Re: [openpgp] Reducing the meta-data leak

[Ben McGinnes <[e-mail]>]

On 4/11/2015 1:37 am, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> 
> Bryan Ford proposed getting rid of all unencrypted meta-data.  In
> particular, he wanted to get rid of the recipients / number of
> recipients.
> 
> There are some practical difficulties with this approach,
> which I mentioned above.
> 
> My proposal is a blue sky idea to avoid having to try to decrypt a
> message with every secret key while (hopefully) making it more
> difficult to get at the list of recipients.

While I don't doubt the good intentions, I fail to see how this has
any real value.  Specifically because of the significantly larger
amounts of meta-data which already leaks from every SMTP exchange
ever.  That's the real threat and that inevitably leads to this
question:

* In what scenario has someone gone to the effort of disguising all
  their SMTP traffic (remailers, tor, whatever), but not selected an
  alias on the OpenPGP key they're using?


Regards,
Ben