[52745] in Cypherpunks
Re: MUSE (Mail Ubiquitous Security Extensions) discussion starting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ned Freed)
Wed Mar 27 09:21:05 1996
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 02:18:58 -0800 (PST)
From: Ned Freed <NED@INNOSOFT.COM>
In-Reply-To: "Your message dated Tue, 26 Mar 1996 00:42:13 -0800"
<9603260842.AA07183@toad.com>
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, gnu@toad.com, ietf-muse@imc.org
> One initial technical question I have about MUSE is why to bother
> encapsulating email messages while in transit in more layers of MIME
> glop? Why not just run IP Security between the sendmail daemons
> involved, and have the receiving sendmail daemon note in the Received
> header that the message arrived over an authenticated connection?
Because this gives you a point-to-point solution. MUSE is still end-to-end; the
only difference is that the ends have moved slightly away from the user in the
interests of deployment expediency.
> IPSEC provides your choice of authentication and/or encryption, and
> already uses the keys from the Domain Name System. IPSEC solves many
> other problems as well as the particular secure/private email delivery
> problem. And deploying a Real Application (sendmail) that uses IPSEC
> would shake it out and get it widely used.
IPSEC does indeed solve many problems. Unfortunatly secure email end-to-end
email isn't one of them.
Ned
