OT: Email signing

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 1/30/06, Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com> wrote:
>
> Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>
> >
> > Could someone briefly fill me in on the if, why and how of email
> > signing (I do not mean signatures). I am sure I can google the how,
> > but I would like opions and experiences.
>
>
> OK, I presume that you mean cryptographic signing.  Message signing can
> be done with either SMIME or PGP.  Both accomplish the same thing, and
> operate in virtually the same way.
>
> Why sign?  It's all about trust.  If you reliably sign your messages,
> the people with whom you exchange messages can configure their mail
> client to trust the fingerprint of your certificate (or, they may trust
> someone who signed your certificate).  They can trust that a message
> with your name on it, which has a valid signature, was written by you
> and has not been tampered with.  They should also learn not to trust
> messages that have your name on it, but no signature.
>
> Which method you choose probably will be influenced most by who,
> exactly, you want to be able to verify your signatures.  SMIME uses, in
> large part, the same infrastructure that is already in virtually every
> mail client to support SSL connections.  That's one of the reasons that
> SMIME is supported by nearly every major mail client available, out of
> the box.  PGP does pretty much exactly the same thing, but requires an
> entirely separate infrastructure.  I'm not aware of any major client
> that supports PGP by default; they require plugins, mostly.  That gives
> SMIME a significant advantage if you want to sign messages, and have
> that information be useful to a wide audience.


 What is the difference between "S/MIME" and "S/MIME opaque" ?

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