now. Nothing is ever simple. Except the wrong answers. --Lauren--
chongo@nsc.UUCP (Landon C. Noll) (02/04/85)
In article <3004@allegra.UUCP> don@allegra.UUCP (Don Mitchell) writes: >The new UNIX crypt (never-to-be-released) has an option for dealing >with mail. It will generate printable Ciphertext when encrypting and >filter out junk (mail headers) when decrypting. Oh? Is this another Sys V binary only product? chongo <> /\../\