Black Berry and encryption

[James Knott]

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> As users of email, we would want end-to-end encryption.  Unfortunately
> no random pair of users seems to have a prior agreement about how to
> do encryption or authentication so we use the greatest common divisor,
> plain text.
>    
What about X.509 certificates?  Those are commonly used.  I had one from 
Thawte, from before they were bought by Verisign.  With those 
certificates, encryption is end to end, including through any mail 
servers.  Corporate mail systems would often have their own certificate 
server, which would generate the necessary keys and make them available 
as part of the directory services.  We certainly had that with Lotus 
Notes, when I was at IBM several years ago.  I believe Exchange does 
that too.  If a 3rd party certificate server is used there's no way any 
ISP would have access.  Also, with X.509, you could send someone the 
encryption (public) key, simply by sending them a signed email.  I'd be 
very surprised if RIM didn't use a public/private key system, as the old 
symmetrical keys had a lot of problems, particularly with key distribution.

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