Re: Shortcomings of current schemes (Was: One-pass signatures)

[Black Unicorn <unicorn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 05:42 PM 7/25/98 , Hal Finney wrote:

>Bob could require/request his customers to prepare their messages in
>two passes, the first one to clearsign them and the second one to
>encrypt them.  Then when he processed the messages he could decrypt
>and leave a clearsigned message, on which the signature could be
>checked but the message left in clearsigned form.

This was the option I referred to when I said "without much nonsense on the
senders side."

Bob's clients would be annoyed and there would be constant non-compliance
and customer service strife.

>We at NetAss

Please tell me this abbreviation was intentional.

>have considered changing the default behavior of the
>encrypt-and-sign option to behave in this manner (clearsign then encrypt).

Continue considering it, please?

>Unfortunately, messages prepared in this way require users with current
>client software to manually run two passes to decrypt and verify.
>The need for backwards compatibility has prevented us from going forward
>with this scheme.
>
>We have had some discussion on OpenPGP of a flag, perhaps in the literal
>packet, which would indicate that messages are in this form.  Perhaps a
>future version will have a clean way of doing this.

I do hope so.  If Network Associates is trying to sell these services in
enterprise, and anticipates, as I think they have, a need for archiving and
corporate access as well as anti-repudiation features, it would seem this
is a major issue that has to be addressed.