Encrypted lists and ease of use

[E. Allen Smith]

	Where was the information on PGPdomo? That would seem appropriate
for the input end, at least.
	-Allen

From:	IN%"scs at lokkur.dexter.mi.us" 26-SEP-1996 17:26:10.69
Subj:	Encrypted lists and ease of use

I'm considering sending someone off to work on a project, but wanted to
sanity-check the idea and see if someone already has something similar.

Recently I've been involved in a number of small (30 people or less)
mailing lists which occasionally use PGP for encrypted mail.

The hassle comes when one is encrypting a message to the list.  With
people coming and going, remembering who is on what list is impossible.
We're always having to go back and re-send to someone who was left off
of the encryption list.

What I propose to do is have a second list, list-encrypted at host, for
every list at host.  Any mail sent to the list simply goes out in plaintext.
List-encrypted is encrypted for everyone on list, then sent to the list
with appropriate additional headers.

To secure the mail as it travels from the sender to list-encrypted, we
want to establish a public key for list-encrypted.  All mail to the list
*must* travel with the public key or be rejected.  When mail arrives at
list-encrypted, a deamon will process it.  The daemon knows the secret
key for -encrypted, and has a list of who is on what list.  The daemon
strips the -encrypted address, encrypts the message for all on the list.
If there are other people on the To: or Cc: fields, the deamon will
encrypt for them as well.  If any of this fails, the message is sent to
as many as possible and notification failure goes back to the original
sender indicating who the failures were.  The daemon then forwards it
to the list real list.  It preserves the From: field, but changs `To:
list-encrypted' into simply `To: list.'

Comments?  Generally useful?  Beta volunteers?  :-)
-- 
  "Yea, the heavens shall open and the NP-complete solution given forth.
ATT executives shall give birth to two-headed operating systems, and 
copyrights shall be expunged.  The voice of the GNU shall be heard, but
the faithless will be without transceivers."   -- me