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Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the futur

by devx 13y ago

Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the future? And I hope their PGP implementation is really user-friendly. This sounds like more of the same of what we've had so far, perhaps with the ability to become a little more mainstream, but I don't see any breakthroughs in terms of encryption here, like say the way Bitmessage is. I think that if we want NSA-proof secure messaging we'll need to come up with new stuff, and not just use the same old PGP with centralized email databases. This could definitely be a (very short-term) win against NSA if say Gmail implemented PGP in a very user-friendly way, but for something starting from scratch, I'd rather it was a breakthrough in security.

mikegioia 13y ago
Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the future? The way I see it, Mailpile won't be issuing certificates for people to use, they merely enable you to use your existing certificate infrastructure. I have a machine with a certificate authority that issues S/MIME certs for us to use internally for sensitive emails. Currently we use Thunderbird and Mac Mail to handle this but people like web mail and we need a system that can run a web interface (or phone app) to handle these certificates.
- noselasd 13y ago
  I'd say the people that can set up and manage their own CA, and the people that need a new mail client to be able to send/receive encrypted email are non-overlapping groups. If you're right - what does Mailpile solve ?
  - mikegioia 13y ago
    The reason why I need something like Mailpile (and the problem they will hopefully solve) is to have a client-side app with a user-friendly system for managing S/MIME certificates. I can set up the CA and generate user (employee) certificates on my own, there's no way the end-user should have to do that. But what's frustrating right now is that the current tools for configuring S/MIME signing and encryption for email either (a) don't exist, or (b) are heinously complicated to use. Have you ever tried getting S/MIME certificate auth set up in Mac Mail? It's doable but I had difficulty walking my tech-savvy brother through the process over the phone. If Mailpile has a simple method of selecting a certificate file for an email account then the hard part is done IMO. The process just becomes IT issuing new certificates every year to employees, and employees uploading said certificates through their (web) mail app. The biggest value here is having a web mail client, hosted locally, that can support PGP/SMIME in a user friendly way. Then signed/encrypted emails are that much easier to configure for the masses.

by devx 13y ago

mikegioia 13y ago

Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the future? The way I see it, Mailpile won't be issuing certificates for people to use, they merely enable you to use your existing certificate infrastructure. I have a machine with a certificate authority that issues S/MIME certs for us to use internally for sensitive emails. Currently we use Thunderbird and Mac Mail to handle this but people like web mail and we need a system that can run a web interface (or phone app) to handle these certificates.

noselasd 13y ago
I'd say the people that can set up and manage their own CA, and the people that need a new mail client to be able to send/receive encrypted email are non-overlapping groups. If you're right - what does Mailpile solve ?
- mikegioia 13y ago
  The reason why I need something like Mailpile (and the problem they will hopefully solve) is to have a client-side app with a user-friendly system for managing S/MIME certificates. I can set up the CA and generate user (employee) certificates on my own, there's no way the end-user should have to do that. But what's frustrating right now is that the current tools for configuring S/MIME signing and encryption for email either (a) don't exist, or (b) are heinously complicated to use. Have you ever tried getting S/MIME certificate auth set up in Mac Mail? It's doable but I had difficulty walking my tech-savvy brother through the process over the phone. If Mailpile has a simple method of selecting a certificate file for an email account then the hard part is done IMO. The process just becomes IT issuing new certificates every year to employees, and employees uploading said certificates through their (web) mail app. The biggest value here is having a web mail client, hosted locally, that can support PGP/SMIME in a user friendly way. Then signed/encrypted emails are that much easier to configure for the masses.