Re: A brief comparison of email encryption protocols
Raph Levien (raph@c2.org)
Thu, 15 Feb 1996 09:51:58 -0800 (PST)
On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> At 12:49 PM 2/14/96 -0800, Raph Levien wrote:
> >
> >PGP
> >---
> >
> > The main missing feature is the lack of MIME integration. Thus, PGP
> >is not suitable for multimedia types other than US-ASCII text. PGP
> >does contain some support for 8-bit charsets, but at cross-purposes
> >with MIME. Signature checking of non-US-ASCII data is simply not
> >reliable. To give an idea of this problem, the most recent
> >international version (2.6.3i) tries several different character set
> >conversions when verifying signatures, to see if any of them will
> >work.
>
> I am missing something here. Are you saying that PGP has support issues for
> multimedia, like GIFs and AU, and other special 8bit file thingees? Or are
> you saying that its rather brut strength method of handling these do not
> interface with MIME?
I'm saying that PGP can certainly be used to encrypt GIFs and audio
files, but that leaves open the question about how to identify the
resulting decrypted message as a GIF or whatever. Since MIME already
provides this capability, for any encryption protocol to be transparent
with respect to email, it has to provide this capability as well. PGP by
itself doesn't, but if it were properly integrated with MIME, it would.
PGP also has a "charset" parameter that tries to do roughly the same
thing as MIME's charset parameter in text/plain, but, in my opinion,
fails.
I hope this is clear enough.
Raph