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Nicholas John Murison wrote:
I'll be working on developing a transparent public key encryption system for e-mails as my dissertation next year, so the uptake of such schemes is very much an interest of mine.
The interesting question is the slow adoption of the technology and the standards war, I mean if we had all wanted it enough the UK government could have given us a patent free algorithmn (probably safe against everyone but GCHQ at least), and a standard could have been agreed and tad-dah a fait accompli. Politics over the algorithmns didn't help, export licences didn't help, but these have been hinderances not show stoppers. Comes back to the old question - why is IT security such a hard sell? I suspect users (unlike the IT literate) don't see the problem, or don't see a problem. Just like most people are perfectly happy with a standard yale lock on their front door despite the fact you can buy a kit to let you through most of them in virtually no time. Professional locksmiths make most IT security people look like total beginners. I've seen a locksmith open a broken(!) lock so quickly that it wasn't obvious the guy broke his stride from walking down the footpath and into the hallway. The Internet has pushed standards in IT security up, as the potential for disruptive self replicating code increases enormously in such an environment, so we now all need the kind of front door locks used in the dodgiest parts of the world. So I think the acceptance problem is far more interesting than the technical HOW TO. We can probably find a g[r]eek to do the technical part in a few lines of PERL ;) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.