[ih] The Internet Plan; was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine)]

> the obvious next thing would be some kind of uniform agreement on
> strong authentication of the source of email and protecting contents.
> I know about PGP of course, but it's not uniformly implemented and I
> think we could usefully try again. Last time we tried, it was called
> PEM and suffered from too pure a hierarchy of certificates, I think.

S/MIME is implemented in all of the popular MUAs, but nobody uses it 
because of the key distribution problems.  DKIM is a simpler signing 
scheme where the granularity is a domain rather than a user, and puts keys 
in the DNS.  It seems to be reasonably successful, in large part because 
it's primarily MTA->MTA rather than MUA->MUA and there's a lot fewer MTAs 
to configure.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
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