message encryption

[john99]

Hello,

management heard, that the system admin can access/read all mails
stored on a mailserver and is terribly affraid about that :-)

As I understand, Zimbra will soon support PGP encryption of the
messages.

Questions:
1.
Will the user be able to re-encrypt messages stored in his mbox
(after reading them)?
2.
Will there be a mechnisme to prevent unencrypted parts of an email
on the mailserver?


Thank's a lot for your feedback!

John

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by john99

Hello,

management heard, that the system admin can access/read all mails
stored on a mailserver and is terribly affraid about that :-)

As I understand, Zimbra will soon support PGP encryption of the
messages.

Questions:
1.
Will the user be able to re-encrypt messages stored in his mbox
(after reading them)?
2.
Will there be a mechnisme to prevent unencrypted parts of an email
on the mailserver?


Thank's a lot for your feedback!

John

As currently planned, the messages are going to be en(de)-crypted during message transmission between the server and the ZWC. Zimbra (as near as I can tell) pretty much has a immutable mail store. Since the server might not have the pass phrase that protects the PGP key, or the S/MIME certificate, it might not always be able to permanently encrypt/decrypt the message.

This all means that:

• Zimbra will probably stored incoming encrypted messages as encrypted.
• Outgoing encrypted messages will be in clear text.
• Options will probably be enabled to cache a copy of the key phrase on the server to allow for permenant encryption/decryption.
• I want to do a pass to understand the SOX implications of that.

There are basically trade/offs everywhere here. To be able to store the message in S/MIME or encrypted, the server has to know your pass phrase. Another bottom line is that while I want features that enable secure connections with the rest of the world, I am targeting organizations rather then individual users. That means manageability to be factored in as well.

I'm not dead set 100% on these things, that is just my current thinking right now. I suspect the more paranoid will never use this extension, and stick with something along the lines of FirePGP instead where the keys don't have to be stored on the server.