71–80 of 369 posts
So what do I use for encrypted messaging that can, like, replace email, then? Nobody seems to have provided any sort of satisfactory answer to this question. To be clear, an answer this has to not just be a secure way of sending messages, it also has to replicate the social affordances of email. E.g., things distinguishing how email is used from how text-messaging is used: 1. Email is potentially long-form. I sit dow…
So what do I use for encrypted messaging that can, like, replace email, then? Nobody seems to have provided any sort of satisfactory answer to this question. To be clear, an answer this has to not just be a secure way of sending messages, it also has to replicate the social affordances of email. E.g., things distinguishing how email is used from how text-messaging is used: 1. Email is potentially long-form. I sit dow…
3 is incorrect for encrypted email: you cannot email someone unaware without their consent and expect them to willingly and ably participate in decrypting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In modern practice, email is sent over TLS sockets already. Any good email client should prohibit you from using SMTP, POP, or IMAP with TLS, and for the past few years, even the MX-MX transfers in the backend have started to become protected (albeit mostly opportunistically at this point, I believe) with TLS. So the only people who can read email are you, your counterparty, your ESP, and your counterparty's ESP, ass…
This is an excellent explanation overall, I do however think that it's important to note that opportunistic STARTTLS is vulnerable to downgrade attacks by mitm. Since this would have to be a mitm of e.g. Gmail it's not trivial by any means, but neither is it completely out of reach (see for example the periodic rerouting of the internet caused by odd BGP advertisements). One further note is that you can know post-hoc…
Not only that, but intentionally downgrading STARTTLS commands has as times been the default configuration for some Cisco routing gear.
(Buy me a beer one day and I might tell you about the time I charged one of Australia's big four banks about $70k to debug that in a router on their internal network that nobody there knew existed...)
Magic Wormhole is neat, but the happy path is to use a third-party rendezvous server, which is susceptible to traffic analysis (I also wish that the codes had more than 16 bits of entropy, but that is part cargo-culting on my part). Signal is also vulnerable to server-side traffic analysis, and is strangely keen on both demanding a selector (a phone number) for identity and on trusting Intel's 'secure' enclave (I str…
Yeah, this whole part is some 90s cypherpunk way of modeling human relations, which has never mapped onto any real world relationships. As soon as people had real world digital identities outside of their gokukillerwolfninja666 logins, this didn't help.
CA ecosystem might be fundamentally flawed, but WoT was a complete failure. So PGP users end up trusting some key server which is probably sitting under someone's desk and has been owned by every serious intelligence service since forever.
So what do I use for encrypted messaging that can, like, replace email, then? Nobody seems to have provided any sort of satisfactory answer to this question. To be clear, an answer this has to not just be a secure way of sending messages, it also has to replicate the social affordances of email. E.g., things distinguishing how email is used from how text-messaging is used: 1. Email is potentially long-form. I sit dow…
Do you feel like PGP is a good way to cold email people in practice? (I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but that sounds like what you're saying.)
So what do I use for encrypted messaging that can, like, replace email, then? Nobody seems to have provided any sort of satisfactory answer to this question. To be clear, an answer this has to not just be a secure way of sending messages, it also has to replicate the social affordances of email. E.g., things distinguishing how email is used from how text-messaging is used: 1. Email is potentially long-form. I sit dow…
I don't get what's insecure about normal unencrypted email. It's sent over https, isn't it? It's not like I can read your emails unless I break into Google's servers, no? And even if I do, they probably aren't even stored in plaintext. I just don't get the encrypted email obsession. It's impossible for an individual to withstand a targetted cyber attack so it seems pointless to go above and beyond to ultra encrypt ev…
Well, first of all, "breaking in" isn't the only way someone might get access to data on Google's servers. There are such thing's as subpoenas, not to mention that it is possible a Google employee might abuse access to servers. And then I would be _very_ surprised if google doesn't use the content of your emails for advertisement and tracking purposes.
Furthermore, unless both parties are using gmail, the email will be stored at least temporarily on other mail servers, which may be less secure (and you might not even know who controls them).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 is incorrect for encrypted email: you cannot email someone unaware without their consent and expect them to willingly and ably participate in decrypting.
Why not? I mean, that's what publicly listing your public key is for, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel like PGP is a good way to cold email people in practice? (I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but that sounds like what you're saying.)
Good question. Not sure. Although I don't see why I wouldn't, if they have a PGP key listed? (I guess there is some question over whether the listed key is actually them?) But my point is that, well, email is a good way to do that, and Signal isn't, so I'm going to use email rather than Signal. Honestly, I wouldn't focus on (3), because as I see it, if you can replicate the feel of email, things like (1)-(2), so that…
The problem is that no-one else has gone through the process of establishing a community/standard that's capable of replacing it. Each system has built their own inoperable walled garden that doesn't work with anyone else, and none of them have a user base large enough to make encryption easy and pervasive.
My own secret hope is that Apple is forced to open iMessage as a part of an anti-trust action and that acts as a catalyst for interoperability.
I've been (ab)using ansible-vault for this. It's apparently[1] now using reasonable primitives (PBKDF2+AES-CTR+HMAC-SHA256), but not necessarily the latest and bestest ones: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.8.1/lib/ansible/p...
The implemention is sub-optimal though, with some silly issues that haven't been fixed like https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/12121