[HacktionLab] "secure email list services"

[Martin]

Hi there,

I won't have time to prepare much, but perhaps somebody too is interested in 
looking into:

   http://sels.ncsa.illinois.edu/

Essentially, what it does is to provide GnuPG encrypted mailing lists. 
Everybody who is on such a list with more than 5 people knows the pain: 
everybody always needs to encrypt for everybody and things go wrong.

Proxy Re-Encryption to the rescue. The idea is that the sender encrypts to a 
re-encryption key and the server transforms that encryption so that it 
encrypts for every recipient *without* being able to decrypt the message. So 
if the server gets seized/compromised no content is revealed. See:

    http://sels.ncsa.illinois.edu/about.html

This idea was implemented for GnuPG and I'd be interested in checking out the 
software to see how user friendly it is etc. (joining a list becomes more 
difficult since there is some key negotiation to be done) The idea being to 
eventually set-up this SELS thing as a service so it's easy for people to have 
GnuPG encrypted mailing lists, i.e., mailing lists with end-to-end encryption 
without relying on a trusted third server.

Cheers,
Martin

PS: The authors also wrote research papers which give a bit more in-depth 
background: 

   http://sels.ncsa.illinois.edu/pub.html