So, I'm really not trying to start a fight, please read this with curious intent. I personally don't really feel like keeping my email is a violation of my privacy. If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's kind of fun that they decided to use a one-way hash, but this story doesn't make me…
> If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's also a means of identifying you. It's not just the piece of data, even if it's only your mail address that is stored it can be sensitive information due to context. Say, due to a data breach a list of all members of a company's mailing list is le…
The GDPR blog post
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: The GDPR blog post
#52Re: The GDPR blog post
#53Is there not any issue with having a hashed version of the email, given the entropy of an email address is quite small?
There are ways to do this better. Let's say that it's 1 party and you're trying to figure out if you've seen en email address before. (That's the case in the article, there are also schemes where you and another entity can figure out if you both saw any email addresses -- but that's not what we're discussing here.)
We already know how to take relatively low entropy things and store them securely to see if you've seen them before, for password storage! However, password storage works a little differently. You _know_ which entry you're checking against because you have a secret (password) but also an identifier (user name) -- so you can recompute against the same random key. This randomization means attackers need to try every password for every user. This doesn't work for us, because we just have an email, but it's close.
Three parts worth considering: KDF, PRF and truncation. Firstly, your (deterministic, for reasons mentioned above) PRF turns your low-entropy input into a higher-entropy key. But (again, for reasons mentioned above) attackers still just have to try every email should they compromise your database. You can fix that problem by also adding a PRF (pseudorandom function) that you rate-limit vigorously. Think of a PRF as a keyed hash -- the usual example is HMAC-SHA256. If you're capable of keeping PRF key material safe but might leak a database dump (not unreasonable), the PRF forces the attack to be online: an attacker can only validate guesses as long as they have access to the PRF, and the PRF comes with audit trails and rate limits.
Finally, you can choose to truncate the output. Because the output space of your PRF will be much, much larger than the input space of email addresses, a match out of the PRF gives you almost perfect certainty that you've seen the email address before. That goes for you, and an attacker. If, let's say, you have another way to validate if you've seen the user before (but it's expensive, say, you have an encrypted offline dataset but it's AES-GCM'd and you can't afford to decrypt the entire thing every time), truncation gives you a neat way to _probabilistically_ say if you've seen an address before.
Re: The GDPR blog post
#54So, I'm really not trying to start a fight, please read this with curious intent. I personally don't really feel like keeping my email is a violation of my privacy. If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's kind of fun that they decided to use a one-way hash, but this story doesn't make me…
The problem is identification of physical persons. Your e-mail is public, but it also identifies you as a person. This is important, because it allows for correlating different data sets. Touch Surgery sounds like a honest company, so for them this was just some extra burden. But the same law prevents ShadyAdtechCo from getting datasets from several companies and joining them on e-mail column to build a profile of yo…
Re: The GDPR blog post
#55I got a few dozen gdpr emails today, some from companies I didn't know existed. This law is a fantastic development for end users/consumers.
Yup. Today I opened my fridge wondering if I'll see a note about an updated privacy policy inside. It's ironic seeing that the law was in power for the last 2 years, but companies woke up only last week. A lot of those mails are only information, with no (clearly marked) link to a consent panel, so I assume that me ignoring them means they won't be allowed to spam me anymore.
From that perspective, this whole trainwreck makes considerably more sense.
Re: The GDPR blog post
#56Is there not any issue with having a hashed version of the email, given the entropy of an email address is quite small?
Maybe, but they have a good reason to keep that data, and they even go out of their way to "hide it" the best they can using a one-way function. To save the information that a certain email address has explicitly withdrawn consent, they need to store it. The alternative is to send out a new email the next time someone adds then. I think the interpretation of GDPR this particular instance of information storing is sti…
Active concern for me: GDPR will promote a bunch more homegrown looks-fine-but-actually-busted crypto schemes. I don't think GDPR will be used to enforce that even in the case of breach, and I'm not sure it should -- I think we should make better schemes available instead.
Re: The GDPR blog post
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's also a means of identifying you. It's not just the piece of data, even if it's only your mail address that is stored it can be sensitive information due to context. Say, due to a data breach a list of all members of a company's mailing list is le…
What if someone else registered using his email (some websites for example don't send confirmation email if you change it in your profile or add additional email) or leaked data is fake? How that protects him?
Re: The GDPR blog post
#58Is there not any issue with having a hashed version of the email, given the entropy of an email address is quite small?
One of the GDPR notes says:
> [p]ersonal data which have undergone pseudonymization, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information, should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person”
Consider that you are running some kind of controversial/embarassing site of sexual/political/other sensitive nature. You keep a hashes of people who once were users but unsubscribed or something like that.
If that database is leaked, a user could re-hash list of political figures, celebrities or just some big list of well known email addresses and with this information find out they were users of this sensitive site.
So to me it seems that pseudoanymized/hashed emails still count as PII and have to be treated as such.
Re: The GDPR blog post
#59So, I'm really not trying to start a fight, please read this with curious intent. I personally don't really feel like keeping my email is a violation of my privacy. If they're not "processing" it (that feels like code for "data mining") is this really required? I mean my email address is literally a public means of contacting me. It's kind of fun that they decided to use a one-way hash, but this story doesn't make me…
The problem is identification of physical persons. Your e-mail is public, but it also identifies you as a person. This is important, because it allows for correlating different data sets. Touch Surgery sounds like a honest company, so for them this was just some extra burden. But the same law prevents ShadyAdtechCo from getting datasets from several companies and joining them on e-mail column to build a profile of yo…
You could track c_sharp_enthusiasts@myCompany.com, but that is not identifying a person.
Re: The GDPR blog post
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is identification of physical persons. Your e-mail is public, but it also identifies you as a person. This is important, because it allows for correlating different data sets. Touch Surgery sounds like a honest company, so for them this was just some extra burden. But the same law prevents ShadyAdtechCo from getting datasets from several companies and joining them on e-mail column to build a profile of yo…
Wouldn't then a hash of your email also identify you as a person? The companies can still build a profile of you if they just agree to use the same hashing function :/