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Lavabit Reloaded

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Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#101

Post by pvg »

danielpatrick wrote: post #98
pvg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's your question?

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#102

Post by dexterdog »

askmike wrote: post #87
amenghra wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can mostly get rid of spam by requiring the sender to perform a proof of work if they aren't in your contacts list. I.e. whitelist of senders + proof of work or some kind of configurable per domain quota/proof of work.

I guess that gets rid of all other email as well..

How often do you get email from somebody that you've never gotten email from before?

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#105

Post by dexterdog »

imglorp wrote: post #54
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…

I would argue the biggest downside to encrypted email is the sender, recipient, date, and size are known to all intermediaries. First of all, sometimes knowing who you talk to is more important than knowing what you say. Traffic analysis lets you draw all kinds of conclusions. Secondly, there are two parties, so double the chances for rubber hose cryptography. An opponent can approach either party and ask for details…

If you don't trust the other party you should not be sending him sensitive data. He has to be able to see it so of course he will be able to reveal it.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#106

Post by viraptor »

bigbrooklyn wrote: post #65
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…

These are just minor problems. End to end encryption should not be forced upon users, but should be used selectively. You don't want to lose your entire inbox because you wanted to send a few encrypted emails. > 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. How slow would this be with thousands of emails…

> How slow would this be with thousands of emails on a mobile device ?

This in itself is not a problem. Btrees are O(log n) for search, so thousands of emails can be looked up in 3-4 requests with the most naive way to implement remote tree walk.

The fact you're revealing the structure and index contents to the server as you search would be a bigger issue.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#107

Post by geofft »

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.

He didn't go to the mat for his users. He built a service that he knew was vulnerable to standard legal process (or if he didn't, he was amazingly incompetent) but sold it as if it were safe from the government, duping even Edward Snowden. The government, naturally, engaged in standard legal process, and found that he possessed a key that would give the government access to everything they needed, and that he was capable of turning it over. So he was ordered to turn it over, which should have surprised no one.

He did surrender the key, although by printing out the key in 4-point font (unclear if he was buying time, or just thought contempt charges sounded fun). After the government pressed him harder, he shut down the service days later. He didn't disclose that he had surrendered the key; the public found out when the court documents, including the key itself, were unsealed.

If something can't be done securely, don't tell your users that it can be done securely. If you know you can't win, there's honor in refusing to lose without a fight. But there's no honor in first promising people that you'll win, and there's quite a bit of dishonor in asking people to pay you to win.

Lavabit v1 should never have been built. Many people were technically qualified to build something like it it (it's email, which constrains the design significantly), had the resources, and chose not to. The fact that Levison built it, and that he hasn't apologized for building it, demonstrates that he's untrustworthy. This is not to say that he's a bad person; everyone makes mistakes, and I wouldn't trust myself to build a secure email service singlehandedly, because I know what mistakes I've made and what sort of personality flaws I have. It's just a statement that the required level of trust is extremely high, and Levison hasn't demonstrated it.

Lavabit v2's "Trustful" mode has all of the same flaws as Lavabit v1. He writes about his "free and open source server" and asks how you feel about "trusting our servers," when that was never the problem. If you can magically make sure that the government doesn't have access to your system, a standard unencrypted email server will do just fine. If you can't, they'll issue the exact same legal order to Lavabit v2 that they did to v1, and it'll be just as effective.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#108

Post by geofft »

MichaelGG wrote: post #66

Last I looked, DIME was just org level trust. That is, your domain determines what level of verification you get as far as knowing you have the right key for the recipient. So if you used, say Gmail and they did DIME, you'd still be trusting them totally. Am I misunderstanding? And still no admitting he was selling a fundamentally critically flawed service in the first place. If that's not even being mentioned, it re…

Also, hardware HSM is vulnerable to the "SSL added and removed here! :-)" attack, is it not?

"Dear Mr. Levison, remember that law about pen registers that you clearly hadn't heard off last time around? Well, now that you understand them, please install a pen register on the other side of your fancy FIPS 140-2 hardware security device, and have it send us everything in .pcap format. You don't need to reconfigure your HSM for this, and in fact any attempt to do so is now tampering with evidence in a federal investigation. Cheers, the FBI."

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#109

Post by fiatpandas »

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…

>I had my icloud account social engineered (someone walked into an apple store claiming to be me and they couldn't get their iphone syncing to "their account")

Were you using 2-factor?

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#110

Post by curun1r »

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.

If Edward Snowden started a mail service, I'd probably trust it more. If you want to talk about "going to the mat" for people, I think Snowden has made the bigger sacrifice.

Moxie and Whisper Systems probably would get my nod too. Perhaps even DJB or Bruce Schnier.

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