[Cryptography] Explaining PK to grandma

[Nico Williams]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:44:59PM +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com> writes:
> > [...]
> 
> +1 to all the above.  I've been a bit behind on email recently so you got
> there first with a good summary of the problem, but if your secure email
> scheme has a step 0 of "explain to granny how secure email works" then you may
> as well not bother going to step 1, whatever your step 1 is meant to be.
> Secure email has to work like Skype, you install it, you click on "Call
> <insert-name-of-grandchild>", and it works.

Right, secure e-mail is a bit of an oxymoron.  You can have other secure
things, but e-mail, not so much.  And do explain this go grandma:

    all your base belong to government [and your vendor(s) [*]]
    
    [*] If she can grok any explanation of "vendor".

And as someone pointed out, if you wish to store bits and pieces of non-
e-mail secure conversations, pretty soon you're right back at something
that looks like e-mail, but as long as exchanges between peers are
interactive you have a shot at being secure modulo caveats that grandma
can understand (see above).

Nico
--