Re: TLS anyone?

Hi,

Sorry for being late to the discussion. It's been a hellish week for me. 

>> I'm generically interested in this practice.

Me too.

> Ok. Playing devil's advocate: what would be the rational of "securing" 
> email's "last mile" when the entire email path is insecure in its very 
> nature?

Because the last mile might be subject to greater risk in some
circumstances, IMHO. For the rest of the path, my email is generally
mixed with many people's. The chance of getting sniffed is high, but
(hopefully) the chance of getting singled out is not. It's called
security by obscurity. Not exactly a great strategy, I know.

The last mile is different. Someone targeting your machine (someone
having a chance to sniff on your local loop or somewhere close by) will
have much to peek into if the last mile isn't secured.

> I thing that the only point of having build-in TLS support in ZOE 
> itself is more for the sake of convenience than anything else as this 
> would allow the different application's services to use STARTTLS when 
> necessary without any further need for additional configurations. It 
> also remove the need to have to explicitly manage the PKI as the app 
> can generate its own self-signed certificate when necessary.

These will all be great benefits for someone like me. I run Zoe on my
home desktop, which, as the most powerful machine I have, serves also as
my main workstation. I prefer not to install too many server things on
it. Java itself isn't known for performance, and I need the rest of the
power (CPU & RAM) for my work.

I tried VPN a while back; it didn't work. I might try stunnel or ssh
someday, but that means installing more server stuff (for stunnel or ssl)
on the machine. 

I do have a Linux server machine capable of providing secure access to
clients, but it's in my office, 40 miles away from home. As I work
mostly at home, Zoe database has to stay home for I need local access to
it. (Among other things, to fix those Chinese messages with broken
headers using Zoe's "source link" function, which works only on local
files.)

So, you get one more yes vote.

-- 
Best regards,
Ming-Li



-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. 
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/