[Mailman-Users] S/MIME and Public Key Encryption Features

Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham at vdata.co.uk
Thu Dec 9 19:21:09 CET 1999


mray at ixl.com said:
> The company I work for is looking at MailMan as a possible product for
> our client, but we need to know if MailMan supports S/MIME and Public
> Key Encryption.  If anyone could give me information, it would be
> greatly appreciated. 

Mailman should pass through encrypted messages without problems - there 
is a chance that any crypto/signature set that includes the headers in 
the signed data will be broken by mailman changing the subject lines.

However that is not full crypto list support.  As I have never seen 
anyone quite work out what they want from crypto list support it is 
probably fair to say that no one has that yet :-)

Just sending crypted mail through a list server only works if you have 
the public key for all recipients initially and crypt for the whole 
lot.  You could send mail crypted against the list server's key, that 
would then decrypt and recrypt against each recipients key... this 
makes the list server a prime target - break that and you see all the 
messages in transit and can fiddle with them.  It would also cost big 
time in crypto processsing power.  Other ideas are possible...  [but 
mailman does none of these :-( ]

	Nigel.
-- 
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[ Nigel Metheringham                  Nigel.Metheringham at VData.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]






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