[Cryptography] [cryptography] Email encryption for the wider public

[Henry Augustus Chamberlain]

On 17/09/2014, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>I'm not sure I understand what problem you've just solved.  Senders still
>>need to generate a keypair and encrypt their mail, receivers still need to
>>decrypt their mail.  All you've done is remove key lookup and replaced it
>>with a From: header.
>
> Right, and you still have all the problems of key management, with a
> new one that you have to change your e-mail address if you lose the
> keys.
>
> DANE (or an upcoming minor extension thereof) allows you to store the
> public key for an e-mail address in the DNS.  That seems to me to have
> somewhat more tractable key management issues, since a single key is
> not eternally tied to an e-mail address.


I think I may have failed to explain my motivation in sufficient
depth. The general public is currently unable to understand and use
public key encryption: even with automation provided by Enigmail and
similar programs, end-to-end encryption still requires an
understanding of private/public keys and digital signatures, in
situations such as key-signing or when the software gives them an
error message (e.g. "Digital signature not verified").

I think keys and email addresses serve a very similar purpose: both
serve as an "online identity". I don't see why we need to impose two
sets of identities on each user - it means either personally
maintaining a list of both the email address and the public key of
each of your contacts, or alternatively some complex PKI scheme (key
servers, etc) to tie the two forms of identity together.