October 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: What email encryption is actually in use?
by David Howe 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

at Tuesday, October 01, 2002 3:08 AM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001(a)cs.auckland.ac.nz> was seen to say: > For encryption, STARTTLS, which protects more mail than all other > email encryption technology combined. See > http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/usenix02_slides.pdf > (towards the back). I would dispute that - not that it isn't used and useful, but unless you are handing off directly to the "home" machine of the end user (or his direct spool) odds are good that the packet will be sent unencrypted somewhere along its journey. with TLS you are basically protecting a single link of a transmission chain, with no control over the rest of the chain. > For signing, nothing. The S/MIME list debated having posts to the > list signed, and decided against it: If I know you, I can recognise a > message from you whether it's signed or not. Signing has a limited application - I wouldn't use it routinely other than to establish an association (key-->poster) early in a conversation, and then omit it except for things whose source *I* would want verified if I was receiving it. It is unusual for me to use a sig outside of encrypt+sign. > If I don't know you, > whether it's signed or not is irrelevant. Depends on the definition of "know". If a poster had a regular habit of posting at least one signed message every week, and had never protested that the sigs were faked, then you could assume that the poster whose sig just cleared is the same as the poster who has been posting for that time period - mapping that to any real-world individual is more problematic, but mostly you don't need to. There are plenty of people I only know online from email exchanges, and in some cases am not even sure what sex they are :)

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RE: What email encryption is actually in use?
by Wall, Kevin 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Morlock Elloi wrote... <<<deleted>>> > In other words, those that need crypto are taken care of, and > in order to gain resources to make sheeple use crypto you > have to become Them, in which case you don't really want > sheeple to use crypto in the first place. Please do not use the derogatory term 'sheeple'... you're going to give sheep a bad name. --- Kevin W. Wall Qwest Information Technology, Inc. Kevin.Wall(a)qwest.com Phone: 614.932.5542 "I can hardly wait until we get quantum computers. Then we really *will* have to worry about Heisenbugs."

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Re: smartcards
by steve＠tightrope.demon.co.uk 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Steve Thompson <stevet010(a)yahoo.com> writes: > o Most of them have an IR port and many contain enough storage and > horsepower to keep and play small MP3 collections. Chaumian digital cash > code should fit easily. Hell, some companies are already making noises > about full-motion video. How long before the damn things have a digital > camera built in? They already do (at least in Europe) <http://www.nokia.com/phones/7650/> and many are programmable in Java -- Steve Mynott <steve(a)tightrope.demon.co.uk>

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