Re: extra dashes in PGP-related blocks?

[andrew@riskdev.ml.com (Andrew Brown)]

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>> From: Jonathan Rochkind
>
>My problem was that a user would send me their public key, inside of a
>signed message, and the "BEGIN PUBLIC KEY" stuff would have the "- " on it.
>Which means that before I can add it to my keyring, I've got to edit out
>the extra "- "s, and then save it in a file, and then pass it through PGP,
>instead of just passing the original message though PGP, or using the Mac
>"copy" command on a part of the message and sending that through PGP.
>Or someone sends me an encrypted address block inside a signed message, and
>I've got to do the same before I can use it.

but wait!  you can't actually verify the outer sig until you extract the key
from inside the signed message?  that's a bit more complicated.  pgp will
actually recognize a key embedded inside an armored, signed message but it won't
(i don't think -- warlord?) play with the key other than tell you it is one.

what these people should probably be doing is signing their public keys with
their private keys to provide the same functionality (almost).  what you have,
otherwise, really is a two step process.  you will have to strip off the outer
sig layer to get the the key.

>I now understand why PGP does what it does, but it's still a pain. Perhaps
>the ideal mail reading program would run my incoming mail through PGP
>before I even saw it, so I wouldn't have this problem. Well, actually not.
>My ideal mail reader would check the signatures before I saw them, but
>would also leave them intact on the message, so I could re-check them
>myself manually if I wanted.  Oh well.  It's not a limitation on
>functionality of any kind, just on convenience.

i believe if you used emacs to read your mail, you might get that sort of
functionality since it's very user-customizable (is that a word?).  i wrote
myself a little perl wrapper to handle signing/encrypting outbound messages
so that i don't have to type all the options and redirect the output or move
output files.  it's a one person thing.  to each his own.  i prefer to read
my mail in a very un-adulterated form and i do all my sig verifying and
decrypting by hand too.  i'm weird that way.

apologies to warload, you are right (imho) about the fundamental behavior of
remailers.  they shouldn't do things like that except perhaps atttemp to
remove the outer armor layer if it is an encrypting/decrypting remailer.

peas and goobles!

- -- 
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andrew@ml.com (Andrew Brown)
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