Yahoo releases internet standard draft for using DNS as public key server

[Peter Gutmann]

Russell Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> writes:
>Peter Gutmann writes:
>> STARTTLS
>
>If Alice and Cathy both implement STARTTLS, and Beatty does not, and Beatty
>handles email which is ultimately sent to Cathy, then STARTTLS accomplishes
>nothing.  If Uma and Wendy implement DomainKeys, and Violet does not, and
>Violet handles email which is ultimately sent to Wendy, then Wendy can check
>Uma's signature.

Since none of Uma, Wendy, or Violet implement DomainKeys or even know what
they are, DomainKeys accomplishes nothing.  OTOH if their { ISP, company,
whatever } has STARTTLS enabled, they're getting their email encrypted without
even knowing about it and are having better-than-average security applied to
their POP/IMAP mail account, again without even knowing about it (I suspect
the latter is far more of a selling point to users than encryption.  No-one
would want to read their mail anyway so they're not worried about that, but if
it stops those nasty hackers from breaking into their account, it's a good
thing).

>If, instead, Perry had a list of PGP keys and email addresses, he wouldn't
>*need* to compare the email address on the incoming email.

He'd instead need to spend even more time mucking around with keyrings and
updating keys and writing scripts to handle all the checking and wondering why
it all has to be so complicated, and maybe he should just ask people to fax in
submissions.

Peter.

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