In an earlier note, I wrote
This situation is made worse by legal prohibitions on providing plugable
crypto interfaces. It would be technically easy for S/MIME and other
application to employ a set of APIs (even better we could standardize
them) to crypto packages. Sadly, this remains illegal in many countries
including USA.
I thought that before I get flamed, I need to provide a little bit more
detail/context.
1. Vendors are not prohibited from supporting plug-ins that access an
email message on the occurrence of certain events (for example, on
submission, and when being opened for display), when these plug-ins can be
shown to have meaningful non-crypto purposes. It is recognized that these
plug-ins can also be employed to perform crypto processing on outbound and
inbound messages. Outlook and Notes/Domino plug-ins have been developed by
third parties to do just this. In general these have not been particularly
reliable or successful in the market.
2. Microsoft received a dispensation (which others may now have also
received), which allowed them to provide support for pure crypto plug-ins.
This dispensation required them to only allow plug-ins to be employed that
had been approved by the NSA. This restriction is enforced by requiring
crypto plug-ins to be signed using a special Microsoft key. This signature
is verified when the plug-in is first called. Though I recently heard (via
hearsay rather than a reliable source)that the NSA has approved additional
plug-ins (including possibly one for Germany), for a long time they had
approved only one. Under this circumstance, there was not much point in
other vendors following MS' lead.
Nick
Nick Shelness
Independent Technology Consultant
Fellow - Differéntis Ltd.
Advisor - Oak Investment Partners
Contact Details
Office Tel: +44 (0) 1828 640 632
Office Fax: +44 (0) 1828 640 647
Internet email: nick(_at_)old-mill(_dot_)net
Short message: +44 7753 566460 or page(_at_)old-mill(_dot_)net
AOL instant messaging: NickShelness
MSN instant messaging: nh_shelness(_at_)hotmail(_dot_)com
Yahoo instant messaging: NickShelness
Snail mail: The Old Mill, Meigle, Perthshire, PH12 8TJ, UK