Towards usefully secure email

We have built attribute based, usefully secure email (ABUSE), a system that leverages users by enabling them to build a decentralized, nonhierarchical public key infrastructure (PKI) to express their trust relationships with each other, and then use this PKI to manage their trust in people with whom they correspond via secure email. Our design puts humans into the system - to do things that humans are good at but machines are not - at both the creation of credentials as well as the interpretation of credentials. By doing so, we hope this system can overcome the failings of approaches based on standard PKI