On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
... Encrypted email is ramping upward rapidly, in the form of big business and the need for their Excos to protect news of mergers/acquisitions/'unexpected' losses and so on.
i see encrypted laptops and services fitting this bill, but i haven't seen a ramp up of encrypted mail in this role. perhaps i'm just not looking in the right places. [i didn't mean to dis encrypted mail quite as much as my previous comments appear to in hindsight. it certainly serves a purpose and is used often in business. but this is the only domain where i see it used much at all, and even then, VPN's and SSL/TLS services are overtaking many of the roles encrypted email used to fulfill. just my experience, and admittedly limited experience...]
Oh, and don't forget all of the mundane traffic including account numbers and so on. And St May for the 'glorious' hackers: Without their proliferation there'd be less motivation for enterprises to encrypt.
enterprises are definitely encrypting. FDE and VPN's and SSL/TLS services growing much more than encrypted email IMHO. i'd be curious to know how much of this is due to actual hacker threats, vs. data spills and regulatory / industry standards compliance pressures.
Now the real question I have is whether this helps the little guy in any way, because the IP addresses of encrypted packets are themselves not encrypted, so that it's easy for NSA eavesdroppers to throw away the much less interesting enterprise traffic.
pen registers for the intarwebs and social network analysis. they get most of what they want just watching those opaque bits move around...
But I have little doubt that we're slowing approaching the knee in the hockeystick in terms of encrypted traffic.
i think encrypted torrents are the largest source of encrypted traffic on the net. this is purely speculation though; i'd love to see numbers. (encrypted torrents, easy. encrypted mail, still too hard...) best regards,