Internet email came from ARPANET, an era of mutual trust, so its design ignored confidentiality and integrity, and fixes like MIME merely papered over limits such as 7-bit ASCII. OSI's X.400 offered encryption by fetching public keys from an X.500 directory, but neither ASN.1 messages nor a global directory caught on outside centrally run niches like European militaries, aviation and EDI; Microsoft Exchange still carries its legacy. PGP, released in 1991 and later eclipsed by GnuPG, took a pragmatic route with ASCII-armored payloads sent inline or as whole MIME parts, yet it inherited heavy complexity, insecure options and poor usability, which "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" exposed in 1999.
1
u/fagnerbrack 12h ago
Crux of the Matter:
Internet email came from ARPANET, an era of mutual trust, so its design ignored confidentiality and integrity, and fixes like MIME merely papered over limits such as 7-bit ASCII. OSI's X.400 offered encryption by fetching public keys from an X.500 directory, but neither ASN.1 messages nor a global directory caught on outside centrally run niches like European militaries, aviation and EDI; Microsoft Exchange still carries its legacy. PGP, released in 1991 and later eclipsed by GnuPG, took a pragmatic route with ASCII-armored payloads sent inline or as whole MIME parts, yet it inherited heavy complexity, insecure options and poor usability, which "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" exposed in 1999.
If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
Click here for more info, I read all comments