CDR: Re: Lions and Tigers and Backdoors, oh, my...

[Steve Furlong]

"Trei, Peter" wrote:
> 
> Can you document this claim of the existance of 'help fields' in
> Netscape? I am (to put it mildly) astonished by this claim, and
> more than a little skeptical. I was aware of the Workfactor
> Reduction field in the export 'aka International' version of Lotus Notes
> (which this 'help field' seems identical to), but was not aware
> of it being included in any other application.

I've been trying to find evidence of this, too. I've sent messages to
self from several versions of Netscape Messenger on Windows and FreeBSD,
then examined the headers. I have only a Verisign certificate; possibly
the cert source would affect the headers that are produced with signed
or encrypted mail. I checked the headers with a Java program I wrote
myself, so I could verify that Messenger isn't silently stripping them
before display.

The only thing that might be the "help" field is "X-UIDL", which has a
value of random-seeming characters. Even with that, I vaguely recall
seeing something about the intended purpose of X-UIDL, and it wasn't to
break the encryption. "Alleged" purpose, perhaps I should say. But my
memory of that is very unclear and quite possibly wrong.

I, too, am skeptical about the help field claim. I'd be very interested
in details.

-- 
Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere     Have GNU, will travel
   518-374-4720     sfurlong at acmenet.net