Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#31

Post by leeleelee » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

The takeaway?

Don't use standard e-mail (gmail or otherwise) for anything that needs guaranteed privacy. Once you send an e-mail, it is not within your control what happens to it or who sees it.

That's why, for example, in healthcare -- messages are commonly wrapped in secure message "containers". The e-mail simply has a link that takes you to a third party where the actual message is stored, encrypted, has an expiration date, and you must authenticate to view it.

Convenient? No. But privacy always comes at a cost of some sort.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#32

Post by escaped_hn » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:47 AM UTC

bluecmd wrote: post #4

trjordan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most systems never found a good way to encrypt data at rest. You either have to let the user manage the keys / passphrase, giving up things like search and password recovery, or you have to manage the keys in a service, which doesn't provide privacy from the service that manages the keys.

Spam is also a problem. How do you do spam detection if you cannot read the message?

Make encrypting an email cost something. not necessarily money. kinda like minimg bitcoints but instead of getting bitcoins, you get to encrypt and send an email.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#33

Post by ryanlol » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 3:09 AM UTC

Panino wrote: post #28

bluecmd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is also a problem. How do you do spam detection if you cannot read the message?

A Spamhaus DNSBL alone drops 99% of spam with almost no FPs. Add DROP, fullbogons, and greylisting to increase the percentage further. None of these methods read the message body, and there are plenty of other options as well. I self-host and receive about 5 spam messages per year, all without looking at the message body.

I'm not sure if you know how spamhaus DNSBL works, "no FPs" is ridiculously far from the truth.

They make it near impossible for bigger hosts not to get blacklisted unless they fully comply with spamhaus.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#34

Post by phire » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 3:18 AM UTC

escaped_hn wrote: post #32

bluecmd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is also a problem. How do you do spam detection if you cannot read the message?

Make encrypting an email cost something. not necessarily money. kinda like minimg bitcoints but instead of getting bitcoins, you get to encrypt and send an email.

As in, each email requires a bruteforced hash that takes about half a second to calculate on a desktop CPU, before it will be accepted by the mail server?

That's actually the best idea for spam reduction I've heard so far (which is not really saying a lot). Half a second won't be noticed by a normal user, but it will be noticed by people sending thousands or millions of emails.

Sure Spammer will install large GPUs hashing rigs and still manage to send thousands of emails per second, but it would cost them a lot more than it does now.

One problem will be phones, a hash that takes about half a second on a desktop will take tens of seconds on lower end mobile phones, which is hardly unworkable but you could offload the calculations to a 3rd party server (with a large GPU based hashing rig) for say a fraction of a cent, especially if the email contents were encrypted by the phone before hashing.

And it could be introduced without breaking the email system. Initially the presence of a hash will just be used as an additional spam filtering signal, but as support grows over time you can make it harder and harder for emails without a hash to get through.

Like bitcoins, you would need a mechanism to increase the required work over time, though it could just be ad-hoc based on what mail server operators choose to accept.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#35

Post by dragonfray » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 4:01 AM UTC

escaped_hn wrote: post #32

bluecmd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam is also a problem. How do you do spam detection if you cannot read the message?

Make encrypting an email cost something. not necessarily money. kinda like minimg bitcoints but instead of getting bitcoins, you get to encrypt and send an email.

monetary costs can never be imposed on spammers, if we can move money on that scale along with email we've solved bigger problems!

what other costs can we impose? the email lists that spammers harvest stay valid for a long long time, what if they were invalidated faster? to have a high hitrate on their lists they'd need Google scale crawling capabilities, which kinda then defeats their point of trying to make a living from spam.

why are we converting long term relationships with servers(email id and password to login) into relationships with every Tom on the Internet(no control over who can reach you, hence you are in a relationship whether you like it or not)? Do we still have to remember emails or phone numbers, aren't they names in an address book already? why don't we just move off email, use a new system that uses long, hidden alphanumeric ids to identify relationships between people that can be invalidated by either party?

invalidate unnecessary relationships faster = invalidate spammer lists faster :)

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#36

Post by drblue » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 4:38 AM UTC

phire wrote: post #34

escaped_hn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make encrypting an email cost something. not necessarily money. kinda like minimg bitcoints but instead of getting bitcoins, you get to encrypt and send an email.

As in, each email requires a bruteforced hash that takes about half a second to calculate on a desktop CPU, before it will be accepted by the mail server? That's actually the best idea for spam reduction I've heard so far (which is not really saying a lot). Half a second won't be noticed by a normal user, but it will be noticed by people sending thousands or millions of emails. Sure Spammer will install large GPUs ha…

You may want to take a look at hashcash[1]. It was a proof of work scheme for email invented in the late 90s, and they claim it was adopted by bitcoin[2]. (Sadly, it never caught on for its 'intended' purpose.)

[1]: http://www.hashcash.org/ [2]: http://www.hashcash.org/bitcoin/

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#37

Post by Sanddancer » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 4:40 AM UTC

phire wrote: post #34

escaped_hn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make encrypting an email cost something. not necessarily money. kinda like minimg bitcoints but instead of getting bitcoins, you get to encrypt and send an email.

As in, each email requires a bruteforced hash that takes about half a second to calculate on a desktop CPU, before it will be accepted by the mail server? That's actually the best idea for spam reduction I've heard so far (which is not really saying a lot). Half a second won't be noticed by a normal user, but it will be noticed by people sending thousands or millions of emails. Sure Spammer will install large GPUs ha…

The problem I can see there is with legitimate large mailing lists. Think security announcements, etc. Putting a burden like that on smaller teams, or teams without a lot of funding, could prove problematic.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#38

Post by Ricker » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 6:56 AM UTC

omouse wrote: post #16

api wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about ease of use. https is probably the only user-friendly / good UX crypto solution in common/widespread use (unless you count transparent drive encryption), and it achieves this in part by being centrally controlled via registrars to eliminate the need for the user to understand PKI. This in turn makes it kind of a joke from a crypto-snob POV, though it's good enough for most routine stuff. Even MacGPG pl…

I'm trying out TutaNota (not the easiest to remember name :/) and they do encrypted email: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tutanota-end-to-end-encrypt... Recipents basically receive a password from you in another channel (email, IM, phone convo, face to face) and can use it to decrypt the email from TutaNota when they receive it. I tried it out myself and the only clunky thing is that they load up their whole web ap…

Didn't know about them before, looks interesting. I've managed to find their site - https://tutanota.com - even though I was searching for Tutanova (should have just used copy & paste. The name is indeed not easy to remember...

A few questions remain:

* How do they 'encrypt emails to anybody'?

* Where do they encrypt - locally or on the server?

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#39

Post by phire » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 7:09 AM UTC

Sanddancer wrote: post #37

phire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, each email requires a bruteforced hash that takes about half a second to calculate on a desktop CPU, before it will be accepted by the mail server? That's actually the best idea for spam reduction I've heard so far (which is not really saying a lot). Half a second won't be noticed by a normal user, but it will be noticed by people sending thousands or millions of emails. Sure Spammer will install large GPUs ha…

The problem I can see there is with legitimate large mailing lists. Think security announcements, etc. Putting a burden like that on smaller teams, or teams without a lot of funding, could prove problematic.

You could deal with large regular mailing lists, you want to move to a system where users can subscribe to a signed mailing list and have the mail server remember that subscription. But yeah, irregular mailing lists where you suddenly need to tell your million users that your database has been breached and they need to change their passwords will be an issue.

But we are talking about $0.0005 (0.05 cents) worth of hashing on CPU systems per email. With GPU based hashing it should be 50 times cheaper. If your team has 1 million customers, and can't afford the $10 to pay a GPU based hashing service to hash 1 million emails for you, you might have a bigger problem.

I suspect the biggest issue for such a scheme is $10 for 1 million emails is potentially still profitable for spammers while being at the limit of how much cpu time you can expect to waste for regular (particularly mobile) users. And that's before you consider the possibility of ASIC hashing for emails.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#40

Post by pdkl95 » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 7:19 AM UTC

Aka, the "second-hand smoke" effect of gmail (or any similar service). Even if you are fine with giving your data Goggle (or Facebook, etc), it's a problem if your forcing that decision on others.

The solution is probably using email in a manner closer to how it was originally designed: many local MTAs instead of a handful of centralized MTAs.

Here's a product idea, which could make someone a lot if they can find a way to implement it: a home server that is a minimal, secure, locally contained, turn-key home email MTA (with some localhost-only IMAP/webmail interface). You sell the server (and maybe a 1-time service to help people set it up).

This server would have to include a "choose your vendor, enter your credit card, click subscribe" super-easy interface to let people subscribe to vendors (multiple, if desired) that provide lower-MX-priority backup MTA services. (perhaps with an optional "hidden MTA" option, where your home server and lowest MX is only visible to the service, so the home router only connects to know hosts, IFF that is something that the customer wants.

People already understand local-only delivery because it emulates snail-mail. If you can let people receive messages and data unattended and asynchronous, so they can run the server when they want and receive their data directly (nobody else involved except for the backup services of their choice, then you have a product that will sell. It doesn't even need to have to have great uptime (that's what multiple MX records are for) or performance.