X.509 / PKI, PGP, and IBE Secure Email Technologies

[James A. Donald]

    --
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com>
> The real security issue for your mother is [...] her  
> bank and eBay don't cryptographically sign their mail.

And, since her bank and ebay are under massive attack  
from phishers, and your mother, if she is using any of  
the common email clients is using a cryptographically  
enabled mail agent, why don't they sign their email?  
This is exactly the attack that PKI was designed to  
address.

My possibly biased answer to this question, based on my 
past job as key keeper for two companies, would be that 
not only can your mother not sign her stuff with PKI,  
but the chairman of the board finds it even harder.

Does anyone else have war stories on this issue?

Just as big companies find it hard to write software  
that does not open their servers to a cross scripting  
attack, and hard to interact with their users in ways  
that do not train their users to respond to phishing  
attacks, and hard to write server side software that  
does not rely on the behavior of client side forms, they 
also find it hard to sign their email.

In the unlikely event that my mother is threatened by  
man in the middle attacks, she will allow me to set up  
secret key on her computer, and will follow my  
instructions on how to use it, but the chairman of the  
board will not, nor will the marketing department.

That is my experience - does anyone else have any  
experience that differs from this, or confirms this?

And before we sneer at the chairman of the board - hands 
up all programmers who failed to client and server side 
disable all past cookies and issue new https and http  
cookies on receiving a valid login, and all programmers 
who failed to enumerate and sterilize all fields  
appearing in any response.

It is not my position that inability to sign means that 
the chairman of the board is stupid.  It is that  
cryptographic signatures are too @#$%^&* hard and need 
to be made user friendly.

First write software that is easy enough for your 
mother.  Then we can work on making it easy enough for 
the marketing department.  

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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     gvDLBPaNQFZ3Y0yhzmO2KnYEKGolt9E+eey2rPxE
     4bGpW6AUGiMGbJFzaXJ8QcBY0HMhbypcque+5LrMd



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