At 10:21 PM 4/5/1999 -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>The rest of the hype aside -- and without DNSsec, their claims about
>securing the whole Internet through IPsec are overblown -- this part
>strikes me as very dangerous:
>
> 2. Self-Decrypting Archives. You may now encrypt
>> files or folders into Self-Decrypting Archives
>> (SDA) which can be sent to users who do not
>> even have PGP. The archives are completely
>> independent of any application, compressed
>> and protected by PGP's strong cryptography.
>
>How, pray tell, can this work? The only comparable products I've seen
>work by incorporating the decryption software into a executable that you
>mail to your victim, er, correspondent. This person then runs the program
>they received in the mail, which then prompts them for the key... (As
>an aside, I once had to explain to someone why this was an absurd
>concept. "But how does your enemy know what sender to impersonate?" This,
>in a threat environment sufficient to merit encrypting email....)
...
Of course this is dangerous, but there is a demand for it. Not everyone
wants bomb-proof security. I wrote a self-decrypting archive program once,
and the people using it are happy with it. It would be easy, of course, to
substitute any malicious code you please, but sometimes that threat is much
less concern than the fact that some people just plain wouldn't use any
crypto at all without this option. The real cure, of course, is to so
tightly and easily integrate security into email that it is as easy as this
to use, but not as risky.
_______
Michael Paul Johnson
http://ebible.org/mpj
