Re: anonymous mail

[Brad Huntting <huntting@glarp.com>]

> PEM, [...] reveals in the clear who signed the message, outside of
> the encrypted portion. Also [...] to be PEM compliant, you *must*
> always sign your messages.

Perhaps it's time we polished the edges, added a few of the features
that are lacking, and wrote up up an RFC for the PGP message format.

Some features I'd like to see in PGP are:

	The ability to send an encrypted message to multiple
	recipients without duplicating the entire message.  The
	most logical way to do this would probably be to encrypt
	the random IDEA key once for each recipient.

	There needs to be a facility for having multiple signatures
	on a single document without making the signers sign each
	others signatures.  Besides the obvious application of
	removing a signature from a document, this would also
	facilitate things like petitions where many people could
	asynchronously sign a single document, and latter assemble
	all the signatures together.

	It should be possible (though certainly not mandatory) to
	hide the recipient's identity entirely.

	The message format needs to allow for alternate forms of
	encryption (besides IDEA).  Furthermore, the (shared key)
	algorithm used to encrypt a message should be hidden in
	the RSA encrypted part of the message along with the shared
	key.  Ideally, a list of algorithms could be given which
	would allow the message to be optionally compressed before
	being encrypted, or encrypted two or more times with
	different algorithms.

If I'm confused and the PGP message format already supports some
of these features, please correct me.


brad