The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Rene Pfeiffer <address@concealed>]

On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Aumont wrote:

> About PGP encryption into Sympa Rene Pfeiffer wrote:
>
> [...]
> > Did anyone of the SYMPA users or developers think of such a scenario? Is
> > this feasible? Did someone do some experiments? The lists of this kind 
> > would
> > operate with a small number of users (let's say a few hundred). The list
> > manager could use public keys from a dedicated keyserver nearby.
>
> Some ask us about this and our answer is "do it your self". We can help
> developpers that want to do it describing the Sympa encryption internals.
> It should be easy to do because the code is ready to receive this pluggin.
> [...]

This is good information. I was not aware how well SYMPA would support such
an idea. Your answer helped me a lot to argue in favour of extending
existing list managers. I am very content with the features SYMPA supports.

> The main task is to developp in the tool.pl four new subroutines pgp_sign,
> pgp_encrypt, pgp_verify and pgp_decrypt which should look like the 4
> subroutines related to S/MIME (use the same parameters). [...]

Do you know the impact of encryption/signing on the performance of the list
server? Though I doubt that encrypting high volume lists would be very
useful but some people may already have some experiences with this.

> Some gui tell me that PGP/MIME is not yet in use so there is a need to use
> tex/plain structure for PGP features, Is this true ? This may impact Sympa
> MIME capabilities.

I do not know many MUAs that support PGP/MIME (yet). Mutt is one of them. A
compilation of MUAs and their capabilities can be found here:

http://www.gnupg.org/frontends.html
http://www.cryptorights.org/pgp-users/pgp-mail-clients.html

The last link seems to be a bit dated.

> Of course, some restriction still remain in the PGP solution :
>
> - http authentication can't be based on PGP where X509 certificat
> provide it with HTTPS.
> - both S/MIME and PGP encryption can't be used if subscribers do not
> trust into the listmaster.

I am aware of these restrictions. These were also discussed but the primary
goal of using GPG/PGP would be to ensure "secured" communication for small
to medium groups. The background of the people involved in this discussion
is linked to privacy rights organizations and they have a need for
protecting their mails from prying eyes.

Best regards,
René

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