Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lavabit Reloaded

lavabit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 240 posts

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#121

Post by EthanHeilman »

danielhooper wrote: post #16
MaymayMaster wrote: post #2

>Lavabit believes in privacy and will always ensure your digital freedom. >Asks for your credit card information on the same page. Wew, at least let us use buttcoin, Levison.

This is being down voted but is an interesting point. Is a privacy service in which public record is available for its purchases ever truly private? Maybe its extremely difficult for others to see your communications, but if someone (or some law-enforcement agency) knows you have paid for a private communications service, does that make you a candidate for further scrutinization? I think so.

Probably shouldn't pay in Bitcoin then.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#122

Post by chrisper »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #120
coretx wrote: post #111

Sensible choices in a nutshell: If you live in a 5-eyes nation, don't use or buy services hosted or operated from a 5 eyes nation. If you don't live in a 5 eyes nation, only use services hosted and operated from Iceland or Switzerland.( Nation states are the #1 threat, and your own nation is always the most dangerous one. )

Schweiz is in the EU. We are subject to its data-retention laws. Consider Norway.

Schweiz / Switzerland is not in the EU. It has agreements with the EU (EFTA), but it certainly is not a member of the EU.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#123

Post by reitanqild »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #120
coretx wrote: post #111

Sensible choices in a nutshell: If you live in a 5-eyes nation, don't use or buy services hosted or operated from a 5 eyes nation. If you don't live in a 5 eyes nation, only use services hosted and operated from Iceland or Switzerland.( Nation states are the #1 threat, and your own nation is always the most dangerous one. )

Schweiz is in the EU. We are subject to its data-retention laws. Consider Norway.

Schweiz is in the EU.

I don't think it is. See https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries_en

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#124

Post by dexterdog »

gtCameron wrote: post #104
dexterdog wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly once for each contact that has ever sent me an email

I'm talking about now going forward. There are plenty of ways to make a person opt-in the first time they send you something. That process gets rid of more than 99% of spam.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#125

Post by hiddencost »

Alex3917 wrote: post #18
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…

Search is still possible. You can stem words and store their weights without storing the actual unencrypted text. This isn't perfect security, but it's good enough that it would be difficult for the government to successfully use the search metadata in a case against you without a lot of other evidence. This is what we do on FWD:Everyone for email threads shared within private repositories.

DO NOT DO THIS. Statistics is more powerful than you'd expect. Also, the wrong rare word could absolutely be grounds for a very intrusive warrant.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#127

Post by kijin »

What I want is an open-source proxy that I can install on localhost to provide IMAP/SMTP access on the one side, and talk to the encrypted remote data store on the other side.

All of the encrypted email services I've seen so far, including Protonmail and now Lavabit v2, require using a special client (app or webmail) instead of common email software. This fails the very first test that I apply when trying to decide whether or not to use an online service: can I get all my data out of it on short notice, in a standard format through an automated process?

For email, this means IMAP access so that I can use standard tools like imapcopy to back up and migrate my mailbox. I don't care how secure your product is if it leads to vendor lock-in. I want both good encryption and an exit strategy, and the latter is much more important because if you screw up, I can always move to someone who does it better.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#128

Post by nommm-nommm »

curun1r wrote: post #110
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.

Moxie is not impressed with lavabit as lavabit's entire security model relied on "we totally promise we won't look at your private key."

https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/

>Unlike the design of most secure servers, which are ciphertext in and ciphertext out, this is the inverse: plaintext in and plaintext out. The server stores your password for authentication, uses that same password for an encryption key, and promises not to look at either the incoming plaintext, the password itself, or the outgoing plaintext.

>The ciphertext, key, and password are all stored on the server using a mechanism that is solely within the server’s control and which the client has no ability to verify. There is no way to ever prove or disprove whether any encryption was ever happening at all, and whether it was or not makes little difference

Anyways, having good inventions doesn't equal having a secure product.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#129

Post by simplehuman »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #128
curun1r wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Moxie is not impressed with lavabit as lavabit's entire security model relied on "we totally promise we won't look at your private key." https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/ >Unlike the design of most secure servers, which are ciphertext in and ciphertext out, this is the inverse: plaintext in and plaintext out. The server stores your password for authentication, uses that same password for an encryption key, and…

Moxie is not impressed with anything other than signal

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#130

Post by Alex3917 »

hiddencost wrote: post #125
Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is still possible. You can stem words and store their weights without storing the actual unencrypted text. This isn't perfect security, but it's good enough that it would be difficult for the government to successfully use the search metadata in a case against you without a lot of other evidence. This is what we do on FWD:Everyone for email threads shared within private repositories.

DO NOT DO THIS. Statistics is more powerful than you'd expect. Also, the wrong rare word could absolutely be grounds for a very intrusive warrant.

Security is rarely good or bad in an absolute sense, but rather is judged by considering the assets under protection and the threat models you're protecting against.

Just because certain people need the sorts of protections provided by Lavabit doesn't mean that products like Gmail are bad or insecure. They're each secure for the use cases they're targeting.

Post reply on HN