Elbsides 2025

The crucial stopping-gap of wide-spread secure communication over Email clearly seems to be "usability". The difficult part arguably is "certificate management" which, at the core is the question of how to authenticate credentials. Many researchers and developers have taken their shot at improving the situation, while instant messenger applications seem to simply circumvent all obstacles and provide effortless end-to-end security — alas only for communication within their respective silos. And the situation for Email, i.e. combination of SMTP (RFC 5321) and Internet Text Messages, going back to RFC 724 and RFC 772, nowadays encapsulated by MIME, is anything but simple. But since 2015 ACME seemed to have solved the similar problem of distributing authenticated certificates for web-sites. In this work we take up the work on ACME for end-users and transfer the principles to OpenPGP and thus finally solving(?) this problem from the 1990s.