[Discuss] Data including email, stored in the cloud, may be available to law enforcement without search warrant

[Richard Pieri]

On Nov 4, 2011, at 5:34 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 
> You know.  S/MIME.  The encryption protocol that's *actually* included in
> every mail client, without needing something like a PGP/GPG plugin or 3rd
> party app...

*sigh*.  There are two flaws in your statements here.

First, S/MIME is not SSL.  S/MIME uses the same X.509 certificates as SSL but the protocols are quite different.

Second, not "every mail client" supports S/MIME.  MIME support is required as a foundation.  Unix mail and Mailx don't have this.  Rmail can be coerced into reading MIME attachments but it relies on an external decoder and lacks a MIME composer.  Google Mail doesn't do S/MIME; it requires a browser add-on.  Hotmail does not support S/MIME, either, last I knew.  Apple's mail client for iPhone and iPad don't do S/MIME -- there are third party applications to handle the encrypted attachments.  Android doesn't support S/MIME out of the box, either.  On the other hand, BlackBerry has an S/MIME module for the enterprise server, a module required by the handset.

Okay, yeah, I just spent 15 minutes on Google looking these up to prove a point.

--Rich P.