There’s going to be a lot of hype today about something the security researchers who found it are calling “EFAIL”. Interviews, commemorative T-Shirts, press tours, hype. The technical details are interesting, but the un-hyped end-user advice would probably be “If you’re using a mail client that’s got bugs in it’s MIME handling, and you’ve configured...
September was another busy month for us, but Steve stepped up and wrote a number of really interesting posts on email history, cryptography, and current technical issues in the email landscape. We started the month with a look at the various RFCs that served as the technical specifications for developing message transfer protocols in the 1970s. It’s really fascinating to look at the evolution of...
Last week Alice and Bob showed how to cryptographically sign messages so that the recipient can be sure that the message came from the purported sender and hasn’t been forged by a third party. They can only do that if they can securely retrieve the senders public key – which means they need to retrieve it from the actual sender, rather than an impostor, and be sure it’s not...
A decade or so ago it was fairly rare for cryptography and email technology to intersect – there was S/MIME (which I’ve seen described as having “more implementations than users”) and PGP, which was mostly known for adding inscrutable blocks of text to mail and for some interesting political fallout, but not much else. That’s changing, though. Authentication and...
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