What's really in PGP 5.5?

[Adam Back]

Anonymous <anon at anon.efga.org> writes:
> Adam Back <aba at dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:
> > 1. to allow access to important material lost in the mail system in the
> > event that an employee is hit by a bus
> > 
> > Argument 1 seems pretty flimsy to me.  I reiterate my comment in an
> > earlier post: who in their right mind keeps their _only_ copy of
> > ultra valuable company information bouncing around in the email
> > system?
> >
> > Regardless, if PGP claims to be catering to those who use this
> > argument, and to not want to try that hard to make it impossible to
> > by-pass, the more secure, and less GAK friendly way to do it is to
> > have the mail client software archive the email sent and received.

Thank you anonymous for some good feed back.

> Two problems.  First, not all mail clients let you archive the mail
> in a different form than how it arrived.

I was thinking more of a second archive for company use.  You can
leave the normal MUA archive alone if you have to.  The company
archive need not be on your machine; could, probably would, be another
machine inside the corporate LAN.

I do see advantages in using a different archive key for your own
archive if you can, but I don't think anybody much is doing this at
the moment anyway.

> Netscape 3 worked like this, maybe 4 too.

3 has an integrated archive of sent and received email.

IMAP mailboxes are interesting in this context.  (Mail stays in the
remote mail box -- you can't modify it, you've either got to delete
it, or leave it -- if it's encrypted you're stuck with that (other
than re-encrypting it and mailing it yourself).  IMAP is nice for
people who are mobile -- use different workstations/laptops each day.

But still, it doesn't present a problem.  You just archive it once
you've decrypted it.  Similar to your problem where you can't modify
the built-in archive method in the MUA.


Problem #2: what if you're outside the LAN?  

You get inside the LAN with a VPN / ipsec setup, whatever, and do as
normal.  You'll have to if your mail box is in there.

> If the mail comes in encrypted just to an employee key, that is how
> it will be stored, and no business access is possible.

True.  So?  Those calling for GAK for company use argue:

	1. we've been brainwashed by the GAKkers that it's mission
	   critical to be able to recover email in transit

	2. we want to snoop on what our employees are sending.

This one:

	3. snoop on what our employees are receiving

isn't often mentioned.

Item 1, recovering email in transit is bogus.  Recovering email after
receipt, is over-rated in my opinion.

Item 2, snooping on sent mail is an independent problem, not involving
the GAK argument.  (Just send via your mail approver, you sign, he
encrypts and sends on if he approves).

My suggestion does cater for item 3 because the MUA arranges for the
decrypted text to be archived after the employee has decrypted it.

To by pass this, the employee has to either: i) modify the software
to disable the archiving, or ii) not decrypt it at all.

Possibility i) doesn't seem like a major threat, there are ways to
hack around all of these escrow mechanisms.  PGP Inc are highlighting
the purposefully puny nature of their enforcement with the suggestion
that this makes it less GAK friendly.

Possibility ii) doesn't seem like that big a problem.  I presume this
is going to come about if the company has read a few emails, and from
the context of the other mails this one looks like the biggy, where he
is conspiring to do something against the companies interests.  Or
perhaps they are tipped off.  Anyway, my suggested solution would be
to ask the employee to decrypt it, and if he refuses, fire him.  Any
problems?  (If he's forgotten his key, get the sender to resend).


> Second, what if an employee doesn't come back from vacation?  You've
> got messages sitting in his inbox which go back three weeks.  All
> encrypted to his personal key, which is gone.  It's been long enough
> that the senders may not have backups any more.  It's all lost, and
> at best the company is going to put its partners and customers to a
> great deal of inconvenience by making them re-send everything
> they've sent in the last three weeks, not to mention making the
> company look incompetent.

True.

They're going to look a bit incompetent anyway, if this guy was
working on a project where he was the main player.  They'll have to
reorganise anyway.  Not really your corporate nightmare situation I
don't think.  All it requires is a bit if finessing on the part of
members of the departees team.

If he's an interchangeable employee (one of 20 sales people all doing
the same job), you won't be using this method anyway .. you don't want
to loose sales when your sales people go on holiday, there will be a
sales at megacorp.com which is encrypted to a company key.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

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