It’s Always Sunny in Reykjavik or How I NSA-Proofed My Email (2013)

From what source and how were they validated, both from a secure checksum perspective and code audit? Was a full application pen-test done on each package after installation and configuration? Additionally, what controls are running server-side to audit memory execution and modifications on disk? Is Tripwire being used as an example? How about Wireshark? Is it being used to monitor all traffic from the host NICs with alerts sent out if it spots any non-encrypted traffic or traffic to IP addresses not explicitly white-listed? How about ongoing monitoring for zero-days for each of the packages used?

Nothing I read in the article leads me to believe there is any NSA proofing here whatsoever. Making something secure isn't about finding a "secure" data center and hosting a solution yourself. In fact, self hosted solutions can be some of the toughest to secure because you must have a broad and deep knowledge of security as it relates to the entire environment and then keep up with package changes in a way which results in auditing each and every future change. Honestly, no one has time for that and even if secure at x point in time, it won't be at y point, say when a Hartbleed level vuln is announced for a package used while the author is on vacation and can't reach his servers to appropriately mitigate.

As for spooky23, while most your email recipients might be NSA accessible, maybe not _all_ of them are. If you manage to keep your email account confidential, then peeping toms only have a partial view of your social graph (the part that is in your compromised correspondent inbox).

Aside from the many maintenance problems of hosting e-mail yourself, the biggest problem here is the distance: Iceland is far away from the user in the USA. Latency doesn't matter so much for e-mail, but connectivity does, and if there's a problem with a transatlantic link (which does happen on occasion) there goes your most important communications medium.

Finally, the biggest fallacy with e-mail is that it is ever secure. It's never secure. The mail on your client devices is unencrypted, and if you ever reply, forward, or send an e-mail to anyone it's very likely for the whole thread go over an unencrypted relay and be stored temporarily, not to mention the logs, and the unencrypted storage on the destination, etc.

Your physical mail isn't secure in the postal service, and neither is your virtual mail in the e-mail service.

Email is trivial to secure. Just need to be able to exchange OOB one RSA key.

But being able to securely communicate with "isis_recruiter34@jihadistan.jihad" don't give you much when LEO knows that you are communicating with each other.

Nowadays you need security, anonymity and usability - which are often with contradicting requirements.

- local mail delivery does not traverse any network

So if you are user A on a mailserver and your wife/friend/uncle is user B, when you send mail to them that mail is simply a local copy operation (provided they don't POP or IMAP it to a local mailtool).

That's pretty interesting, I think.

It may interest you to know that no piece of rsync.net company email has ever traversed a network - everyone logs in via SSH and uses (al)pine and all internal mail is just local copy ...