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Lavabit abruptly shuts down

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Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#241

Post by john_b »

davorak wrote: post #69
jaggederest wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think canaries are effective. You can't get around a court order just by mental gymnastics, they'll hold you in contempt. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect that they'd simply order you to keep updating the canary.

This would imply that the court can order you to lie to your customers. I think this is not the case. If there is any precedence for any US court requiring public citizen to lie I definitely want to know about it. If the courts are acting like they have this power then it will greatly change my perception of how the courts, NSA, and congress are currently acting.

There was a HN discussion about this two months ago [1]. The general consensus seemed to be that a court would not take the same kind of philosophical and logical approach that most HN types use, and would classify a failure to update the canary as effectively a communication that a NSL has been received. Since the courts only care about the facts that communication is occurring and that the court prohibited it, contempt of court would be the most likely result.

TL;DR: Judges don't philosophise about specific methods for circumventing their intentions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871541

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#242

Post by dictum »

trimbo wrote: post #184
dmix wrote: post #12

From 2011: > Lavabit processes 70 gigabytes of data per day, is made up of 26 servers, hosts 260,000 email addresses, and processes 600,000 emails a day. That’s a lot of email. http://www.dbasoul.com/2011/1008.html Update: According to their stats page, they had 410k email accounts hosted before shutdown https://twitter.com/georgemaschke/status/365553445538775040

70 GB / 600K emails = 122KB per email. That's a large average even with headers. To put things in perspective, Costco's massive marketing email sent to me this morning is 138K including headers. So the question is, what were people sending though Lavabit that averaged 122K and would have attracted attention? Therein probably lies the reason for all of this.

If Lavabit allowed large attachments, I'd say photos.

122KB is the average. The majority of emails were probably 1-2KB. Then newsletters, around 50KB. Lastly, emails with attached photos, ~5MB.

Probably follows a simple Pareto distribution: 20% of emails comprised 80% of the total storage required.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#243

Post by mpyne »

Karunamon wrote: post #201
davidw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if, more than crypto, false positives would make them work harder. They know who you are emailing too, and so likely are not going to target you in any case, since you are not part of an interesting network. But if you start talking about a movie, where they plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Times Square or something... Emacs automates this with M-x spook: morse War on Terrorism encryption Forte Blowpipe LLNL…

6 degrees, though. The network of connecting one person to any other person on the earth is usually quite small. Hmm.. here's a silly idea. A peer to peer network, let's go with a cool web-2.0-ey name like Chaffr, that assigns you a GUID and establishes a stream of truly random (or pseudorandom) data which is propagated out via a P2P system kinda the same way Tor nodes communicate with each other. This stream of nois…

You would still have to encrypt that though, which reintroduces the problems of key management and authentication/trust. I'm sure that issue is resolvable though, although I would expect that most ISPs simply drop that type of traffic completely as it can only hurt their operations. So you'd also need to find ways to route around ISPs that don't choose to participate in this.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#244

Post by mtrimpe »

kgo wrote: post #196
casca wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somewhat true. RFC3207[1] describes opportunistic TLS encryption for SMTP communications. Our postfix deployment uses this and a fair amount of our email is sent over TLS-encrypted SMTP. Of course, an MITM attack could hide the STARTTLS option and there are questions around the strength of the CA cert infrastructure, but SMTP is not just plaintext. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3207

The problem is that you don't sent to the destination SMTP server. You send to your SMTP server. That goes at least one hop via SMTP and eventually ends up on the destination's domain server. So even if I setup and host my own SMTP server, and even if I verify the TLS certs on my side, I have no way to verify that I'll get (1) A TLS connection (2) with an authenticated cert all the way to the ultimate destination. It…

It's quite likely however that Lavabit, being a service that focusses on privacy, delivers enough emails directly to the target server over a secure protocol to cause problems for the NSA in this investigation.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#245

Post by acabal »

dkulchenko wrote: post #138

This is infuriating, and the worst part is that a clear solution isn't in sight. Sure, we can fight this in the courts, and a few secret programs might get shut down, but operations will just continue under a different name. We can encrypt our data, move our services and data offshore, but that just paints a big target on our heads - doesn't actually address the fundamental issue. This is supposed to be a democracy,…

As developers perhaps the most effective thing we can do from a long-term perspective is baking strong cryptography in to all of the products we create, and opting for open source whenever possible. (After all, open source is the only way we can guarantee that the software we're using really doesn't snoop on us.)

If crypto were easier to use and presented as a default, more regular people would wind up using it and we'd slowly start stymieing the NSA and similar organizations.

Playing politics and calling your congressman isn't going to work in the long term, as you said. We might get one or two laws changed in the short term, but things can change back in the scale of decades and we could be even worse off. The only real solution is to make it mathematically impossible for agencies to read our communications now and in the future.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#247

Post by sneak »

mpyne wrote: post #149

One big question I have for the legal beagles: It's understood (if not well-liked) that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply to data given to a third-party... What if, instead, you host server space within the U.S. and run your own software (email, listserv, whatever) and data on the leased hardware? I would think there's a good argument that Fourth Amendment protections then resume, and the domestic-ness of the…

You put your data into a server owned by someone else. Game over.

The real solution, I think, eventually incorporates HSMs. There have been reports of EU authorities seizing racks if servers while keeping them powered up for forensic analysis (presumably key recovery out of running RAM).

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#248

Post by jlgreco »

pchristensen wrote: post #222
jlgreco wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Italy nail a mob boss a few years ago because they were using a common substitution cipher?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano

Yup, that's the guy: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/mafia_boss_sec...

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#250

Post by jdp23 »

DASD wrote: post #132

Interesting thread from Email Discussions: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=66968 If you're a SAAS provider, be aware if you need to shutdown that many users are not prepared for this. Several posters in the linked thread rely on a recover password feature sent to e-mail for access to other accounts. Not a prudent practice but this is common for many.

Interesting thread, thanks for sharing. Huge difference between page 5 (when people still believe it's just a badly-handled storage system problem) and afterwards (when the true story is revealed).
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