Comment by crote

Comment by crote a day ago

But if you distrust the entire PKI ecosystem, how are you intending to use your email server?

If someone is trying to send you an email, their admin definitely isn't going to set up an in-person meeting with you to exchange certificate signatures. Their server is either going to accept any certificate (which means MitM is trivial), or they're going to verify it against PKI (which you don't use because you don't trust it) and abort the connection upon seeing a self-signed certificate.

It's the same if you're sending a reply back: if you're not willing to trust PKI, your server has no way of verifying the recipient's server's identity. You don't trust PKI, and they are not going to manually exchange signatures, so your options are either not sending email at all, or accepting that it is MitMed.

So you're left with a threat model where your adversary is able to fake PKI certificates (so they are nation-state sized) and they are able to MitM the connection from your server to your client - but they are not able to MitM the connection from your server to a third party's server. Call me naive, but I highly doubt such an attacker exists.

appendix-rock a day ago

The answer to this is that anyone that’s thinking in this way is already so elbow deep in security fetishism that real-world implications have long stopped mattering.

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gjadi a day ago

IMAP is for reading your emails not sending, that means you could accept PKI for SMTP to communicate with untrustworthy clients, but want to ensure that your access to your emails are safe(r).

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crote 5 hours ago

Of course, but all emails you could read have been sent at one point or another. Unless you only care about local email delivery, you're going to have to get involved with PKI.
And if your threat model is bad enough that PKI isn't good enough for IMAP, why aren't you using a VPN in the first place? Or even an airgapped network? Or PGP?

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