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Re: Secure email transmission

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On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Forrest Aldrich wrote:

> I know there are wonderful programs like PGP and others which can
> provide security through encrypting the message first.  But let's face
> it, using such mechanisms on a wide scale can still be hacky and
> bothersome.  
> 
> So, why not provide an addition to the SMTP protocol (or for qmail) that
> will establish an encrypted connection between two qmail servers?  

What will you get out of it?
If you add encryption techniques between the MTAs and it was designed in
such a way that only the first and last needed it, you would at best know
which the first and last MTA were for this message. You still don't know
who wrote the contents (unless the first MTA and the MTU were extended in
another way so the MTA could authorize the MTU), and that no one
saw or altered the message between the MTU and the MTA.

If you want this to be global, remember that there are countries there it
is against the law to use encryption techniques, there are countries who
think no one else knows how to implement RSA, DES, IDEA and other common 
encryption algorithms and uses silly export restrictions on programs that
implement "strong" encryption.

If you just want to send secure mail between two remote sites of yours,
get yourself some routers that encrypt the IP packets instead. There is a
project for linux (among others) that turns a PC into an encryption
bridge. I don't know the status for this project but you can find it if
you search the linux kernel mailing list archive.

/Sebastian

See http://www.hogia.net/keys/sa-pgp.asc for public pgp key.

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