[2968] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: IETF building GAK into the PKI
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vin McLellan)
Wed Jul 15 13:59:31 1998
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980714171640.03262158@pop3.clark.net>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 13:21:52 -0400
To: Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org>
From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org> wrote:
>I would love to see mailers (anyone from Qualcomm or Netscape listening?)
>keep mail archives enciphered under one or more storage keys. Symmetric
>crypto is fine for that. PGP mail can have the signature left attached to
>the cleartext (all enciphered under the storage key).
Agreed!
What I have worried about is whether the IETF's WGs on S/MIME and
Open PGP have left a mechanism in place, or even the option for a
mechanism, which could allow for a compliant product which gracefully hands
off incoming encrypted e-mail to be locally decrypted then reencrypted for
the recipient's disk storage.
I don't doubt that several of the vendors active in supporting both
IETF standard-development efforts will try to guarantee -- because they
believe they have a market that demands it -- that key or message
"recovery" crypto for e-mail will be compliant.
It would be nice if someone was being equally watchful to sustain
the possibility that a future generation of compliant mailers might allow
automatic decrypt/crypt (or reencrypt) of a recipient's mail so that it
could be local stored to disk under, at least, a different key.
It might be useful, even necessary, in international markets if the
EU demands that employee e-mail be given the same protection against
employer eavesdropping as employee telephone calls. The EU culture won't
accept the American model that corporate employers can strip their
employees of all communication privacy rights, just because the employee is
on company grounds and using company telephones or workstations. They have
a more expansive model or citizen rights. So CMR doesn't and won't sell in
Europe.
But European firms -- like their American counterparts -- may be
expected to demand the right to recover company data stored encrypted on
company computers, even under an employee's personal key. Only if mailers
have separate crypto or keying for transient messages and stored
messages/data will products be able to service these different
cultural/legal markets.
I don't see this issue being raised among those are debating the
tweaks to the protocol subsections on the IETF lists, unfortunately. (The
source of IETF volunteers is largely American, internationalist
presumptions aside.) The flare of politics that accompanies any discussion
of CMR, GAK, key-escrow or recovery has taught those involved in these
discussions to bury such architectural issues in a miasma of fineprint
details.
Surete,
_Vin
-----
"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for
good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by
its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who
deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
_ A Thinking man's Creed for Crypto _vbm.
* Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> *
53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548
