A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Hadmut Danisch]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 03:50:02AM +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> Lauren Weinstein, founder of People for Internet Responsibility, has
> come out with a new spam solution at http://www.pfir.org/tripoli-overview.
> 
> According to this proposal, the Internet email architecture would be
> revamped.  Each piece of mail would include a PIT, a Payload Identity
> Token, emphasis on Identity.  This would be a token certifying that you
> were an Authorized Email User as judged by the authorities.  Based on
> your PIT, the receiving email software could decide to reject your
> email.



I doubt that any kind of anti-spam mechanism which requires such 
a certification will be widely accepted. And I do not believe that
any cryptographical method can be deployed widely enough to provide
security against spam. Cryptography is simply too complicated and too
error/theft-of-secret prone to be used in common. 


(If anyone is interested, I've made an alternative proposal based on
non-cryptographic DNS-based lightweight authentication/authorization,
available at 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-danisch-dns-rr-smtp-01.txt )


regards
Hadmut



---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com