3 ms·
> WoT sadly often means “accept everything without checking” in practice I'd like to see Trust on First Use used automatically, combined with automatic key gen
by rlpb 9y ago
> WoT sadly often means “accept everything without checking” in practice
I'd like to see Trust on First Use used automatically, combined with automatic key generation with no prompting. PGP is probably more suited to this. While it's not perfect, it is possible to retrospectively verify a key and on success consider it perfect. A well designed UI could expose this.
Details:
1. Generate a key automatically with no prompting.
2. Sign everything outbound automatically with no prompting (if necessary use the header or rely on a multiple email handshake if you're bothered that users will see an "attachment" they won't understand).
3. Expose "identities" in the UI with information about what incoming mail corresponds to what identities, and what trust has been assigned to individual identities.
4. Permit encrypted email to be sent to identities, whether they are trusted or not.
5. Allow retrospective assignment of trust to identities.
6. Allow users to publicly "join" their identities for when autogeneration has happened in multiple places (eg. separately on webmail, my phone and my tablet).
7. Allow import and export of keys and external key agents for users who want to go all the way.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y agoS/MIME is extremely well suited for this, because it's already supported in many clients natively. You could make it possible to obtain a validated identity (e-mail validation) from a CA. Many of today's clients would natively be able to verify and trust this identity without previous key exchange. You could still slap arbitrary additional verification on top of this - trust-on-first-use, WoT, whatever you feel like - but an attacker would first have to overcome the (relatively weak) CA validation and then the additional fancy thing, while it would be usable for normal users immediately. The only open issue would be multiple identities and joining them. This could be fixed by sharing the key (i.e. if you generate a key on your phone, tablet and PC, you'd have to take each of the three keys and place a copy on the other two devices).