[liberationtech] [cryptography] [Cryptography] Email is unsecurable

[Tamzen Cannoy]

On Nov 25, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell at cs.tcd.ie> wrote:

> Personally, I'm not at all confident that we can do something
> that provides end-to-end security, can be deployed at full
> Internet scale and is compatible with today's email protocols.
> But if others are more optimistic then I'm all for 'em trying
> to figure it out and would be delighted to be proven wrong.
> 
> Cheers,
> S.
> 

I think compatibility is the feature that will have to go. Kill SMTP and move on. You cannot rewrite ancient protocols that were never intended to be secure to add security. Go total secure and then allow people to back some of it out if they need compatibility with older systems. 

Tamzen