gpgme: encrypt/decrypt

[Albrecht Dreß]

Am 16.08.05 20:22 schrieb(en) Michael Nguyen:
> I'm creating a Postfix content filter for the company that automatically  
> does GPG encryption/decryption on incoming and outgoing corporate mail.

This sounds like an ineresting idea!

However, are you sure you want to do this on the *mta* level? Most mua's  
(balsa, evolution, kmail, thunderbird, ...) support encryption, which  
seems to be the more logical approach to me. Apart from that, it offers  
more security for the user, as incoming messages are decrypted only on the  
user's machine and using a (hopefully really secure) passphrase only known  
by the user.

> What I wanted to do is have the user's private and public key stored as  
> a TEXT type in MySQL.

Why don't you use the usual gpg key ring for that, maybe with automatic  
retreival of missing keys from a key server? You could store the  
fingerprint as TEXT, but gpg(me) can use email addresses to fetch keys.

>  - Content filter knows who's sending the email and who the recipients
> are

Not sure if Postfix offers all recipients to the filter. But remember that  
the bcc recipients *must* be treated separately, i.e. they must receive a  
different message as the key id's of all "recipients" can be extracted  
from the crypto envelope.

>  - Filter uses this user information to encrypt the message

So the whole content is put into a rfc3156 multipart/encrypted container,  
maybe signed by a "company key"?

If you are concerned about security and want to force the users to encrypt  
messages, another approach might be to reject (bounce) unencrypted  
messages (i.e. with a top-level MIME content type other than  
multipart/encrypted) to certain recipients and/or incoming ones from  
certain senders.

> I do something similar for incoming delivery (except that it's even
> easier because I don't have to search for recipients).

I wonder if this is a good idea... If I send someone an encrypted message,  
I would assume that this is a "for her/his eyes only" one. IMHO some kind  
of company-wide automatic decryption breaks privacy (and may even be  
forbidden by law, at least in Europe).

Just my € 0.01...

Cheers, Albrecht.


-- 
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  Albrecht Dreß  -  Johanna-Kirchner-Straße 13  -  D-53123 Bonn (Germany)
        Phone (+49) 228 6199571  -  mailto:albrecht.dress at arcor.de
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