Re: [Evolution] possibly stupid PGP/GPG display question

[Rodd Clarkson <rodd redfishbluefish com au>]

I've been following this discussion with limited interest, so someone
may have already covered this.

It just dawned on me that to stop someone from counterfitting the PGP
sig, you need to hae some way of creating a unique sig.  Would it be
possible to generate a gif that is in some way unique.  Maybe the first
time a PGP message is recieved the user is asked to type in something
(random characters) that are then used to individualise the gif.  By
using something unique to create this watermark, and then having the PGP
program display this unique icon, it would be nearly impossible to
attach a sig at the bottom of the email that looks like one the person
has.  And if the user thinks that their unique icon has been
compromised, they could easily generate a different mark which would be
used instead.

mintSlice

On 28 Feb 2001 21:05:45 -0600, Mike Messmore wrote:
> Note: These ideas may not be practical, I'm just brainstorming.  I'm
> assuming that pretty much whatever you do in the actual message pane is
> out of the question since it could be reasonably faked by a well crafted
> email.
> 
> So my first idea is a tabbed message view, with a tab for every part of
> the message.  Small icons in the tabs could reflect the validity of the
> signature and the user could click on the icon for a dialog box with the
> detailed description. Instead of the icons in the tabs or in addition to
> them there could be an icon and brief message in the status bar
> depending on which tab is showing  It could say something like "click
> for details" and again, the user could get a dialog box with the
> detailed information on the validity of the signature.
> 
> If the signature spanned the entire multipart message, you could show
> the whole message in one tab, which graphically reflects the idea that
> the one signature spans the entire message.  Or, if that seems awkward
> to sometimes have the parts of a message split and other times not,
> either the icon on the tab or the brief message in the status bar could
> indicate that the same signature covers more than one tab, maybe by
> numbering the signatures or something like that.
> 
> My other idea is that the message could be broken apart in the listing,
> much like replies to a message are done in the threaded view.  You could
> then show signatures like you would be dealing with one at a time.
> There would need to be some way to visually differentiate between a
> broken up PGP/GnuPG message and replies for us threaded folk though, and
> its not very intuitive.  I don't really like this one.
> 
> Again, I'm just brainstorming here, so none of these ideas are real well
> thought out, but I wanted to throw them out so maybe they might inspire
> someone to come up with The Right Idea.  Good luck!
> 
> --Mike
> 
> 
> 
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