Subject: e2e security for messaging (was: stats from the text conferencing experiment)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 13:03:39 +0200

Hi all,

>> Yea, the question is: what is the end-to-end security model of this
>> gateway?
>
> or, is it even appropriate to have an end-to-end security model when
> gatewaying between messaging systems? i don't seem to recall that being
> necessary for the mhs/smtp stuff...

So, I've been thinking about this for sometime, and I keep coming back
to the conclusing that interworking many different messaging apps 
(especially those with different transport) is a receipe for disaster.
Perhaps a single meta-messaging protocol is needed.

I base this conclusion on a couple of things:

	1) My assumption is the the next years, new messaging applications,
	   (integrating instant messages, presence, file swapping, SMS, MMS, 
	   voice, email, etc.) will be deployed.
	2) Security (of many kinds) will continue to decrease (more trojans/viruses,
	   more worms, poor implementations, etc.)
	3) 'Smart' applications (like Outlook) which try do do things on behalf of
	   the user will proliferate.

And, trying to learn from history, before IP became widespread, connecting different
networks was difficult, expensive and not at all intuitive.  One great thing
that IP has done has been to create a common networking layer, allowing
different networks to be interconnected by mere mortals.  I spent too many
hours & days of my youth trying to get Novell to talk to Windows for Workgroups
to propriety networking protocols.

Perhaps a single messaging layer is not feasible, but somehow a proliferation of
messaging protocols & styles seems like a good way to give the user a hard
time.

John