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Native apps already have good support for encryption in general. The default Mail app in OS X has a button for it, for example. The only thing new here is bring
by lnanek2 12y ago
Native apps already have good support for encryption in general. The default Mail app in OS X has a button for it, for example. The only thing new here is bringing it to the big webmail clients via browser add-ons.
- tnorthcutt 12y agoburo9 mentioned native mobile apps. Does e.g. iOS Mail have similar support?
- giovannibajo1 12y agoMail on both OSX and iOS have native support for S/MIME, which I've been using daily for many years. You can use it to sign and/or encrypt emails. Keys are stored in the keychain. S/MIME uses a CA-based system for authentication, so the pro is that you don't even need to do key management (it is sufficient that one user sends you a signed message - and you use the CAs to validate the signature), and the key is automatically imported into the keychain. The con of the CA-based system are the same of SSL/TLS. The only non-user-friendly pass is acquiring the certificate, which is as hard as getting a server SSL certificate; not complicated for an IT professional, but impossible for a casual user (plus, you have to pay them, unless you use StartSSL). Once the certificates are installed, the whole experience is mostly dumb-user proof. For enterprises, OSX & iOS supports pulling the certificate from a specific ActiveDomain/LDAP record, so that you can automatically send encrypted mails to anybody in the company, even if you haven't communicated to them before; moreover, they support deployment through configuration profiles, so that it gets auto-installed and auto-configured for the end user.