[Cryptography] End to end

Max Kington mkington at webhanger.com
Tue Sep 17 13:03:26 EDT 2013


On 17 Sep 2013 15:47, "Christoph Gruber" <grisu at guru.at> wrote:
>
> On 2013-09-16 Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> If people are sending email through the corporate email system then in
many cases the corporation has a need/right to see what they are
sending/receiving.
>
> [snip]
>
> Even if an organisation has a need/right to look into people's email, it
is necessary to protect the communication on transport and storage. Of
course a certain way of key recovery has to be in place.
>
> Just my 2 cents

I intend to reply in more detail to the draft there's lots of very
interesting work there.

The most common approach to ILM for email in highly regulated sectors I've
seen is to divorce the storage and transport mechanism and associated
security from the long term storage. In a corporate environment the message
is captured pre encryption and transmission and stored.

Whilst key escrow mechanisms do exist the risk is that what gets escrowed
isn't what was sent if you maliciously want to tunnel data (imagine not
being able to decrypt a message at the request of the SEC or FSA because
the key you were sent is wrong by the desktop app, or conversely having to
decrypt everything first to check). You have the added issue of having to
store all the associated keys and in 7 years (the typical retention period
over here for business now regarded as complete, let alone long running
contracts still in play) still have software to decrypt it.

Hence, store in the clear, keep safe at rest using today's archival
mechanism and when that starts to get dated move onto the next one
en-masse, for all your media not just emails.

Hence for the purposes of your RFC perhaps view that as a problem that
doesn't require detailed specification.

M

>
>> --
>> Website: http://hallambaker.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> The cryptography mailing list
>> cryptography at metzdowd.com
>> http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> The cryptography mailing list
> cryptography at metzdowd.com
> http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20130917/2d32e1c4/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list