"Email-Firewalls" / Instant Corporate PGP
Companies like the idea of firewall machines to protect the security of their internal nets. I bet they would also like something called an "email-firewall". Names are important. :-) I think of the email-firewall as a slightly modified anonymous-remailer. Outsiders could send encrypted mail to the remailer and it would decrypt it and send it on to the right person inside the company over internal (more secure) nets. The email-firewall could also encrypt outgoing mail when it was going to a person who either had a listed PGP key or who was working at another company with an email-firewall. Also, this remailer would not make the mail anonymous. Corporations need security, not anonimity. Each company would only need to buy one copy of ViaCrypt PGP. For a company this cost is, of course, negligible. With this people inside the company would not need to deal with the encryption directly. They getting encrypted mail would not take anything new, and sending might take a slight change. Of course this is only a step towards true end-to-end encryption, but it is easy and far better than what they have now. Also, it fits with the way companies work. There is a security guard at the entrance to the plant, but once inside people generally trust each other and don't worry about security. With this, internal mail is still like postcards, but external would have an envelope. I thought about this after making a short script (below) so that mail to vac+pgp@cs.cmu.edu (the low security envelope) would be decrypted automatically. This also needed the following line in my .maildelivery: Addr vac+pgp pipe ? /usr/vac/pgp/incoming I am not going to make the "email-firewall" at this time, but thought I would throw the idea out. Has anyone done this? Let me know if you do. One question. How do I extract 2 public keys into one ASCII keyblock? Now that I want to make 2 keys FTPable ... -- Vince #!/bin/csh -f # # Vince Cate setenv PGPPATH /usr/vac/pgp setenv PGPPASS "not really vinces passphrase" cd $PGPPATH cat > mailtmp.asc egrep 'Date:|From:|Subject:|To:' mailtmp.asc > mailtmp echo " " >> mailtmp pgp -f < mailtmp.asc >> mailtmp /usr/ucb/mail -s "Was encrypted" vac < mailtmp exit 0
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Vincent.Cateļ¼ FURMINT.NECTAR.CS.CMU.EDU