ietf-openpgp
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Re: Split Implementations of PGP

2005-03-16 06:14:46

Am Mittwoch, den 16.03.2005, 01:46 -0800 schrieb Jon Callas:
Something that would help those of us doing crypto and IMAP would be 
for IMAP to be less fussy about message size.

[...]

It would be very usefull, for me at least, if you could re-state your
use-case here.  I'm getting the impression that I'm missing something
fundamental.

I'm always reading about server-side decryption.  Some people seem to
see it as a solution for the "one big chunk of ciphertext" problem.  I'm
not sure what else it would be good for.

For me, server-side decryption is a nightmare.  Pure and evil.  

It conflicts with my beliefs about how an end-to-end crypto solution
should work.  Its not a solution, its a kludge and I'd much rather
address the *real* problem.

The server is completely untrusted.  Much too much of my personal data
is on other's servers already.  Organizations or people, who might have
different priorities in protecting it than I have.   Thats why I use
end-to-end encryption when it matters.

If people say, adressing the real problem would require influencing the
senders behaviour, and we can't do that, and so we need a work-around
now -- fine.  I can understand that.  But still, shouldn't that prompt
us to think about wether we *need* to be able to influence the senders
behaviour in more ways than we can now?


P.S. Regarding IMAP and message sizes:  If I get an encrypted message,
the size of the attachment *is* the message size.  That decryption
yields a different size doesn't matter because it occurs on the client,
after download.

Regards

-- 
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff