NPR : E-Mail Encryption Rare in Everyday Use

[Ben Laurie]

Alex Alten wrote:
> At 02:59 PM 2/24/2006 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>> Ed Gerck wrote: We have keyservers for this (my chosen technology
>> was PGP). If you liken their use to looking up an address in an
>> address book, this isn't hard for users to grasp.
> 
> I used PGP (Enterprise edition?) to encrypt my work emails to a 
> distributed set of members last year.  We all had each other's public
> keys (about a dozen or so).
> 
> What I really hated about it was that when fred at company.com sent me
> an email often I couldn't decrypt it.  Why?  Because his firm's email
> server decided to put in the FROM field "fred at server.company.com".
> Since it didn't match the email name in his X.509 certificate's DN it
> wouldn't decrypt the S/MIME attachment. This also caused problems
> with replying to his email.  It took us hours, with several
> experimental emails sent back and forth, to figure out the root of
> the problem.
> 
> No wonder PKI has died commercially and encrypted email is on the 
> endangered species list.

I trust you don't think this is a problem with PKI, right? Since clearly
the issue is with the s/w you were using.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html           http://www.links.org/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

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