[SLUG] Antivirus and Email Encryption - Research Update

From: Scott Grizzard (scott@scottgrizzard.com)
Date: Tue Jun 16 2009 - 18:37:54 EDT


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I spoke to a nice lady from PGP today, and she said that if you have
desktop email encryption through their products, the decryption is done
/after/ the email goes through the virus scanner, making the email
scanner worthless.

The partnership /apparently/ deals with their "endpoint" products, which
aren't really the endpoint now are they?

The tech guy she elevated the question to said that most "active" virus
scanners (not Clamwin - not active) would scan attachments when you
opened them, so there was no problem. I pointed out that macros
embedded /in/ the body of the email (Outlook users) would also not be
scanned... I don't want to say I could /hear/ the shrug through the
phone, but...

I know none of /us/ would /ever/ enable macros in Outlook, if we ever
used Outlook to begin with, but that isn't always true with our clients
who may not know better and may be "resistant" to switching to Thunderbird.

The system I haven't played with is enigmail/clamwin on Thunderbird. I
I know clamwin is not an active malware scanner, but there is a
Thunderbird extension for it, and I don't know when it scans email.

Is this just a "not thought through" problem?

By the way, PGP's $99 Desktop home product looked pretty slick (easy for
non-technical people). It supports gnupg keys and S/MIME along with
their proprietary model - the user just selects the one they want to
use. It also allows you to encrypt /attachments/ alone with a password
that you tell the end-user over the phone, which I thought was a good
idea (even though an encrypted zip will get you there too).

It's not open source, but you can download the source code for "peer
review" for free (that is a really /good/ idea... note note).

PGP supports Outlook /and/ Thunderbird. If you have "unenlightened"
clients/friends of the small office Accountant/Lawyer type, you might
mention it to them...

Their next up product is "Desktop Email", and it includes a year of
support for $164.

There, I plugged her product, so I feel less guilty about taking twenty
minutes of her life. :)

- - Scott
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