My statement was specifically related to the recent revelations around the NSAs focus on third parties not to the strengths of the encryption which I agree are essentially identical. As long as you trust the central authority (you self sign certificates for example) there's no reason to think S/Mime is less secure. But if you're going to do that though you may as well stick with GPG it's designed to be used without a central authority. I stand by my original statement. if you're goal is to prevent the NSA from reading your email. Using any protocol that puts trust in a third party certificate authority is a horrible mistake. They may not be compromised but it's certainly possible given recent revelations. The only reasonable option is to avoid them. I stand by my original statement. GPG is preferable. On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Jay Kline <jay at slushpupie.com> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Michael Greenly <mgreenly at gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > S/Mime uses a centralized certificate authority. PGP/GPG is > decentralized. There's no question that PGP/GPG is preferable over S/Mime > because of this > > > > > > S/MIME and GPG/GPG use the same crypto. So from the standpoint of > protecting the message content, they will be identical. Using a CA > does not provide the private key to the authority. Thus, having > access to the CA does not allow you to decrypt things from > certificates it signs- it only permits you to generate another > certificate that would be trusted the same way, making a future > man-in-the-middle attack possible. But it wont help you on any > existing/past messages, and it wont do any good if the two parties in > the exchange continue to use the keys they already had. > > Jay > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- Michael Greenly http://logic-refinery.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130911/07f3c204/attachment.html>