CDR: Re: Spam free secure email accounts.

[Ray Dillinger]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Tom Vogt wrote:

>same problem here: how do you find out whether or not a message is
>encrypted?

Plaintext looks like plaintext.  This isn't even a "real" problem, 
once you look at the text produced by, eg, PGP, GPG, and whatever 
else you allow on the system. 

You don't even have to have a human look at it; a simple program 
to count character distributions, character contacts, and line 
lengths can identify something as being the legitimate output of 
PGP, or whatever encryption program, with a margin of error so 
flat it's only theoretical.

It would need to make a "profile" for PGP, another one for GPG, 
etc -- then look at incoming messages to see if they match the 
profile.

I mean, yeah, people could theoretically get stuff past it, 
or it could theoretically bounce encrypted messages --  but 
people can also theoretically guess a 128-bit encryption key 
on the first try, and I wouldn't expect that to happen. 

				Ray