EMAIL SECURITY
(Posted 2007-06-20 13:39:13 by ArchPaladin)

I am making some personally-long-awaited changes to my email, and this post
is meant to both announce the changes and to help spread some knowledge
around for those who might be interested.

Most importantly, I am NOT changing my email address.  The one you have for
me will still work.

That said, a quick description to those with some technical knowledge. 
What I am doing is this: yesterday I created a cryptographic key and I will
be using that on a regular basis in the future to create digital signatures
for my emails.  The key will be uploaded to a few key servers and will also
appear on my website sometime later today or tomorrow.  If you understand
all of what I just said, you can stop reading here, as the rest of this
post is meant to explain this in a little greater detail.

Email is one of those things that we have a love/hate relationship with. 
Email has a lot of spam, which is bad.  It is also slower than IM, which is
bad depending on what generation you're in.  However, it is still necessary
if we want to talk to professors, people in other businesses, far-away
relatives that we don't want to talk to over the phone, or many similar
situations.  What most people never really consider, however, is that email
is completely unsecured.

Let me draw a snail mail analogy for you.  Email is like sending snail mail
via postcard.  On the postcard you write your name and address, the
recipient's name and address, and the message text.  Between the mailbox
and the recipient's hands, you have no idea how many people have read any
of that info.  Similarly, an email consists of your email address, the
recipient's email address, possibly your full name (if an email shows up in
your inbox from "Joe Smith", how do you think it knows that info?) the
message text, any attachments, and some extra added by every computer that
handled that email on its route to its destination.  Everything is out in
the open and can be read by anyone with sufficient access to a computer
down the wire from where you are.  Also, because everything is open like
this, email also becomes easy to tamper with or forge completely.

Most people may not care that email is insecure.  They may not send any
info via email that is worth protecting (though email containing fake
"sensitive info" can still be forged).  Others are paranoid.  These
paranoid-types have driven the creation of a number of email-securing
methods, and while I'm not overly paranoid, I do feel that implementing a
method or two is a good idea.

Now, I had this whole long discussion of email securing planned, but when I
got down to discussing the actual methods that you can use to protect your
email, everything started to fall apart because I realized I couldn't sum
things up in a post-length's amount of words.  There are a lot of ways to
go about securing different parts (or all) of your email, making sure it
gets sent anonymously, making sure any computers in the route your email
takes can't understand the message they are sending, and similar tactics. 
Most of these methods require some cryptography, which I can't detail in
this post without considerable verbage.  Suffice to say, if you'd like to
know some of this stuff, you can just ask.  If you need some
introductory-level reading for your next break, you can always check out a
good reference site [ http://www.emailprivacy.info/home ]
[emailprivacy.info].

At any rate, something that I've been wanting to do is add a digital
signature to my email.  When we normally think of emails and signatures, we
might think of a piece of text that we insert at the end of every email
that contains our name or email address or similar message, but that's not
what this is.  A digital signature is something that you attach to the end
of an email that allows the recipient to verify that the email wasn't
altered in transit - it is a tamper-proofing mechanism.  Doing this
requires a couple of things, though:

	*  The content of the email will change to contain the signature.  The end
of the email will contain some random-looking junk that actually comprises
the signature itself.  Anyone who gets emails from me will start seeing
this extra stuff at the end.  The signature itself will change with each
email because it is generated based on the contents of the email.

	*  In order for people to actually know that the signature is valid, they
have to know my public key.  A public key is one of those cryptography
things that takes some words to explain - basically it is a static piece of
information that can be shared between people and is attached to a
particular identity.  It usually takes the form of more random-looking
junk, as well as a name, email address, or other piece of identifying
information.  Because that public key must be disseminated for this whole
signing process to be any good, I will be putting that on my website and a
couple of other places as well.


So there you have it.  Will these signatures (or any other future
protection mechanism) ever be necessary for me?  Maybe not, but with the
way history and life changes, you never know.  I'd rather have the
infrastructure in place and never need it than be caught unprepared.

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