[66908] in Cypherpunks
Re: Encrypted lists and ease of use
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Williams)
Mon Sep 30 21:40:45 1996
To: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Cc: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com>
Date: 30 Sep 1996 19:57:47 -0500
In-Reply-To: "E. Allen Smith"'s message of Mon, 30 Sep 1996 15:36 EDT
<scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us> wrote:
> Recently I've been involved in a number of small (30 people or
> less) mailing lists which occasionally use PGP for encrypted mail.
> The hassle comes when one is encrypting a message to the list...
Well, let the list server keep track of who is subscribed.
> What I propose to do is have a second list, list-encrypted@host,
> for every list@host...
Why do you need two lists? My server currently hosts a few such lists
(for non-profit international technical projects, extended family
news, etc.):
Subscribers send mail to the list server, PGP-encrypted with the
list's public key. The list server decrypts each inbound message with
its private key (passphrase entered at reboot). The message may be a
message to the list, or a command to the list server.
The list server maintains a list of subscribers' public keys and
encrypts each list message (or digest, for higher-volume lists) for
each subscriber (our lists are small, so we prefer to encrypt mail for
one subscriber at a time).
Although messages exist temporarily as plain text arrays in the list
server, it doesn't maintain an archive of messages. And as with any
(semi-)secure server, physical security is an issue.
As Allen mentioned, I think PGPdomo handles this, but majordomo is
pretty easy to hack up for any variation on this theme...
--
Roger Williams finger me for my PGP public key
Coelacanth Engineering consulting & turnkey product development
Middleborough, MA wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE
tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/
