On Saturday, November 2, 2002, at 08:01 PM, Tyler Durden wrote:
"Prior to that, the encrypted email I've sent in the past year or so has almost always failed, because of version incompatibilities,"
While in Telecom I was auditing optical transport gear, and we adopted the practice of encrypting all of our audit reports to vendors. Of course, the chance of there being an eavesdropper (uh...other than NSA, that is) was a plank energy above zero, but it gave the vendors the imporession we really cared a lot about their intellectual property (if we determined a problem with their equipment, and if that info ever leaked, it could have a major impact on them).
When I was at Intel we sent our designs for microprocessors to European branches and/or partners. One set of designs sent to MATRA/Harris, a partner in the 80C86, was stolen in transit. (The box of tapes arrived in Paris, but the tapes had been replaced by the suitable weight of bricks.) The moral: 99.9999x % of traffic is of little interest to thieves or eavesdroppers. But some fraction is. And it often isn't appreciated until after a theft or eavesdrop in which category the traffic lies. (Equivalent to people not thinking about backups until it's too late.) Having said this, I, too, rarely encrypt. It should get easier, now that PGP 8 is well-integrated into the Mail program I use in OS X. (Years ago PGP stopped working in my mailer, and I had to encrypt and decrypt manually.) It is odd that we mostly think crypto should be easy and painless. The military, with a real need for crypto, has full-time code clerks on ships and at bases, even out on the battlefield. And they have "code shacks" and "cipher rooms" and all sorts of procedure and rigamarole about envelopes, couriers, locks on doors, combo locks on safes, need to know, etc. PK crypto has made a lot of things a lot easier, but expecting it all to work with a click of a button is naive. Of course, most of us don't actually have secrets which make protocols and efforts justifiable. There's the rub. --Tim May