Autocrypt support

Autocrypt support

[Rajeev Narang]

Is anyone working on supporting Autocrypt in emacs.

  https://autocrypt.org/en/latest/level1.html

It is in the devel branch of enigmail, and there are open pull requests for integration in k-9.  Delta-chat already supports it.

Re: Autocrypt support

[Robert Pluim]

Rajeev Narang <rajeevn@riseup.net> writes:

> Is anyone working on supporting Autocrypt in emacs.
>
>   https://autocrypt.org/en/latest/level1.html
>

I don't think so. I didn't see any rationale on that page for why we
need yet another way of transferring keys and specifying encryption
options in email headers, perhaps you could explain why Autocrypt
would be a good thing?

Regards

Robert

Re: Autocrypt support

[Tim Cross]

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I agree. This spec looks very under developed yet and I'm not sure it
actually addresses the key issue which prevents more universal adoption of
end-to-end encrypted email.

The problem is and remains one of key management and humans, which becomes
even more difficult because it is trying to retro-fit encryption to a
protocol  which has no support for it.

The real challenge for specs like this is that they mean nothing unless a
majority of mail clients support them. Getting them added is going to be
extremely difficult - near impossible. It is more likely we will just see
people move to different comms channels which are secure rather than trying
to retro fit traditional email.  A bigger problem is that their spec for
level 1 only deals with users using a single mail client. I'm not sure in
this day of multiple devices this will be sufficient. The reason I moved to
an imap based setup is that I regularly use 3+ different mail clients on 4+
different devices. I need to be able to access my email from all of these
devices and this spec will fail to provide that.  Level 2 looks like where
this functionality will be targeted. However, the problem is that level 1
may not get the uptake/momentum needed to get to level 2.

Note that I'm not meaning to disparage the effort - it is a good/meaningful
effort. However, I think it needs to mature a fair bit before any real
implementation/support can be added to existing mail clients. It is likely
efforts like this are what is needed to work out a better solution, but
this spec so far seems to lack some meat. It needs to provide more detail
on exactly what the key problems are which prevent automatic end-to-end
encryption of email and how this spec will address those problems.


Tim


On 28 August 2017 at 19:41, Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> wrote:

> Rajeev Narang <rajeevn@riseup.net> writes:
>
> > Is anyone working on supporting Autocrypt in emacs.
> >
> >   https://autocrypt.org/en/latest/level1.html
> >
>
> I don't think so. I didn't see any rationale on that page for why we
> need yet another way of transferring keys and specifying encryption
> options in email headers, perhaps you could explain why Autocrypt
> would be a good thing?
>
> Regards
>
> Robert
>
>
>


-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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