151–160 of 165 posts
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But SMTP with TLS is opportunistic -- and if we're talking "national state secrets" it's trivial for a state to MITM the connection and do a TLS downgrade attack.
Not if the receiving smtp server implements DMARC
Johnny can't even select, download, use, or configure an email client.
Try asking someone to encrypt something, anything before sending it. The looks you'll get range from sideways or merely confused to fearful and panicked, to are you fucking kidding me?
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> In practice, I heard someone say that the biggest improvement in people’s privacy has been use of Gmail. In practice, until Snowden happened, NSA was able to access all the Google's internal data as Google replicated in plaintext its whole datacenters through the links snooped by the NSA or the GCHQ. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...
Correct. And now they encrypt all the inter-data center traffic. Question: Is that done on an end-to-end basis? Or do they encrypt the links between data centers? I want to encrypt a 10g ethernet and all the solutions look quite expensive. Has anyone done high speed encryption (i.e. 10gbps/1500 byte packets) with strongswan or similar?
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/highspeedencryption
It's public, but please do join if you're interested.
I think it would benefit the community to have an open and central location for best practices of high speed encryption.
Epistasis, Phil21, others, please do join and let's continue the discussion and progress there!
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Matthew Green and I had a bet for the last year, which just ended, over libotr's security; I bet him that nobody would find a sev:hi flaw in it all year, and, of course, won, because at this point all the low-hanging fruit in libotr has been shaken out. That bet was a reaction to the release of the EFF scorecard, which at the time gave Cryptocat(†) a perfect score but dinged ChatSecure, which is a libotr client, for…
What would be a better way to produce such a scorecard? Is there already any collection of common criteria established by computer scientists and accepted by experts and / or any kind of standardization of requirements for secure software that was produced by leading security capacities that allows to extract data for a compact visual comparison like the eff scoreboard? Would you like to provide or show me a link or…
The problem with this flawed list is that it in effect makes endorsements. It's better to have no criteria at all than a set that makes dangerously broken endorsements.
Backwards compatibility is the killer. The whole design of PGP is to be the envelope to make email private, versus the plaintext postcard that everybody can read. It works with existing servers and existing mail clients. The biggest Snowden revelation is the importance of metadata. Just knowing whom you talk to, when, is frequently enough to compromise the parties involved. You might be doing something legal now, but…
Technologically that might be true, but since Google is a third party they're required to provide their data to the government so practically, the technological considerations like SSL are absolutely meaningless.
I see two major barriers to mass adoption of any crypto system that requires a UI. 1. Abstraction. For the non-expert, the only metaphor that works for PKI is that of physical security. The concept of a "key" as a series of characters or a file that must be protected must be replaced by an abstraction that allows users to protect it in the same way they understand how to protect a key or a wallet. So long as the "key…
I've been using GPG since a while now, to sign my outgoing mail. I don't encrypt it as I don't know anyone who uses GPG. I'm still happy to use it, to get used to it, and to see alternative uses. Signing is in my view a big improvement, to make sure nobody has messed with the messages. I always use HTML, so the receiver gets an attachment with the signing hash in it, and no strange text in the mail. I use a signature…
Hmm. Why don't we have a standard place on our domains for public keys? For example for myname@mydomain.com the public key could be https://key.mydomain.com/myname.
If someone could use your public SSH from say Github and send you a private message that would be great. From my understanding that is not possible. You need to generate and exchange PGP keys before, a major UX issue. Allow SSH public keys to be used and we'll be a lot closer to fixing the secure email issue.
It's unrealistic to expect naive subjects to learn how to use GnuPG in an hour. It takes longer than that to learn a new game! People need at least to know what public-key cryptography is before trying to use it. But unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry is rather intimidating.[0] The GnuPG FAQ (at 7.1) is clearer, but not so easy to find.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy [1] https://www.gnupg.or…
You said "People need at least to know what public-key cryptography is before trying to use it." I think this is untrue. People really just need to know how to work with the technology, not understand what it's actually doing. Trying to explain the underlying principles makes it more confusing and thus, less safe.
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Not if the receiving smtp server implements DMARC
DMARC doesn't have a STARTTLS policy. I think you mean DANE / TLSA.
(The parent is Tony Finch, a very smart email guy who runs email for the university of Cambridge)