One could always add a “CC:” before the DKIM-start “From:” and still pass DKIM, no?
Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
141–150 of 492 posts
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#142I think this is a shameful argument. Non-repudiation over time is a truly powerful property of DKIM'd email for a great many uses outside of blackmail. Calling for the ability to remove it during the years 2016-2020 in order to "protect politicians from blackmail" is not only of deeply questionable value but of suspect motivation. Who is the author interested in protecting?
A counter to the non-repudiation of old emails is the fact that people who own their own mail servers can rotate their DKIM keys. So it's already possible for e.g politicians to have their email set up in such a way that they're insulated from leaks.
The argument here is more that customers of gmail and other email services are not offered repudiation as a feature.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you have confused messaging cryptography with "all of cryptography".
You said "there is never a legitimate need to do X". I gave an example of a legitimate need to do X. Your rebuttal is that... I'm confused? Yeah, you're gonna have to be more specific than that if you want to convince anybody.
> You said "there is never a legitimate need to do X".
No, he didn't, and to use quotes to claim someone said something that they didn't say is extremely disingenuous.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
"An accident of the past few years is that this feature has been used primarily by political actors working in a manner that many people find agreeable — either because it suits a partisan preference, or because the people who got “caught” sort of deserved it. But bad things happen to good people too. If you build a mechanism that incentivizes crime, sooner or later you will get crimed on."
People who are protected from blackmail by email repudiation are by definition people who have incriminating emails. Maybe everyone had skeletons in their closet, but if you have email proof of skeletons I'm starting to wonder if you're such a good person. Also there's an argument that "good people" can be blackmailed for INVENTED misconduct, but wouldn't such fake emails be more convincing without the ability to ver…
The world isn't entitled to knowing whether something I'm alleged to have said or done really happened or not.
For the people who lack imagination: suppose I'm a public official, and a photograph comes out depicting me doing some kind of "dirty" sexual act. Maybe it's real; maybe it's a deepfake; but if confirmed to be real it certainly would do reputational damage. Non-repudiation by definition prevents me from disavowing it, to no social benefit, and it's an anti-feature, in the sense that the large majority of users would prefer to have the ability to repudiate certain message contents than not.
Non-repudiation should be opt-in.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Non-repudiation over time is a truly powerful property of DKIM'd email for a great many uses outside of blackmail. This. Publishing the DKIM keys would be a huge loss for email archivists and historians in general. E.g. a couple weeks ago Donald Knuth published all of the emails he's sent and received over the last 20+ years of his career[1], without DKIM how would we know that they are authentic? [1] https://libra…
You can say the exact same thing about all secure messaging, which, after all, has the essential function of keeping documents out of the hands of third parties, including activists and historians. If DKIM upsets you, how do you get your head around disappearing messages?
>how do you get your head around disappearing messages?
I get my head around them by thinking they are bad? As in, not good. An undesirable property.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#146It's interesting that he asks for this solution but not the more easy to implement solution to the other side of the problem (which you can do if you run your own server): remove the DKIM signatures upon delivery to your inbox. Google can just add in a tag in their database that says "this message was verified". Or at least make it an option for users if they want that ability.
In the case of Podesta, the emails were stolen from his gmail account. If the headers weren't there, the messages would have been unverifiable.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#147Wow. This blog post is appalling. I completely disagree with it.
Consider this excerpt from the blog post:
> But DKIM authenticity is great! Don’t we want to be able to authenticate politicians’ leaked emails?
> Modern DKIM deployments are problematic because they incentivize a specific kind of crime: theft of private emails for use in public blackmail and extortion campaigns. An accident of the past few years is that this feature has been used primarily by political actors working in a manner that many people find agreeable — either because it suits a partisan preference, or because the people who got “caught” sort of deserved it.
> But bad things happen to good people too. If you build a mechanism that incentivizes crime, sooner or later you will get crimed on.
The author seems to be arguing that if after a certain point it becomes impossible to verify whether an email was genuine or not, that would somehow be a good thing.
This reasoning seems harmful to me. It's incredible that the author treats this moral argument as self evident. Let me state my objections clearly.
1. The truthfulness and reliability of the historical record is important. The fact that politicians are protected from blackmail when they write incriminating emails is utterly insignificant by comparison. Is the principle being defended that protecting politicians from blackmail is stronger than a public interest in having a historical record?
2. Making historical emails impossible to authenticate after a certain period of time makes it more difficult to prosecute crimes. It helps criminals, the very thing the author claims to be trying to avoid. If a politician, or anyone for that matter, sends an incriminating email which is evidence of the intent to commit a crime, why on earth would you want to make it easier to cover your tracks?
Seriously, can someone present a moral argument for why this should be adopted? It seems only harmful to me.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#148As we head into the post-truth era, we already know videos are going to become far less trusted due to deep fake tech. Finding grains of truth through cryptography, like DKIM, is so refreshing that it hurts to think some people want to cripple it. The Hunter Biden email is a good example. I initially thought it was a garbage tabloid drop, but once I read Rob Graham's analysis, it felt very refreshing to have a real n…
The Hunter Biden email is a terrible example. It's very likely that what's been found on "Hunter Biden's" laptop is just hacked material which has been stuffed on a laptop to disguise the original source of the breach. In this case the DKIM signatures are being used to lend credibility to the story that the laptop was mysteriously left in repair shop, never to be reclaimed. DKIM is not meant to validate conversations…
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Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#149As we head into the post-truth era, we already know videos are going to become far less trusted due to deep fake tech. Finding grains of truth through cryptography, like DKIM, is so refreshing that it hurts to think some people want to cripple it. The Hunter Biden email is a good example. I initially thought it was a garbage tabloid drop, but once I read Rob Graham's analysis, it felt very refreshing to have a real n…
The Hunter Biden email is a terrible example. It's very likely that what's been found on "Hunter Biden's" laptop is just hacked material which has been stuffed on a laptop to disguise the original source of the breach. In this case the DKIM signatures are being used to lend credibility to the story that the laptop was mysteriously left in repair shop, never to be reclaimed. DKIM is not meant to validate conversations…
It's not farfetched to believe a crack-addicted wealthy individual who seemed to live a very "promiscuous" lifestyle, would have forgotten some cheap laptop at a repair shop. These people are humans, at the end of the day.
Re: Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys
#150I know threads change over time, and it's dangerous to write a comment in response to the perceived gestalt of an HN thread, but, I have to say, it's pretty wild reading a thread on this site arguing so strenuously against the premise of secure messaging. In messaging cryptography, non-repudiability has for almost 2 decades been considered a vulnerability, not a feature. The OTR protocol[1] takes the step of publishi…
Has this kind of repudiation ever been tested in the real world? It's hard to imagine a court throwing out email evidence because it lacked a DKIM signature. And on a personal level seeing a chat transcript that had cryptographic non-repudiation would make me likely to believe it, but seeing one that lacked it would probably not weigh heavily in how I came to that determination.
> Has this kind of repudiation ever been tested in the real world? It's hard to imagine a court throwing out email evidence because it lacked a DKIM signature.
They're more likely to ask their expert witness to testify about the evidence, and the deniability of the DKIM signature could be brought up by the expert witness as a reason to distrust the evidence. I wouldn't expect lawyers to discover this argument from first principles.
Has it ever happened? Not that I know.