> Agreed. Which is why I pointed out that the encryption taking place > under-the-hood tends to be a reasonable defense against a passive or > less-resourced attacker while being frequently unsuitable against the
Whoever taps SMTP/POP3 bitstreams is hardly less-resourced. The only adversary you need to worry about is the resourceful one. > decision. But that does not mean that no security benefits are to be had > from opportunistic encryption of Internet traffic. Any massive deployment of crypto is subvertible. I see no way around it - it's like microsoft windows' vulnerabilities. To be safe, crypto needs to be diverse, custom-made and manual. The brain cycles you spend when encrypting are the only real defense. > friend's nor my ISP to have ready access to the cleartext of that email. > Fortunately, we had encrypted SMTP connections end-to-end, thus > protecting the contents of the email from the ISP's, albeit perhaps not > from the NSA. Very few run their own SMTP. Your own SMTP on your own box is not much different from PGP eudora plug-in autoencrypting. But you cannot use this argument to preach benefits of under-the-hood crypto - when almost all internet mail traffic uses ISP-owned SMTP servers. > noticed that a good majority of the P2P efforts introduced at CODECON > all included support for encryption as part of the protocol. The various I predict that first attempt to apply this on the gnutella/morpheus/kazaa/napster scale will lead to clampdown. Which is the reason that no one did it. We don't want osama sending orders that way. ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com