A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: What’s the matter with PGP?

2014.09.05

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: What’s the matter with PGP?.

TL;DR: keys suck, key management sucks, no perfect foward secrecy really sucks, implementation sucks, software sucks and we should rethink how to do this stuff slightly better.

If you’ve used PGP (or GPG), it’s hard to find fault with his arguments, though.

Categories : Security

ProtonMail Blog – News and Updates

2014.09.04

ProtonMail Blog – News and Updates.

Just got access to the public beta of this; here’s to hoping others follow suit.

Categories : Security

Official Gmail Blog: A first step toward more global email

2014.08.25

But all that could change. In 2012, an organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF created a new email standard that supports addresses with non-Latin and accented Latin characters e.g. ?????.????. In order for this standard to become a reality, every email provider and every website that asks you for your email address must adopt it. That’s obviously a tough hill to climb. The technology is there, but someone has to take the first step.

via Official Gmail Blog: A first step toward more global email.

 

The TL;DR is: Google is enabling non-latin chars in email addresses (cf RFC6530). Whether this will encourage widespread acceptance of this is going to be interesting to see; like IPv4, everyone’s gotten used to The Way We Do It Now. And like IPv6, I doubt there’s going to be much switchover unless it’s forced.

One obvious benefit would be to employ char-sets in the email header as part of heuristic anti-spam measures in a more nuanced way (as opposed to “anything non-LATIN-1 gets more weight when spam/ham score is being calculated”) — you’d be able to say “well, we have customers in Russia, so Cyrillic is OK, but we have no market in Asia so Asian languages have a higher spam score”.

Categories : News