The Motivated Can Encrypt (Even with PGP)

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0

User errors cause or contribute to most computer security failures, yet user interfaces for security still tend to be clumsy, confusing, or near-nonexistent. Is this simply due to a failure to apply standard user interface design techniques to security? We argue that, on the contrary, effective security requires a different usability standard, and that it will not be achieved through the user i...

Why Johnny Still, Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

This paper presents the results of a laboratory study involving Mailvelope, a modern PGP client that integrates tightly with existing webmail providers. In our study, we brought in pairs of participants and had them attempt to use Mailvelope to communicate with each other. Our results shown that more than a decade and a half after Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, modern PGP tools are still unusable fo...

Defective Sign & Encrypt in S/MIME, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP, and XML

Simple Sign & Encrypt, by itself, is not very secure. Cryptographers know this well, but application programmers and standards authors still tend to put too much trust in simple Sign-and-Encrypt. In fact, every secure e-mail protocol, old and new, has codiied na ve Sign & Encrypt as acceptable security practice. MOSS all suuer from this aw. Similarly, the secure document protocols PKCS#7, XML-S...

How to Encrypt with the LPN Problem

DRAFT MIME Security with PGP

Previous work on integrating PGP with MIME (including the since withdrawn application/pgp content type) has suffered from a number of problems, the most significant of which is the inability to recover signed message bodies without parsing data structures specific to PGP. This work makes use of the elegant solution proposed in RFC1847, which defines security multipart formats for MIME. The secu...