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>S/MIME is super niche. Even within the niche of email encryption it's a niche protocol Compared to what, PGP? As far as I know, S/MIME has the most prevalent
by lol768 8y ago
>S/MIME is super niche. Even within the niche of email encryption it's a niche protocol
Compared to what, PGP? As far as I know, S/MIME has the most prevalent support out of the box in email software.
- jcranmer 8y agoTo rough orders of magnitude, there's something on the order of a few million users of S/MIME, a few hundred thousand of PGP, and a few billion for DKIM, with DKIM happening for about half of email.
- lol768 8y ago>and a few billion for DKIM, with DKIM happening for about half of email I'm not sure I'd count DKIM in this category, since it's not user-facing.
- Chlorus 8y agoAlso, does DKIM really provide the same sort of authentication that PGP / s/MIME would? All DKIMs verify is that the message was in fact authorized to emanate from that domain - PGP & S/MIME attempt to confirm that a particular identity belongs to a particular address.
- aaronmdjones 8y agoDKIM signs the message headers (including the From: header) and (a hash of) the message body. So you can validate that a message has not been tampered with, and is from the mailbox it says it is (assuming your mail provider rejects messages with an invalid signature, irrespective of e.g. DMARC).
- hannob 8y agoIt's been said that S/MIME has more implementations than users. My guess would be there's more PGP users than S/MIME, but I could be wrong (and I doubt anyone has reliable numbers). In any case, everyone should agree that both are super niche.
- jcranmer 8y agoThere's almost certainly more users of S/MIME than PGP. PGP keyservers can be well-analyzed for number of available keys, which is somewhere in the region of hundred thousands to millions, with the number of active users probably around a hundred thousand or so. S/MIME is known to be used by the DoD and CAC, which gives it several million users.