bradley@cs.utexas.edu (Bradley L. Richards) (01/10/91)
David Gast noted: > Mail is not secure either... there are well known, previously published > methods of faking mail addresses. A question which has been bothering me lately: with readily available public-key algorithms, why hasn't the idea of secure mail caught on? I, for one, would very much like to be able to send sensitive business and personal messages securely by e-mail. But as long as messages are transmitted and stored in unencrypted form on insecure machines, it's foolish to do so. It seems a simple matter to implement public key encryption, using a standard algorithm (e.g., RSA), so that one could send a secure message merely by providing both the recipient's mail address and their public encryption key. Bradley