[Cryptography] The Mesh

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Ralf Senderek <crypto at senderek.ie> wrote:

> On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 19:49:48 Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
>  Using strong email addresses, the fingerprint of the root of
>> trust for the receiver is embedded in the email address.
>> So if you send an email message to:
>>
>> MB2GK-6DUF5-YGYYL-JNY5E-RWSHZ?phb at hallambaker.com
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> If the message is sent through the prismproof.org email proxy,
>>
>
> In plain text?


Agh, no. The proxy code is available from there. You connect up to a proxy
on each local machine (127.0.0.1) and it uses TLS to boot.



 it will strip out the fingerprint, try to pull an email
>> profile with the specified fingerprint from the mesh
>> and extract an S/MIME key that chains to that root.
>>
>
> and use this key to encrypt the message on the proxy.
>
> Seems to me, that there are a number of questions to be
> answered, if this is going to be pretty secure.
>
> How will you convince the user that there is no "encryption
> kill switch" with a remote control to NSA headquaters
> on the proxy? It might be doable, I just don't see how.
>

Well the proxy is just an interim measure for most users until the email
apps have native support.

But if you are that paranoid, it is much easier to verify the open source
proxy isn't doing anything wrong than your email client.

But again, these are not the types of concern that 99% of users care about.
Right now the objective is to provide pretty good security, not absolutely
proven to not be sabotaged.
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