Hi Mike, 2015-02-09 16:06 GMT+01:00 Mike Hearn <[email protected]>: > To quickly double check my understanding, your users can get public keys > from two sources: > > Whiteout acts as a CA for its own users > Or, the app will accept any key that claims to own that email address and is > uploaded to a key server > > Given this model, I'm not sure why you are using PGP. It seems like the > wrong tool for the job. > > In the first approach you're basically doing the PKI, but smaller, with less > competition/decentralisation and with less software compatibility. You could > as well just use S/MIME and team up with an existing CA that offers free > S/MIME certs. This would have the advantage of e.g. working out of the box > on the iPhone/Outlook/Thunderbird/etc, plus the existing CA's have the > advantage of having been audited and been in business for a long time, > whereas you are new and a bit of an unknown quantity. > > In the second approach you're dodging the key management problem entirely, > whilst opening up a DoS attack - anyone can block your app from sending mail > to any user by simply uploading a bogus key to a PGP keyserver. Is there a > good way to recover from this? > > Opportunistic crypto is fine, but it feels like this second approach is not > any better than just telling people to use Gmail. Both ends have TLS on the > wire and it's only susceptible to a targeted attack, so the security level > is the same. > > Can you convince me I'm wrong?
Nope. > If you got out of the CA business and used stuff that's more widely > implemented than PGP, you could focus 100% on building the best S/MIME UX > and fixing up some of its warts with proprietary extensions e.g. encrypting > the subject field. That would be a truly valuable product, plus it would > come with a built in business model as S/MIME is much more widely used in > corporate deployments than PGP, so you could sell into the enterprise with > greater ease. > > I guess the biggest issue you'd face, beyond the fact that PGP has nerd cred > that S/MIME doesn't, is that you are implementing everything in Javascript > in the browser. Webmail is only one option. More info here: https://github.com/whiteout-io/mail-html5/wiki/FAQ#is-browser-based-security-really-possible Right now we're focusing on the consumer market. We've thought about adding S/MIME support, but right now we're focusing on providing an easy to use PGP solution. Tankred -- Whiteout Networks GmbH c/o Werk1 Grafinger Str. 6 D-81671 München Geschäftsführer: Oliver Gajek RG München HRB 204479 _______________________________________________ Messaging mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
