Tom Thomson wrote:
But will Aunt Mary be able to work out how to generate a key-pair and send
the public half off for signing, and install the certificate when it comes
back and install a new certificate every day when it arrives? How much of
this can be automated for Aunt Mary in the MUA? Do have you a less
complicated certificate mechanism in mind?
The MUA can handle that process transparently. Besides, it's not
necessary for Aunt Mary to get her certificate signed by the Root-CA -
this can be delegated, most likely to her ISP. The ISP would then need
to get a signing certificate signed by the CA et voilà.
Of course that's a very different business models for CAs. Established
CAs will want to fight with ISPs over who gets what percentage of Aunt
Marys monthly charges.
OTOH, there is no need that the "mailing CAs" are the same as the
oligopolistic list embedded in webbrowsers.
A possible problem: sometimes mail is sent to a machine that is currently
off line, and gets held in some relay (the outgoing mail server) for some
days. Lets hope that the next machine down the line checks the
certificate's valididity for the date in the first Received header, not the
date at which it receives the mail, or the certificate will appear out of
date.
PKIs can be designed to allow for such overlaps.
-- Matthias
--
Braindump-Blog http://matthias.leisi.net/
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