The very concepts are confusing for most users: public key versus private key, key signing, key revocation, signing keys versus encryption keys, bit length, and so on. Unfortunately, in traditional approaches to email, public-key encryption is notoriously difficult to use properly, even for advanced users. Key ManagementĪll the projects in this report use public-key encryption to allow a user to send a confidential message to the intended recipient, and for the recipient to verify the authorship of the message.

Although no consensus has yet emerged on how best to tackle any of these problems, the diversity of projects listed in this report reflect an surge of interest in this area and an encouraging spirit of experimentation. These problems are hard, and have defied easy solutions, because there are no quick technological fixes: at issue is the complex interaction between user experience, real world infrastructure, and security.

Common ProblemsĪll of the technologies listed here face a common set of problems when trying to make email (or email-like communication) secure and easy to use. These will be addressed by future technologies currently in the making. None of them however also fulfil the scalability and social usability aspects. Still, the alternative mail systems that fulfil the privacy requirements of #youbroketheinternet today are Cables, Freemail, I2P-Bote and Pond. If you think you need to make up your mind for yourself, this document is for you. It is reasonable to conclude that to improve and deploy such fundamentally new technology is lower hanging fruit than to further attempts of repairing the old broken architecture, but there is very emotional resistance in the systems administrators community to this kind of conclusion. These technologies solve several of the problems of traditional email by design, other are in the process of being resolved, but since the science community has made very in-depth research on the issues involved with public-key based routing, the methods are known and already implemented in some projects. It is not surprising that projects that started over a decade ago re-inventing the foundation of the Internet based on public-key routing and distributed hashtable technology, have in the meantime developed to a degree of solidity that they are presenting a true alternative way for many Internet applications including email. freedom from Spam and correlated nuisances. user-expectation conformant scalability and 8. Also, none of the improvements tackle the problem that people are flocking away to Facebook Mail, a cloud- and social-network-based alternative that offers 6. to tackle incongruencies in the architecture with user interface design, as if that hadn't been tried in the previous twenty years. requiring a complete overhaul of the involved protocols if forward secrecy is to be achieved and 5. allowing observing entities to map out the identities and the intensity of social interactions, 4. allowing people who disregard your privacy requirements to send you unencrypted messages, 3. allowing for man in the middle attacks at the moment of first use, 2. Even the best projects in the field accept dangerous trade-offs such as 1. Traditional email faces unsurmountable problems concerning trustworthiness, usability and protection of social information on who is participating in communications when it comes to provide end-to-end confidentiality. Protection of Transaction Data and the Social Graph.This document itself is hosted at, since it is bad practice to host content exclusively at commercial social networks. To contribute to this document, fork its repository. Please help us fill in the missing details and correct any inaccuracies. This is a report highlighting the projects and comparing the approaches, derived from the biased version published by the OpenTechFund. Only few of them fulfil the security requirements of the # youbroketheinternet community.

There are an increasing number of projects working on next generation secure email or email-like communication. Overview of projects working on next-generation secure email

Bitmessage email client