Re: [lamps] S/MIME fix

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 5/17/18 9:01 AM, Russ Housley wrote:
>> To create an analogous situation for secure email, you'd need to use webcrypto in a way that stored your private key in the browser (inaccessible to the page), and develop web standards that add some affordance for web pages to hand encrypted data to the browser in a way that causes the corresponding unencrypted data to be displayed to the user, but isolated from the web page completely (e.g., rendered into an iframe that the parent cannot inspect).
> I am not following you.  I do not see the requirement to do anything with webcrypto.  However, I completely agree with the need to isolate each portion of the multi-part.

Presumably, we would need a means to generate a keypair, and to make the 
public key available to the webpage so that it can be conveyed to remote 
parties. That could be a new API, but it feels like something that could 
be added to webcrypto without much fuss. (I'll note that WebRTC did take 
the other approach, by defining an 
RTCPeerConnection.generateCertificate() method that is very roughly 
equivalent to window.crypto.subtle.generateKey(), but with the 
properties I describe above).

Admittedly, this can all be done by the browser itself using local UI, 
but the general idea of the web platform is that you delegate only as 
little as is necessary to the browser. I mean, if you push enough of 
this to the local binary, and it becomes a full-fledged email client. ;)

/a