The trade agreement between the EU and Great Britain made necessary by Brexit was concluded at the last minute. This is the only way to explain why the proud 1246 page comprehensive document contains IT recommendations that would have surely been noticed and revised upon critical review.

Mozilla Mail and Netscape 4.x On page 921 of the agreement is about the security of communication by email. “s / MIME functionality is integrated into most modern e-mail programs, including Outlook, Mozilla Mail and Netscape Communicator 4.x, and works with all major e-mail software packages,” it says there and on: ” Due to the simple integration of s / MIME into the national IT infrastructure on the part of all countries, it was selected as a future-proof mechanism with which security in communication can be implemented. ”

At the same point in the agreement Between the EU and Great Britain, the authors also recommend 1024 – bit RSA encryption and the SHA-1 hashing algorithm for secure communication via e-mail.

Since the section of the trade agreement in question is exactly a passage from an EU legal text from the year 2008, there are increasing voices on the Internet that suspect an unfortunate copy & paste as the cause of the involuntarily funny recommendations. For a long time it looked as if no agreement could be reached – the provisional text of the agreement had to be finalized under great time pressure after the historic agreement on a Brexit trade pact.

Not to be excused For copying in completely outdated IT However, Professor Bill Buchanan, who teaches cryptography at Edinburgh Napier University, has little understanding of guidelines. There is little excuse for it, he told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). SHA-1 and 1024 – bit RSA were a good choice about ten years ago, but they no longer meet modern security standards. Netscape Communicator dates from 1997.

(dwi)