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>But as a security generality - email is vastly less secure than human nature wants to assume that it is. I don't think this has to do with "human nature" anym

by xoa 2y ago

>But as a security generality - email is vastly less secure than human nature wants to assume that it is. I don't think this has to do with "human nature" anymore than http did. It's a very important, powerful form of communication without any secure replacement. Just as we switched to https, ideally an "xmail" or the like would get created as an open standard with open software that was email with better security by default. Sadly I'm not sure we collectively have the ability to do that kind of thing any longer, powerful entities have realized it's just too attractive to lock it up. But even many open source organizations don't seem to feel like bothering. Plenty of security experts even just prefer new shiny and will spout ridiculous "move to instant messaging". So status quo rules for the foreseeable future.

immibis 2y ago
Email is one of a great number of internet communication systems. It happens to be one that was created before security was much of a concern (and before it was a problem we could solve), and also one that is highly asynchronous. Newer systems have their own different sets of tradeoffs. None of them happen to be email plus security. But that makes sense: now that everyone is online most of the time, why would you design a highly asynchronous store-and-forward-ish system? Of course you want a recipient to receive a message as soon as you sent it and the sender to confirm the recipient received the message. Designing a new system any other way would be leaving value* on the table. (*actual value not economics value) We can extend email, though. Why isn't there an SMTP GETKEY command to return a PGP key corresponding to an email address? Sure, the sender might not support the same version of PGP, and sure, the connection might be intercepted (hopefully you'd not trust the output of this command except over TLS), but like most of the email system, it would be a big improvement and good enough most of the time.

by xoa 2y ago

immibis 2y ago

Email is one of a great number of internet communication systems. It happens to be one that was created before security was much of a concern (and before it was a problem we could solve), and also one that is highly asynchronous. Newer systems have their own different sets of tradeoffs. None of them happen to be email plus security. But that makes sense: now that everyone is online most of the time, why would you design a highly asynchronous store-and-forward-ish system? Of course you want a recipient to receive a message as soon as you sent it and the sender to confirm the recipient received the message. Designing a new system any other way would be leaving value* on the table. (*actual value not economics value) We can extend email, though. Why isn't there an SMTP GETKEY command to return a PGP key corresponding to an email address? Sure, the sender might not support the same version of PGP, and sure, the connection might be intercepted (hopefully you'd not trust the output of this command except over TLS), but like most of the email system, it would be a big improvement and good enough most of the time.