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Mailpile – taking e-mail back

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Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#151

Post by mikepurvis »

enterthemist wrote: post #80
mikepurvis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS crypto makes sense, but I'm confused as to why a browser extension is necessary—you can safely deliver the JS crypto solution over an https connection, so the critical component is keeping the user's private decryption key distinct from their login/password. Seems a shame to depend on a browser extension—you lose most of the advantages of webmail when you can't log into it from anywhere.

As tlrobinson says, the problem is that we dont want you to have to trust us. One of our goals is to minimize the amount of trust you have to place in us. Therefore, we want you to be safe if we are forced to try and steal your keys. See my other comment for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245617

Gotcha, makes sense. Still, I wonder if there might be a clever solution which exploits the same-domain policy to isolate the decryption activity from the rest of the app. That would considerably reduce the attack surface if it handles collecting the key and then you just postMessage strings back and forth.

As you hint at in the other comment, there are various ways that third-parties could vouch for the code running on the decryption domain.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#152

Post by samstave »

ds9 wrote: post #146
samstave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And when someone connects to a Commbox, how can they tell (across the network) whether it's operating as described, or an imposter box reporting to the bad guys while pretending to be trustworthy? This is a problem for a lot of these ideas, not only yours and mine (see my other post where the difficulty comes down to verifying the server). Logically, the solution would seem to be a tamper-proof (or tamper-evident) ha…

See my other post in this thread, where I posted the following. Which, please, tell me if this would work or not:

>You run two instances of your VM. One is run locally to you - another is hosted. When a message is sent to you from another peer - it must reach both the hosted and the local one to be opened. When both instances are online at the same time - a hash is shared of the message between both instances and the local master can trust and open the message.

When you're locally off line and a message is sent - Thus, if your locally offline - your hosted instance receives the message. When you come online - your local instance will receive the message from your hosted instance AND a hash from the senders hosted instance. If the hash from the sender matches the message hash from your hosted instance - the message is trusted and can be opened. Else it is dropped.

The problem is that all these p2p secure connections can still always be slurped.

The addresses are only within the system and one would never know which hosted instance belongs to what actual address.... (This area needs a lot more thought)

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#153

Post by nollidge »

Zoomla wrote: post #127
nollidge wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm having trouble financing the development new features for my SaaS application, should I just create a funding project for it? Sure, why not? No one is stopping you. > I wish someone could explain this phenomenon to me. Many people invest small amounts of money in a person or group of people. There are risks, like any investment, and the payoff is a product which the investors will find useful or entertaining…

it is not really an investment, it is more like charity... you more then likely never get more then what you paid for and you have a risk of loosing it all.

> you more then likely never get more then what you paid for

They tell you beforehand exactly what the payoff will be. If that doesn't sound economical to you, you don't pay in. There's absolutely no deception here. There's no promise of riches. There's just a promise of a product that is worth what you paid for it.

> and you have a risk of loosing it all.

...which is exactly like every other investment in the history of commerce.

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#155

Post by girvo »

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…

I'm currently using Geary as my local MUA (Linux only, FWIW) -- I'm unsure if it has encryption built in yet, but I know it's on the radar, and is under heavy development. Check it out, if you're a Linux user. I replaced Thunderbird with it quite successfully :)

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#156

Post by Zoomla »

nollidge wrote: post #153
Zoomla wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not really an investment, it is more like charity... you more then likely never get more then what you paid for and you have a risk of loosing it all.

> you more then likely never get more then what you paid for They tell you beforehand exactly what the payoff will be. If that doesn't sound economical to you, you don't pay in. There's absolutely no deception here. There's no promise of riches. There's just a promise of a product that is worth what you paid for it. > and you have a risk of loosing it all. ...which is exactly like every other investment in the histor…

But you have 0 chance of getting back more then what you spent, unlike an investment (the reward is always worth less then what you spent, if you think about it as an investment).

Re: Mailpile – taking e-mail back

#157

Post by FedRegister »

cwp wrote: post #121
FedRegister wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it doesn't solve the traffic analysis problem. It doesn't because it can't. Out of the list posted by the GP the following aren't fixed by mailpile and can't be because it has to use SMTP: modern content encapsulation / PKI / mandatory authentication / SPAM control.

What do you mean by modern content encapsulation?

MIME blows
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