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Lavabit Reloaded

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Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#41

Post by bleachedsleet »

MaymayMaster wrote: post #2

>Lavabit believes in privacy and will always ensure your digital freedom. >Asks for your credit card information on the same page. Wew, at least let us use buttcoin, Levison.

Yeah, that and an alternative email is required. Too much personally identifying information is needed for a so-called privacy oriented service.

I understand an additional email is needed right now since it's basically a pre-order, but I would hope that once fully launched this requirement would be removed at least.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#43

Post by simcop2387 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #18
bigbrooklyn wrote: post #15

If you NEED encryption, don't use email. From: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ What's the tradeoff? If the server doesn't have access to the content of emails, then it reverts to a featureless blob store: Search isn't possible Previews can't be calculated If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email Spam checking on content isn't possible To access mail on multiple devices, th…

Search is still possible. You can stem words and store their weights without storing the actual unencrypted text. This isn't perfect security, but it's good enough that it would be difficult for the government to successfully use the search metadata in a case against you without a lot of other evidence. This is what we do on FWD:Everyone for email threads shared within private repositories.

I've never tried it but I'd bet you could use instead use a key derived from the master somehow to salt a hash for all the stems too. I think that'd let you still do the search and possibly have a good index for it still but it'd add some hurdles to the whole thing so that you couldn't make a lot of good guesses about the actual contents of the emails. It would still leak information a out related emails (say there's a thread discussing a unique term in it), but it'd still be better than otherwise.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#44

Post by ycmbntrthrwaway »

sbenfsck wrote: post #28
ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had any old account, looks like you should be able to connect now. Too bad imap.lavabit.com:143 is firewalled on their side.

The website is up now, I think it'll be a bit until the mail is up.

Source: https://twitter.com/kingladar/status/822583975067713536

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#45

Post by pvg »

ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #39
pvg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to regain and build trust with users would have been to acknowledge his previous mistakes. Then at least you could say "he's been around the block, done it wrong and learned how to do it right". Instead, he writes: "In August 2013, I was forced to make a difficult decision: violate the rights of the American people and my global customers or shut down. I chose Freedom." That isn't what happened. He chose t…

> The completely pointless escalation forced him to compromise all of his users How has he compromised all of his users? The service was shut down and emails kept encrypted. Am I missing something?

He gave up the cert, there was no PFS-only configuration, plus, presumably the FBI got to do their surveillance except instead of the target's email, they could read everyone's. So no, you are not right.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#47

Post by baudehlo »

unknownsavage wrote: post #35
bigbrooklyn wrote: post #15

If you NEED encryption, don't use email. From: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ What's the tradeoff? If the server doesn't have access to the content of emails, then it reverts to a featureless blob store: Search isn't possible Previews can't be calculated If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email Spam checking on content isn't possible To access mail on multiple devices, th…

> If you want encryption, don't use email. That's total nonsense. > Search isn't possible It absolutely is, in both theory and practice. The server stores an encrypted index, and the client walks it (requesting parts as needed). It's going to little slower, and a lot more complex but it's doable. > If you lose your private key, we can't recover your email This is a damn feature. I had my icloud account social enginee…

Fwiw search that way is (I think) patented by Proofpoint. So it might be hard to implement.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#48

Post by Alex3917 »

simcop2387 wrote: post #43
Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is still possible. You can stem words and store their weights without storing the actual unencrypted text. This isn't perfect security, but it's good enough that it would be difficult for the government to successfully use the search metadata in a case against you without a lot of other evidence. This is what we do on FWD:Everyone for email threads shared within private repositories.

I've never tried it but I'd bet you could use instead use a key derived from the master somehow to salt a hash for all the stems too. I think that'd let you still do the search and possibly have a good index for it still but it'd add some hurdles to the whole thing so that you couldn't make a lot of good guesses about the actual contents of the emails. It would still leak information a out related emails (say there's…

In theory you could HMAC all the stems, but at that point you really need to ask yourself what threat model you're trying to protect against. E.g. keeping only the stems is more than enough to prevent competitors from learning anything useful about your business if your database gets compromised, but using an HMAC probably isn't going to significantly slow down a state-level actor who has a warrant or zero day for your web servers. So on the balance I think the technical debt that would be introduced would likely make the overall system less secure, at least for most use cases.

Re: Lavabit Reloaded

#50

Post by jml7c5 »

tptacek wrote: post #30

In August 2013, I was forced to make a difficult decision: violate the rights of the American people and my global customers or shut down. I chose Freedom. Shouldn't that "or" be an "and"?

It's clearer if you add an "either" and a comma:

either violate the rights of the American people and my global customers, or shut down.

Unless you're alluding to some impropriety on Levinson's part that I'm unaware of.

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