How to improve our GUIs (was: We have GOT TO make things simpler)

[raf]

Hi,

Sorry if this was mentioned before but I've just come
across a novel approach to email encryption that
doesn't do end-to-end encryption, but rather it
encrypts email upon receipt so that an individual can
encrypt the email that is stored in their IMAP account
as it arrives without the need for every sender to
encrypt and without the need for any service provider's
involvement (you just need an IMAP account), and it
supports reading email from multiple devices, each with
their own local private key. Most importantly, it
doesn't require the user to know anything about
encryption except that they want some.

It might not address all threats but it certainly seems
to solve some very real threats, mainly the threat of
someone hacking into your IMAP account and accessing
every email you ever received.

  Making It Easier to Encrypt Your Emails
  Authors: John S. Koh, Steven M. Bellovin, and Jason Nieh
  https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2019/koh [paywall, usenix]

  Why Joanie Can Encrypt: Easy Email Encryption with Easy Key Management
  EuroSys '19 Proceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019 
  Authors: John S. Koh, Steven M. Bellovin, Jason Nieh
  https://doi.org/10.1145/3302424.3303980 [paywall, acm]
  http://nieh.net/pubs/eurosys2019_e3.pdf [free]

  Easy Email Encryption with Easy Key Management
  Authors: John S. Koh, Steven M. Bellovin, Jason Nieh
  https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=1639 [free]

  Automatically and invisibly encrypt email as soon as it is received on any trusted device
  https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2019/04/01/easy-email-encryption/ [free]

I know this doesn't help with the discussion of
improving GUIs to make it easier to encrypt emails that
you want to send, but it looks like a promising
improvement in privacy that could help many more people
than just those that want to encrypt emails that they
send. And it's still relevant. I expect that those that
want to encrypt any emails that they send might also
like all the emails that they receive to be encrypted
as well.

cheers,
raf