The best way to integrate PGP into other software is a tough question. There are so many different ways in which people read and send mail. A lot of people receive their mail on some other machine, often a multi-user machine. So, the first question is, should the mail be crypted there, or should it be crypted on your personal machine. The second choice is preferable from the security point of view, but that means that you need to download at least your PGP mail in order to decrypt it, and it means you have to compose your mail on your home machine before encrypting, uploading, and sending. (Phil Zimmermann had an idea for multi-user systems in which the RSA portion of the decryption, which involves your secret key, would be done on your personal machine, then the decrypted session key would be uploaded to the multi-user machine and the IDEA decryption done on the message itself. This way you only have to upload and download a couple hundred bytes regardless of the length of the message. This would require PGP to be integrated into a terminal program.) If you _do_ download your mail before reading it, you could get in the habit of downloading _all_ of your mail into a big file, then running a word processor or some more specialized program to read the messages, one at a time, and compose replies. Then, when you were done, you could upload and send the replies. If you worked in this mode, which probably few people do, you could integrate PGP by running it on the downloaded mail file before running your WP to read it. I have a Perl script which runs PGP on a file, finding the PGP messages in it, decrypting them, and replacing them _in_the_file_ with their decrypted versions. (Normally PGP outputs its decrypted contents to another file, which is a little inconvenient.) This can make PGP pretty transparent for decryption if you actually read your mail in this way. Another possibility is to use a WP or mail reading program which has a "filter" mode, one which lets you pass incoming or outgoing mail through some program, and replace the mail with the results of that program. I don't know which programs can do this. A lot of Unix programs can, like VI and EMACS, but I don't know about PC's or other home machines. PGP has a filter mode which is designed to be used with WP's which can do this. There have been a couple of messages on alt.security.pgp which have advice on using PGP with various Unix mail reading programs. Mark Riordan's soon-to-be-released RIPEM program (an alternative, incompatible, RSA public-key program) has some ideas in its manual on how to use its filter mode with Unix mail, which mostly apply to PGP as well. One other point: regarding a Mac port: There have been at least a couple of messages on alt.security.pgp over the past couple of months from people who have successfully compiled the PGP sources under Think C on the Mac. However, as a Unix/PC program, it ends up using a character window for I/O, which you type into just like you would on a PC. This is unacceptable for Macs, so nobody has released one of these. Still, compared to what Tim has to do, it would be an improvement. I think people should release their executables which work like this as an interim crutch version until the real Mac version is available. Hal 74076.1041@compuserve.com
Hal Finney, Tom Jennings, Eric Hughes, and others are working on solutions to the "ease of use" problems I cited in my posting. Hal F. writes:
The best way to integrate PGP into other software is a tough question. There are so many different ways in which people read and send mail.
If you _do_ download your mail before reading it, you could get in the habit of downloading _all_ of your mail into a big file, then running a word processor or some more specialized program to read the messages, one at a time, and compose replies. Then, when you were done, you could upload and send the replies.
If you worked in this mode, which probably few people do, you could integrate PGP by running it on the downloaded mail file before running
This is a major drag, destroying the feedback loop of reading mail and responding to it immediately. And, as Hal alludes to, it requires extra stuff, like PERL scripts, which complicate matters.
on the Mac. However, as a Unix/PC program, it ends up using a character window for I/O, which you type into just like you would on a PC. This is unacceptable for Macs, so nobody has released one of these. Still, compared to what Tim has to do, it would be an improvement. I think people should release their executables which work like this as an interim crutch version until the real Mac version is available.
Here's hoping. Several people claim to be working on a real Mac port. (I thought the idea someone had of doing it inside a HyperCard stack was a good one..HyperCard supports a CLI and so could run PGP, and HyperCard newsreaders exist, so in perhaps the two could be united.) Zimmerman's PGP has spurred people to think about the many practical issues of P-K crypto...authentication systems, keyrings, user interfaces, and so on. This alone is a major step forward. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.
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