1994-03-02 - Re: Insecurity of public key crypto #1 (reply to Mandl)

Header Data

From: Eric Johnson <ejohnson@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu>
To: rarachel@prism.poly.edu
Message Hash: b7be7f2acdeed48298deb159955512adf5794148027aac99a8ec36c1f7be6a3b
Message ID: <199403020511.WAA21677@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1994-03-02 05:11:49 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 1 Mar 94 21:11:49 PST

Raw message

From: Eric Johnson <ejohnson@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu>
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 94 21:11:49 PST
To: rarachel@prism.poly.edu
Subject: Re: Insecurity of public key crypto #1 (reply to Mandl)
Message-ID: <199403020511.WAA21677@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


: From rarachel@prism.poly.edu Tue Mar  1 21:44:58 1994
: Subject: Re: Insecurity of public key crypto #1 (reply to Mandl)
: To: ejohnson@pmip.dist.maricopa.edu (Eric Johnson)
: Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
: X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21]
: Content-Type: text
: Content-Length: 1207      
:
: > 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 recipient 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.

That was exactly the point Eric Hughes was making; it is not a good
strategy to save encryption for only private communications.

Besides, procmail (or similar) should be able to handle piping
incoming cypherpunks traffic through the decryptor, so the hoop 
would be transparent anyway.  No muss, no fuss.

	--Eric





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