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

Mailpile – taking e-mail back

indiegogo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 157 posts

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#51

Post by stbenjam »

crocowhile wrote: post #38
harrytuttle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well your point F nullifies your point about A-D does it not? As for a second point F, the identity can be derived from the unencrypted headers in PGP. Before PGP: From: bob@alqaeda.org To: bill@gmail.com Subject: The snow this year is better at Innsbrook. But not at St. Moritz. After PGP: From: bob@alqaeda.org To: bill@gmail.com Mime-shit.... DEFKJiwfou3hoqwdnhoqiwfhoqifowqihwqoidhqwod== PGP is an encapsulation and…

No, it does not. Take this message: From: anonymous_acct_101@mailpile.is To: anonymous_acct_77@mailpile.is Mime-shit.... DEFKJiwfou3hoqwdnhoqiwfhoqifowqihwqoidhqwod== This is quite a secure message and it would be as easy to send as any other email with mailpile or similar services. My point is that security is not a black&white concept. There is a continuous of security, and part of the job of mailpile could be to g…

No. That really looks like another anon.penet.fi. If that is the case, then if 101 (let's call 101 Alice) or 77 (let's call 77 Bob) are using providers that are in bed with the NSA, the NSA can easily still grab the metadata from this.

If Mailpile is the MTA, and the NSA is following the connections to Mailpile's servers they can use time correlation to find out the metadata.

Metadata is hard to hide^.

Anyway, as the other posted mentioned, the correct solution is definitely full security across the board, with full encryption MTA->MTA. That needs to happen so it can't be sniffed on the wire. But of course full security between Alice's MTA and Bob's MTA is ultimately pointless when Bob's MTA (e.g. Gmail) is sleeping with Evan (the NSA).

The actual message contents need to be decrypted with keys that only the recipient has access to, and GPG is as good a solution as any for that. You can only trust what only you have. Don't trust Google. Don't trust Mailpile, either.

^ anon.penet.fi was an OK solution, but still was subject to possible timing attacks (and legal attacks since a table exists SOMEWHERE in the universe that correlates your name to your nym).

A nym.alias.net solution is better when you're chaining remailers and using random timing delays.

Deadrops are better, post your message anonymously to a newsgroup/forum/etc via a Tor or other anonymous connection, and your recipient does the same to retrieve the message anonymous. There's no metadata there to capture.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#52

Post by moxie »

harrytuttle wrote: post #4

How many times do people have to say this: There is no such thing as secure email. Assume everything is being read. You can't bolt security on (SSL, mailbox encryption, PKI). You have to design it in from the start. SMTP/IMAP etc have crudely hacked on TLS implementations which aren't even guaranteed to be operational site to site. PGP is just an encapsulation which is rarely used. It's a mess. This is just a repacka…

I don't think Mailpile is potentially valuable because it immediately solves the encryption problem, but because it solves the MUA problem.

All innovation in the secure email space has been blocked for the past 13 years by one primary problem: webmail. It is simply not possible to develop a secure email solution if webmail is the only viable option for accessing mail, so most people who would be interested in innovating here don't even bother. If we can successfully make the transition back to local MUAs, however, we might have a chance to try something new.

Even if we can't leverage it to get a full end-to-end mail encryption, here's why I want something like Mailpile:

Right now, every single email I receive is encrypted. I have my public GPG key on my mail server, and every incoming email that's not already encrypted is encrypted using that public key. That way if the anyone compels my VPS provider for access, they just get a bunch of encrypted email. So my problem isn't receiving or encrypting email, it's reading it. The only real option I have right now is Thunderbird, which isn't great, and is no longer under development. As a browser-based but locally-hosted MUA, Mailpile might be the remedy to Thunderbird that we need.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#53

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
harrytuttle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well (E)SMTP works effectively by connecting, then knocking on the door and asking for a list of capabilities (EHLO). When the remote SMTP server says "no I don't support TLS", what are you supposed to do? Email only works at the moment because in this scenario, usually the sending MTA just says "what the hell" and delivers it over the wire in plain text anyway. The moment you force TLS as a requirement, the internet…

I think that's the problem though. My browser connects to Gmail with SSL/TLS/HTTPS. The internet community moves fast when we decide something (Goodbye support for Internet Explorer 6!), why can't we decide on this: You will use a mail client that requires SSL to connect to our mail server, or one that does support SSL will be provided for you. Would you ever allow fallback to HTTP of authentication or credit card da…

[deleted]

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#54

Post by enterthemist »

moxie wrote: post #52
harrytuttle wrote: post #4

How many times do people have to say this: There is no such thing as secure email. Assume everything is being read. You can't bolt security on (SSL, mailbox encryption, PKI). You have to design it in from the start. SMTP/IMAP etc have crudely hacked on TLS implementations which aren't even guaranteed to be operational site to site. PGP is just an encapsulation which is rarely used. It's a mess. This is just a repacka…

I don't think Mailpile is potentially valuable because it immediately solves the encryption problem, but because it solves the MUA problem. All innovation in the secure email space has been blocked for the past 13 years by one primary problem: webmail . It is simply not possible to develop a secure email solution if webmail is the only viable option for accessing mail, so most people who would be interested in innova…

Firstly, I want to applaud mailpile for their efforts. Next, I'd like to respond to you with what our product is aiming to solve (because that is what I know best).

> All innovation in the secure email space has been blocked for the past 13 years by one primary problem: webmail.

We are working on solving this very problem. We do this via js crypto. The main problem with js crypto is modification of the crypto with the transfer. We aim to solve this via having a browser extension be the default js store (so that all the crypto is verifiable by outside sources).

> That way if the anyone compels my VPS provider for access, they just get a bunch of encrypted email.

This is also true of any service which provides end-to-end encryption (With the exception of the plaintext headers).

> So my problem isn't receiving or encrypting email, it's reading it.

We use SMIME for encryption which is supported by a variety of clients: Outlook, iMail, and our own client. For internet mail, as I said, we are working on browser extensions for gMail.

The main problem that this does not solve is the routing and timestamp metadata problem as that is still necessary for the transfer of the email.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#56

Post by hershel »

malandrew wrote: post #49
harrytuttle wrote: post #4

How many times do people have to say this: There is no such thing as secure email. Assume everything is being read. You can't bolt security on (SSL, mailbox encryption, PKI). You have to design it in from the start. SMTP/IMAP etc have crudely hacked on TLS implementations which aren't even guaranteed to be operational site to site. PGP is just an encapsulation which is rarely used. It's a mess. This is just a repacka…

Ultimately we need something that is a cross between Skype's old decentralized architecture and alt.anonymous.messages. We can now stream videos of a few gigabytes with a large enough swarm. That should be enough to create large shared mailboxen among several hundred random people that lasts about a month at a time, at the end of which your mail program would automatically mail all the people in your address book at…

Won't mailbox rotation enables attacking it by comparing users in different mailboxes - the users who stayed over some time in shared mailboxes , probably want to communicate with each other ?

And few hundreds is a pretty small group if you want anonymity.

And according to the presentation in the link you gave(very interesting work on the subject of anonymity) - if messages are posted correctly, using the right tools(mix networks, nymservers) and those tools are developed to high enough quality(which is not the case today) , and enough people are using the service , the anonymity achieved can be very high using standard mailboxes.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#57

Post by samstave »

harrytuttle wrote: post #4

How many times do people have to say this: There is no such thing as secure email. Assume everything is being read. You can't bolt security on (SSL, mailbox encryption, PKI). You have to design it in from the start. SMTP/IMAP etc have crudely hacked on TLS implementations which aren't even guaranteed to be operational site to site. PGP is just an encapsulation which is rarely used. It's a mess. This is just a repacka…

It's amazing how this is all coming about.

Lots of people are thinking about the problems we have right now.

I have been thinking of the following and want to get some feedback on the idea:

ComBoxen! Comm box is a VM image that, when run, launches with a set of services that allow fully encrypted communications between other ComBoxes.

Basically a secure linux distro on full lockdown that will register with a central directory only to state it is online. Messages are directly passed between comboxes when both are online. Messages are stored locally on the Combox until a secure direct connection can be made to the recipient.

The whole VM could be a stripped down truecrypted message store that only talks to others on a trust list.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#58

Post by ghc »

Okay, so we're crowd-funding an email client now?

Is there any reason to not just put up all of my random project ideas on indiegogo and see if they get funded? If I'm having trouble financing the development new features for my SaaS application, should I just create a funding project for it?

Because I'm really not seeing the difference between that and this...I wish someone could explain this phenomenon to me.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#60

Post by [deleted] »

hershel wrote: post #56
malandrew wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately we need something that is a cross between Skype's old decentralized architecture and alt.anonymous.messages. We can now stream videos of a few gigabytes with a large enough swarm. That should be enough to create large shared mailboxen among several hundred random people that lasts about a month at a time, at the end of which your mail program would automatically mail all the people in your address book at…

Won't mailbox rotation enables attacking it by comparing users in different mailboxes - the users who stayed over some time in shared mailboxes , probably want to communicate with each other ? And few hundreds is a pretty small group if you want anonymity. And according to the presentation in the link you gave(very interesting work on the subject of anonymity) - if messages are posted correctly, using the right tools…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN