On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Tom Vogt wrote:
same problem here: how do you find out whether or not a message is encrypted?
Plaintext looks like plaintext. This isn't even a "real" problem, once you look at the text produced by, eg, PGP, GPG, and whatever else you allow on the system. You don't even have to have a human look at it; a simple program to count character distributions, character contacts, and line lengths can identify something as being the legitimate output of PGP, or whatever encryption program, with a margin of error so flat it's only theoretical. It would need to make a "profile" for PGP, another one for GPG, etc -- then look at incoming messages to see if they match the profile. I mean, yeah, people could theoretically get stuff past it, or it could theoretically bounce encrypted messages -- but people can also theoretically guess a 128-bit encryption key on the first try, and I wouldn't expect that to happen. Ray