PGP makes email encryption easier

[Ian Grigg]

Eric Murray wrote:

> > For the record, AFAIK, this approach was invented and
> > deployed by Dr. Ian Brown as his undergraduate thesis,
> > back in 1996 or so.
> 
> Not to take anything away from Dr Brown, but I wrote something very
> similar to what PGP's selling for internal use at SUN in 1995 (to secure
> communications between some eastern european offices).   I'd thought
> about it a couple years before that as I needed something to secure
> communications between the company I worked for and their law firm,
> and teaching executives and chip designers to use PGP wasn't working
> very well.

Thanks for the correction!  Was this project ever released
or documented?  I never heard of it before.

> I don't beleive that I was the first to think of it or the first to
> do it; it's a pretty obvious solution.

:-)  Many inventions are obvious once well understood.

Although I would agree that such an invention should not
deserve to be patented.  Whether that's because it is too
obvious, or too useful, depends on ones pov...

> > It's a good approach.  It trades some sysadmin complexity
> > for the key admin complexity, but it also raises some
> > interesting challenges for deciding when to encrypt,
> > when not to encrypt, and also, when to block outgoing
> > mail that should be encrypted...
> 
> Yep.
> 
> Eric

iang

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