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Lavabit Reloaded

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Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#91

Post by wfunction »

unknownsavage wrote: post #35
bigbrooklyn wrote: post #15

If you NEED encryption, don't use email. From: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ What's the tradeoff? If the server doesn't have access to the content of emails, then it reverts to a featureless blob store: Search isn't possible Previews can't be calculated If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email Spam checking on content isn't possible To access mail on multiple devices, th…

> If you want encryption, don't use email. That's total nonsense. > Search isn't possible It absolutely is, in both theory and practice. The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable. > If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email This is a damn feature. I had my icloud account social enginee…

> The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable.

Going on a tangent, but do you know of any services that offer such a thing?

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#92

Post by caf »

codazoda wrote: post #52
chuckdries wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean?

My understanding is that he was legally forced to hand over the encryption key and all the data. The FBI, then, could have read all messages that were available on the server. He shut down so that no additional mail could be sent and read. It's unclear to me how much mail was kept on the server. Only unread mail? Anything in your inbox? Everything?

My understanding is that the key he was forced to hand over was the TLS key that protected communications between clients and his server, and the stored emails were encrypted with a key derived from the user's password.

So whether or not the FBI could read a particular stored message or not would depend on whether they'd been able to obtain that user's password: they could if the user had logged in after the FBI had the certificate, or if they'd logged in using a non-PFS cipher suite at any time, or if their password was vulnerable to cracking or determinable by the FBI in some other way.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#93

Post by berry_sortoro »

codehusker wrote: post #7

Is there any person as trustworthy as Ladar Levison for a service like email or chat? To my knowledge, he is one of the few that has gone to the mat for his users.

Well AFTER all this happened I would sure call Ladar trustworthy. Before that, not so much https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/

He was was advertising a false sense of security to people and even snowden trusted him but as moxie explains very well that it was basically not was all thought it was. The claim "we can't read your stuff" was simply wrong.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#94

Post by lisper »

Pxtl wrote: post #82
brianpgordon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Search isn't possible > It absolutely is, in both theory and practice. The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable. Are you suggesting that to search your mailbox, the client should download every single encrypted message in the entire mailbox and decrypt them all locally to search them? If not, how…

So what, you hash each word in the e-mail and search for the hash, and this returns which emails include those hashed words? Would that be horribly insecure? I guess it would be impossible to salt those hashes, and it probably risks defeating the whole crypto.

> Would that be horribly insecure?

Yes.

> I guess it would be impossible to salt those hashes, and it probably risks defeating the whole crypto.

Exactly. (There are other problems too, but that one by itself is a show-stopper.)

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#95

Post by Groxx »

unknownsavage wrote: post #35
bigbrooklyn wrote: post #15

If you NEED encryption, don't use email. From: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ What's the tradeoff? If the server doesn't have access to the content of emails, then it reverts to a featureless blob store: Search isn't possible Previews can't be calculated If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email Spam checking on content isn't possible To access mail on multiple devices, th…

> If you want encryption, don't use email. That's total nonsense. > Search isn't possible It absolutely is, in both theory and practice. The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable. > If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email This is a damn feature. I had my icloud account social enginee…

> > To access mail on multiple devices, the private key needs to be shared securely between them

> This is a non-issue. It can easily be derived from a password

How does that change the equation? You're still exposing the thing-that-decrypts to multiple devices, thus (many!) more threat vectors. Lose one, and you lose them all, which is the point of the claim.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#97

Post by danielpatrick »

Groxx wrote: post #95
unknownsavage wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want encryption, don't use email. That's total nonsense. > Search isn't possible It absolutely is, in both theory and practice. The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable. > If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email This is a damn feature. I had my icloud account social enginee…

> > To access mail on multiple devices, the private key needs to be shared securely between them > This is a non-issue. It can easily be derived from a password How does that change the equation? You're still exposing the thing-that-decrypts to multiple devices, thus (many!) more threat vectors. Lose one, and you lose them all, which is the point of the claim.

...so use unencrypted email?

The point is, some is better than none. More is better than some.

So many people here pointing out holes that make it worse than a theoretically perfect system even though it's leagues ahead of where we are now.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#98

Post by danielpatrick »

pvg wrote: post #25
codehusker wrote: post #7

Is there any person as trustworthy as Ladar Levison for a service like email or chat? To my knowledge, he is one of the few that has gone to the mat for his users.

A good way to regain and build trust with users would have been to acknowledge his previous mistakes. Then at least you could say "he's been around the block, done it wrong and learned how to do it right". Instead, he writes: "In August 2013, I was forced to make a difficult decision: violate the rights of the American people and my global customers or shut down. I chose Freedom." That isn't what happened. He chose t…

Source? So many hacks in this thread. Why trust any of this?

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#99

Post by tylersmith »

ctrl_freak wrote: post #69
Spone wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for these claims?

From what I read, he gave up the SSL cert by printing out a hard copy in a tiny font, and when he was ordered to provide a digital copy, he shut down the service. > At approximately 1:30 p.m. CDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the F.B.I. a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen register. This printout, in what appears to be four-point type, consists of eleven pages of…

How big was that key? 11 pages at 4pt is a lot of characters. I wonder what encoding.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#100

Post by nikcub »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #64
mike-cardwell wrote: post #42

So they're using a HSM to protect the SSL key this time. Makes me wonder how many HSMs out there are already backdoored.

My mind tells me that it's not a large amount, but given that the USG has a track record of intercepting routers in the mail and installing surveillance software in them, my guts tell me to be very wary.

The whole point of an HSM is that you can't physically tamper with it.

Vendors also provide ways to validate HSM's

https://www.thales-esecurity.com/msrms/validate

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