Re: Access to Storage and Communication Keys

["William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com>]

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In <3.0.1.32.19970609000938.00756910@popd.ix.netcom.com>, on 06/09/97 
   at 12:09 AM, Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com> said:

>I've been using PGP Inc.'s PGP5.0 Eudora Plug-In,
>and it decrypts the mail into the mail message buffer itself. When you
>finish with that particular message (e.g. go to the next, or just close
>it), you get asked it you want to save the modified message, and if you
>say "yes" you'll have the decrypted message in your mailbox. However,
>there's a negative about this - if you receive mail that's  signed and
>encrypted, and save the modified version, it loses the signature
>information - so it may be more valuable to save the encrypted
>version...

Well this is why I tell everyone to clear sign the message first and then
encrypt it. In my PGP GUI/E-Mail integration E-Secure this is the default
behavior. IMHO encrypting & signing (-sea) is a PITA (for the reciever).

I also verify signatures of all signed inbound messages and append the
output from PGP to the bottom of the message so that you can see the
results when the message is opened without having to re-run PGP.

The user also has the option to either decrypt messages as they are
retreived or to store them encrypted.

I just released the first beta of my auto-encrypt code. That was quite fun
to write. Myself am rather disturbed by how many PGP/E-Mail implmentations
handle signing/encrypting of messages. One of my biggest pet peeves is
when only the plain text of a message is signed/encrypted. I have seen
this with more than 1 implementation and I see it as a serrious security
flaw.

Another issue that is usally missed is Bcc's. The whole purpose of using
Bcc's is that you don't want the rest of your distribution to know that
you have sent a copy to the addresses on the Bcc line. If you encrypt a
message with multiple keys including keys for your Bcc's then your Bcc's
will be known to everyone who recieves a copy of the message.

What I have done to address this is to send seperate copies of the message
to each address on the Bcc list each encrypted with only the one key for
the address.

You can have the strongest algorithms in the world but they do you no good
if they are poorly implemented.

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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