Automatically Encrypting all Incoming Email • Hacker News Board

Re: Automatically Encrypting all Incoming Email

#21

Post by mike-cardwell » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 8:37 AM UTC

johnny_maxwell wrote: post #15

What's the point? This is equivalent to putting all postcards you receive in a safe so that no thief can read them if he breaks into your house. I would think there is also other important data besides only mail on a PC, why not just go the safe route and encrypt your hard disk the proper way. File-by-file PGP encrypting stuff does not look like the best solution to me.

Your reaction makes me think you didn't even read as far as the second paragraph... Your question is answered there.

Also worth noting that the blog post doesn't tell you to do this instead of using full disk encryption. There's nothing stopping you from doing both, and you should.

Re: Automatically Encrypting all Incoming Email

#22

Post by mike-cardwell » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 8:40 AM UTC

frank_boyd wrote: post #8

Wouldn't it be way easier to just encrypt the partition? Ubuntu for example has an easy-to-use feature for that. The idea of email encryption is not least to avoid interception in the clear. Or am I missing something?

You should do both. The solution described in the article provides several extra levels of defense against different types of attack that full disk encryption doesn't provide. If you actually read it, you'll know this...

Re: Automatically Encrypting all Incoming Email

#23

Post by FedRegister » Mon, Aug 26, 2013, 3:36 PM UTC

rmk2 wrote: post #13

FedRegister wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likely have plain-jane, no TLS SMTP mail being delivered which means it's trivial for your upstream provider to read your (unencrypted) email.

Exactly. So why bother at all right? Root password? "root" will do. Encrypted partitions on the server? Useless. SSH keys? Silly overengineered junk. Following the same logic, why bother setting strong passwords on Gmail? Or even bother at all with 2FA, I mean, after all, somebody can just read your unencrypted email in transit anyway, right? This comment is not helpful at all. The original article did not mention wi…

>Exactly. So why bother at all right? Root password? "root" will do. Encrypted partitions on the server? Useless. SSH keys? Silly overengineered junk.

>Following the same logic, why bother setting strong passwords on Gmail? Or even bother at all with 2FA, I mean, after all, somebody can just read your unencrypted email in transit anyway, right?

That's not even remotely what I'm claiming. Stop being a dick. Yes, you should always have good passwords on your accounts and use 2FA. But if you want to send something secret across the Internet you might want to choose another method than (unencrypted) email.

>This comment is not helpful at all. The original article did not mention with a single word the NSA or anything like it, but he is worried about things being stolen or hacked.

If someone really wants to read your mail they'll compromise the host your mail is on and read it before you get a chance to encrypt it. In that case this "solution" does nothing. It keeps a casual person out but does nothing to stop a more advanced attacker.