>> > To elaborate on one point a bit: it seems to me that it's harmful to >> > security to allow the sender to unilaterally override the recipient's >> > preferences that something be encrypted. To forestall one argument, >> > yes, the sender knows the contents of the message, but the recipient >> > knows their own circumstances, and they may be at particular risk >> >> The general approach of REQUIRETLS is that the sender is in a good >> position to determine the sensitivity of the message(s) they are >> sending, because they know what the message is. > > Right, this is what I am disputing.
I have to agree with EKR about it not completely being the sender's decision, though for a rather different reason. I really doubt that in the vast majority of cases any human user will actively choose or not choose this option on a message-by-message basis. I think that in the real world we'll see one of two use cases: 1. The sending system is just configured to require TLS, because, of course, it's a Good Thing to make sure TLS is used all the time. This might or might not cause frustrating delivery problems, depending upon how broadly and quickly this gets deployed. 2. Some other aspect of a message, such as having it marked "Company Confidential", "Top Secret", or some such, will result in the sending system requiring TLS for that message. My experience with working in organizations that use such markings is that they overuse them: the sending human doesn't actually determine the sensitivity; rather, the sending human becomes used to putting "Top Secret" on nearly everything, or "Confidential and Privileged", in the case of lawyers, on absolutely everything including, "Let's have lunch." For EKR's concern about the recipient's preference, this protocol would need some sort of recipient policy that senders would look up. While I absolutely see the value in that, I'm not sure how workable it would be. Barry _______________________________________________ Uta mailing list Uta@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/uta
