Alpha testers wanted: GNU Emacs, RMAIL, and PGP

[b44729@achilles.ctd.anl.gov (Samuel Pigg)]

   Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 23:28:36 PDT
   From: jpp@markv.com
   Sender: jpp@markv.com

     I have just finished writing a fancy new package for GNU Emacs
   (pgpmail).  It requires PGP, RMAIL, and sendmail.  You must be able to
   run a program from within Emacs.  Pgpmail automaticaly checks message
   signatures and decrypts messages, it helps automate signing outgoing
   messages (and strips the signatures a bit too!).  Pgpmail also helps
   fix a known security hole -- it doesn't send you passphrase on the
   command line, but uses the environment instead.

I may be missing something, but isn't this less secure than using the
command line? Anyone on the system can do a "ps -e" whilst you are
encrypting to get the environment of the pgp process.

If you use the -z option to pass the passphrase to pgp, that argument
gets cleared by pgp immedaitely when it executes, so it is not
available for very long.

An even better way would be to use the file descriptor method of
giving the passphrase to pgp.

Not sure how you would do this in elisp, but that's how I did it in
NXPGP (pgp front end for NeXT). Well, the newest version anyway, which
is still being beta tested (anyone want to help?).


-Sam