[Discuss] email privacy/security

[Richard Pieri]

Kent Borg wrote:
> That doesn't give them session keys for communications.

If the NSA can get copies of the public root certificates then they can 
either get the site/server certs from the CAs or forge their own. Either 
way, a compromised root certificate is the key to the entire chain of trust.

Self-signed certificates can't be compromised this way because there is 
no root CA involved. On the other hand, the quantity of traffic 
encrypted with self-signed certificates is quite small compared to the 
traffic encrypted with public CA certificates. Most of these use AES as 
one of the preferred ciphers. AES, a cipher approved by the NSA for 
commercial use. There is no doubt in my mind that the NSA can break AES 
in substantially less than polynomial time.

-- 
Rich P.