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

[galvin+internet-history at elistx.com (James Galvin)]

-- On February 16, 2011 6:06:36 PM -0500 Bernie Cosell 
<bernie at fantasyfarm.com> wrote regarding [ih] secure email was  The 
Internet Plan;	was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet --

> Am I correct that every proposal
> that's floated by so  far has involved EVERY email sender and
> recipient having a personal  public key?  If so, then
> is there any rational way even to consider a  system that might
> involve allocating [and managing] several hundred  million public
> keys?  AFAIK the PKI system barely works now... if every  person who
> wants to participate in email 2.0 has to get a personal public- key,
> that's going to be a bit of a mess, no?

I believe that DNSSEC makes this eminently doable.

As a concept, change an email address to a domain name by replacing the 
"@" with a ".".  Then lookup the public key for that user.  For that 
matter, lookup the certificate for that user, which could even be 
self-signed.

PKI never worked Internet-wide because there was never an effective 
Internet-wide distribution system.

Revocation could be supported either similarly to what DNSSEC does for 
itself or simply by not being present in the zone.  Other solutions are 
also possible.

Next stop: world peace.

Jim