RE: secure sign & encrypt

[Terje Braaten <Terje.Braaten@xxxxxxxxxx>]

john.dlugosz@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> Emails are the only thing where we might have missing context 
> information.
> In an informal note typed by a person, it might assume the 
> conversation in
> progress.  But what contract or other formal document doesn't list the
> parties as part of the document content?  And what does "intended
> recipient" mean for things that are not messages sent to somebody?

Everything that is "signed & encrypted" has a list of recipients that it
is encrypted to. This list of recipients is included in the protocol. That
is why I mean the protection of this information by signing it also belongs
in
the protocol.

> 
> If an application wants to automatically add context 
> information before
> signing, without messing up the document proper, then a 
> general purpose
> "extra information" field is needed, since "TO:" is just a 
> special case of
> this general problem.  And I think it's been said that a 
> suitable field
> already exists.
> 

I think you have completely missed my point here. Please read what
I wrote once again. I am making an argument for that this is NOT
a kind of general "extra information", it is information that already
are included as a part of the protocol. And a proper standard for how
to duplicate this information inside the signed part of the message
should also be a part of the standard, so that this can be done in the
same way by all applications that uses this standard. Is this to much
to ask?

 
> 
> Terje Braaten <Terje.Braaten@xxxxxxxxxx>@mail.imc.org on 05-30-2002
> 12:38:22 AM
> 
> Sent by:    owner-ietf-openpgp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> 
> To:    "OpenPGP (E-mail)" <ietf-openpgp@xxxxxxx>
> cc:
> Subject:    RE: secure sign & encrypt
> 
> 
> 
> Michael Young writes that "The intended recipient is only one of many
> pieces of context that a user might mistakenly believe was included
> in the signed material." That is correct, but I will still argue that
> the information on which keys the message is encrypted to (or intended
> to be encrypted to) is special, and belongs in the OpenPGP standard.
> 
> It is not only mail that can be signed and encrypted with OpenPGP,
> it can be all kinds of electronic documents and messages. When f.ex.
> an "X-To-PGP-Key" header might be an adequate solution for e-mail
> messages, it will not fit at all for other sorts of messages.
> In fact, the only meta data about a message that is common to all
> encrypted messages is the recipient public keys. And since this
> is meta data about the message that is always present, I think
> it is very appropriate to be specified in the protocol a convention
> on how this is to be protected in a message that is signed 
> and encrypted.
> 
> (If we could just have an optional sub packet on the 
> signature in the first
> round I would be happy.)
> 
> --
> Terje Bråten
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>