ietf-822
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Re: RHijacked Addresses

2002-08-05 09:37:00

At 8:49 PM +0200 8/4/02, Jacob Palme wrote:
I am not a security expert and do not understand why.
Possible causes could be:

- Competing standards where unity is needed.

Not true for email. S/MIME has been built into most widely-used MUAs for many years; almost no one uses it.

- Too complex and expensive standards.

Complex, yes; expensive, no. But the complexity hasn't prevented them from being widely deployed with quite good interoperability.

- Maybe existing standards do not solve the right problem.
  (For example protection of body, when protection of
  heading is more needed.)

If this were a real problem, it could have been solved years ago with encapsulation. This is probably a red herring.

- Difficulty of establish a trusted key distribution
  scheme giving everyone, not only a few large servers,
  access to keys.

Close, but not quite, I think. Key distribution is easy: trust distribution has so far been impossible. That is, if you and I have certificates that lead to different roots, how do you and I establish trust?

- Viruses and worms threaten keys stored in personal
  computers, and smart cards (which possibly might
  solve this problem) has not been successful because
  of the extra cost or lack of standards.

This has not been a problem yet, but it certainly will be when/if trusted email becomes prevalent. It is pretty trivial to find the private keys on a PC, and probably 95% of them are easily susceptible to dictionary attacks.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

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