Groupwise Security Question

July 2, 2007 6:55 PM

Novell Groupwise expert advice needed. (more inside)

My wife and I are middle/upper managers that work in a fairly large organization (3,000 + employees). We like to send each other 'fun' and 'flirty' (for lack of a better term) emails throughout the day. Makes for the time to go much more quickly, and evenings to be a little more interesting as well! My understanding of networks is limited, but I am aware that pretty much anything you send client-client that isn't encrypted can be read along the way. I assume that means the network geeks can peer at will to the emails traveling within the intra and internet from either of us. (Should they be inclined to do so). YES... we are aware of our 'acceptable use policy'. NO... we do not want to lectured that if we didn't flirt, we wouldn't have to worry about this. The question is this: Is there an easy way to encrypt our messages so that only her and I can read the emails to each other in Groupwise 6.5? The network is fairly secured- we can't use free mail programs like hotmail, yahoo, etc..

Suggestions?

posted by bytemover to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What you're looking for is a PGP solution. You won't be able to use the PGP support that is built into groupwise because the certificates need to be set up on the server by your administrator, but you can get programs that let you encrypt the message outside of groupwise and then paste the encrypted message.
posted by SpecialK at 7:44 PM on July 2, 2007

Well if you could manage to get yourselves a pair of certificates S/MIME could work, but that's a bit complicated. What I'd recommend for simplicity is to just take this piece of javascript and make a simple little HTML form around it (or steal the one from that site if you don't know how). Put a copy on your computer and copy on your wife's computer and come up with a shared password to use. Once you have it all in place, when you're sending emails to each other type them into the form and encrypt it with the password you chose. Email her the encrypted text, and she can use the same form to decrypt it.
posted by saraswati at 7:51 PM on July 2, 2007

As long as you are using the Groupwise client, messages sent to the server are encrypted.
Once on the server, the message store is encrypted as well.

As I understand it, both of you are internal to the company, so the messages will never be in an unencrypted form except for when you (or your wife) are reading them.

If you are using the webmail client, so long as the session is SSL, then your messages will again never be in plain text[1].

Honestly, despite the "I read your email" t-shirts, network geeks are rarely interested in your mail, but the default Groupwise setup will provide a reasonable amount of protection against snooping.

There are PGP plugins for Groupwise, but I've not used any of them. You could also get yourself a copy of GPG for windows ands just cut and paste encrpted text on either end. saraswati's suggestion would work provided that you didn't transmit the clear text over the Internet while encrypting it.

[1] Techniques exist for decrypting SSL sessions, especially when one has the certificate (as a network admin would have). Whether or not your admins are up to using them is something only you can judge.
posted by madajb at 10:51 PM on July 2, 2007

madajb has it right. The Groupwise message stores are remarkably well protected...sure it's possible as an administrator to work around that, but without some compelling reason to do so (like a subpoena) nobody is going to bother.

Until our recent switch to Lotus Notes (sob!) I managed multiple Groupwise systems, and we'd gripe every time we were asked to do this because it was a pain in the ass.
posted by JaredSeth at 8:33 AM on July 3, 2007

I asked the friendly tech guys at my former employer, a Fortune 500, whether they monitor emails since my friends and I were constantly sending work-unfriendly notes around. They said they didn't look at people's emails because they didn't care and had too much real work to do.
posted by look busy at 8:55 AM on July 3, 2007