From: rarachel@prism.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian)
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 94 20:45:06 PST
To: ejohnson@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu (Eric Johnson)
Subject: Re: Insecurity of public key crypto #1 (reply to Mandl)
In-Reply-To: <199403020015.RAA21139@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu>
Message-ID: <9403020433.AA16707@prism.poly.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


> Would it not make sense, therefore, to publish a public cypherpunks
> mailing list key, which is returned with subscription requests?
> All incoming message cleartext to the mailing list server would
> then be encrypted in the server's key; not for security, but 
> precisely for the reason you state above.  That _would_ create
> quite a volume of encrypted communications to each receipient of 
> the list.

Please don't do that.  I don't want to go through hoops to read this
mailing list.  It's already cumbersome as is.  Adding PGP in the soup
would make things very nasty.  I'd rather not use PGP except for private
messages.

Perhaps having a usenet news group for encoded mail might be better.
Something where everyone can occasionally either send a PGP'ed message
with the subject being an encoded version of the receipient's name,
or with just random junk that's PGP'ed...  This would create enough
traffic to be able to hide messages in.

Perhaps a special "news" reader program can be written that scans
all messages in that group for the encoded name, and if it matches
that of the reader it will decode it and dump it in that user's mail
or read it (and possibly reply to it) on the spot.