Announcing Mailmin: a system for remote access and administration via secure (OpenPGP) email
Hi everyone,
A little over a year ago I asked (on this list) [0] about a solution
for secure, remote access via email. The only existing solution that
seemed to do what I wanted was grunt [1], by our own John Goerzen [2],
but it has virtually no documentation [3], so in the time-honored *nix
tradition, I decided to roll my own. I figured it would be a great way
to teach myself some Perl, which it was, and I also learned a bit about
the gory details of OpenPGP, gpg, and MIME types. It is now a full
blown (and fully documented) project hosted on Sourceforge [3].
In brief, Mailmin is basically a specialized MDA. Your MTA, MDA, or MRA
passes Mailmin mail to Mailmin. Mailmin uses gpg to decrypt the message
and verify the signature. It then invokes the shell to process any
commands contained therein (it can also do file transfer to and from
the remote system via special Mailmin directives). The output is placed
into the body of an outgoing message, gpg is once again invoked to sign
and encrypt the message, and it is then sent via sendmail (or a
sendmail drop-in).
Mailmin is a Perl script. It isn't (yet?) a Debian package, but its
dependencies are all in the official repos. It is currently a fully
functional beta release.
I would love to get any feedback from any of you Perl / mail / OpenPGP
gurus out there, as well as from regular users. I obviously care most
about any security mistakes I may have made, but I am also interested
in bugs in general, as well as feature requests, usability issues, and
anything else. You can contact me on or off the list. Note that I
myself am *not* a Perl / mail / OpenPGP guru, so be careful!
Celejar
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/01/msg00463.html
[1] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/grunt
[2] http://people.debian.org/~jgoerzen/
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=250664,
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=252989
[3] http://mailmin.sourceforge.net
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