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I would love to see a protocol added, so that when alice composes an email a request is sent to bob@bar.com with a special header to retrieve bob's private key.
by derekp7 7y ago
I would love to see a protocol added, so that when alice composes an email a request is sent to bob@bar.com with a special header to retrieve bob's private key. This in turn would be signed with a cert from bar.com, which in turn is signed by one of the same trusted CA's used for HTTPS traffic.
Is there anything like this currently implemented / standardized?
- lvh 7y agoThere's something crappy-ish and similar for email with DKIM. That doesn't sound the same, because it's the server signing, not the sender -- but in this protocol you're kinda already trusting the server anyway. The critical difference is that DKIM is not protected with WebPKI.
- WorldMaker 7y agoActivityPub will bootstrap public keys from WebFinger (over TLS/HTTPS). Keybase has an even more complicated key escrow-based system (that works for any of their "Proof" types, not just domain ownership) if you trust their clients, where your client generates an ad hoc key for the recipient and essentially a "for bob's ears only" claim and on verifiable Proof from Bob securely exchanges the ad hoc key to Bob's new public key. Which is interesting because it allows for people that haven't yet setup keys to eventually receive them so long as you trust Keybase's clients and their Proof infrastructure.
- dane-pgp 7y agoI think you want Alice to retrieve Bob's public key, but it also sounds like you want Autocrypt [0] and/or RFC-7929 [1]. [0] https://autocrypt.org/ https://autocrypt.org/ [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929