Re: POP3 password in plaintext?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ted Zlatanov writes:
 > On Wed, 01 Oct 2014 13:00:56 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> 
 > wrote: 
 > 
 > SJT> It's not clear to me that there's a good way to do it.  Perhaps having
 > SJT> the `password-read' function (and any other functions that are used to
 > SJT> read passwords) check for unencrypted connections and warn the user
 > SJT> would work.
 > 
 > I think you mean `open-network-stream'?

No, I really do mean "password-read".  Mostly because not all
protocols demand authentication immediately on opening a stream.  Eg,
many sites can be accessed with HTTP, will switch to HTTPS without
authentication of the client, then present an HTML document for
login.

 > DC> configures the server name and port. In this day and age it might make
 > DC> sense to have such a [use TLS or fail] checkbox default to "on".
 > 
 > I agree for most protocols, now that almost all our platforms support

+1

 > GnuTLS. I think it would also help to have a certificate manager UI,
 > especially for self-signed certificates. I'd like to work on it after
 > the impending release.

I think the self-signed cert manager should default to one-time-only
or a short local expiration (1 hour? 1 day?) even if the cert is
long-lived.  Self-signature means that the server doesn't care to
devote much financial resources to security (which may be correlated
with carelessness concerning other security resources), and it's quite
possible that some of those will be evil sites, recognized as such by
user intuition, and I'd prefer to be warned about them on a second
approach.