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A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

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Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#71

Post by sliverstorm »

magic_haze wrote: post #55

To play the devil's advocate, what exactly is the practical use of all this if most of your family and friends are on Gmail (and couldn't be arsed to figure out pgp)? From what I can see, your emails will now be sent in the clear over the internet, instead of staying within google's servers. Either way, the government's going to get your data, but at least you're protected against... /more/ unscrupulous people snoopi…

None of it is impermeable, even your own server. It's just another layer of misdirection and/or difficulty.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#72

Post by etherael »

Sami_Lehtinen wrote: post #66
etherael wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.

That's why they take memory snapshot first, which is trivial with VPS and then pick encryption keys from it to access encrypted volumes. This is well known method and works with pure hardware machines too with physical access. It's great question when you get to server, to shut it down or leave on. If on, it could destroy data, if turned off encryption keys are gone. I think it would require some individual case anal…

Isn't the pure hardware method for memory snapshots some ridiculously complex mechanism with freezing the memory and quickly transferring it to a reading device?

If you're going to pull this, you need to know in advance that it's necessary, that's not some minor thing that everyone is going to just do automatically, it's an extra, complicated step it's easy to screw up.

That said, I acknowledge the possibility of compromise in the aforementioned scenario, but once again I don't understand people who always jump to the "I am vulnerable to this narrow threat model, ergo, I should not bother to protect myself against any threat models". Especially when the measures you can take to protect yourself most likely will address the actual threat models you are liable to encounter.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#73

Post by LiveTheDream »

richdougherty wrote: post #53

It would be incredibly useful if there was a mail service that received email over SMTP, encrypted it straight away with a public key, then just dumped the encrypted email into a general-purpose online storage solution (e.g. an S3 bucket). That would IMO provide a good base for encrypted client-side apps to build on top of. Open source would better be able address the problem of writing a client once the money needed…

Hushmail and Lavabit sort of do this. They encrypt emails before storing them. However, as far as I can tell they handle the public/private keypair on their own, so the security only goes as far as you trust them.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#74

Post by ansgri »

brongondwana wrote: post #2

I'm not sure why you can't do those things on FastMail. (disclaimer: I work for FastMail) Sure we have folders rather than tags, which means you can't add multiple of them to the same message. Probably the biggest lack is that you can't manage IMAP flags via the web interface. Otherwise, our search is now very powerful (since about March this year) and allows you to build filters that show messages from multiple fold…

Tags would be useful, but the UI aesthetics could be better too: now it's too plain and minimalistic. Look at Yandex Mail for example: it's just less boring. I guess you could attract much greater audience by adding theme support and proper marketing in light of this outrage.

That said, I like fastmail very much: keyboard navigation, search and overall speed are great!

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#75

Post by bigiain »

cheese1756 wrote: post #68
mbell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Have you been following this topic at all? Exactly where are these convincing arguments that google is sending all e-mail to the NSA? Links? Data? Do you have anything that supports this at all? There is the telephone stuff that was leaked, which has been well known since 2006 [0]. But, where is this miraculous evidence that google is handing everything over to the NSA? [0] http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washin…

The issue is not what we know, but what we don't. Keep in mind, all we have is what was leaked. We only have a tiny glimpse into the massive amounts of post-9/11 surveillance. We can ascertain that the government is doing extensive amounts of surveillance on large amounts of people, and that the NSA has either refused to tell Congress the scope of the programs or outright lied about it (take a look at this ( http://w…

"The answer is yes, and to assume that there is detailed email surveillance, either at the ISP level, through backdoors, or through direct cooperation is not unreasonable."

I'd suggest _not_ assuming that might be considered negligent.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#76

Post by viveksec »

bigiain wrote: post #70
joe_bleau wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be an artifact of my postfix configuration. Looking over a few logfiles, here are the ciphers I've seen recently (all servers, not just gmail): ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits) AES128-SHA (128/128 bits) AES256-SHA (256/256 bits) DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits) EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (168/168 bits) RC4-SHA (128/128 bits)

Curiously, I'm seeing a bunch of TLSv1:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:256 between one of my machines and google... I wonder why/when the connections end up RC4-SHA instead?

Google serves up static content uses DHE. We've noticed only Google sites using DSA certs with ECDHE. A report on what we found http://trisul.org/blog/dsa-xdrill/post.html

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#77

Post by SmokyBorbon »

ciniglio wrote: post #56
spudlyo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpamAssassin and friends still do a reasonable job for me, and have for years. I delete a handful every day, but like the parent I've had my email address since 1996, and I haven't been too careful about using it. If I had to do it over again today, I'd look at rspamd. Getting people to accept your mail can be a pain in the ass, yes, but it's not impossible. * Get a "clean" statically allocated IP address. * Control…

Do you have any tips on testing for deliverability? I have a hunch that if I try to send something, say to my gmail or one of my close friends' email, that the spam filter will allow it because it's a familiar name/domain, but I would expect that if I email a stranger's gmail, it might get flagged...

You can use http://www.mxtoolbox.com/ to see if your domain or IP have been blacklisted by any ofthr public lists. Also, if you get blacklisted you should receive a bounceback email telling you who blacklisted you and where to go to get yourself removed.m

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#78

Post by viveksec »

bigiain wrote: post #62
joe_bleau wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see encrypted connections to/from gmail all the time. Here's an example from a test I just ran: Trusted TLS connection established to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[173.194.79.27]:25: TLSv1 with cipher RC4-SHA Anonymous TLS connection established from mail-yh0-f48.google.com[209.85.213.48]: TLSv1 with cipher RC4-SHA

Hmmm, no Perfect Forward Secrecy on RC4-SHA... Would it be considered paranoid to read anything into the fact that they offer ECDHE-RC4-SHA for https sessions, but only RC4-SHA for SMTP connections?

> Hmmm, no Perfect Forward Secrecy on RC4-SHA...

Actually dont see how you can have PFS on DHE either if one of the endpoints doesnt co-operate. You can simply dump the master keys and provide those to the decrypting app.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#79

Post by etherael »

bigiain wrote: post #69
etherael wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.

Possibly some too-cynical questions… Do you think ovh is any less beholden to GCHQ than Google et al are to the NSA? Do you think your encrypted partitions and turned-off admin backdoors protect you much against people with physical access to the hardware?

> Do you think ovh is any less beholden to GCHQ than Google et al are to the NSA?

OVH maybe a little more, because at least they're not under the direct auspice of the most megalomaniacal state in the world and will act according to their economic incentives in being a reliable and trustworthy service provider, which in a purely free market would align their interests with my own. However being as they are subject to various hostile state entities that have the ability to exert deleterious effects on that self interest, to the extent that they are forced to, they will cooperate with those entities.

I take action to protect myself from those threats to the greatest extent that I am able in either scenario whilst acknowledging that every theoretical threat model can never be entirely negated, coupled with the fact that at the end of the day, bothering to break through all of my measures and taking that trouble, they would find basically nothing that they were interested in.

I despise the state, sure, I'd like to see it dissolve into something like the system outlined in the machinery of freedom, sure. However in my view, taking any violent measures to expedite this process would both make me as bad as the enemy, and compromise the goal of a better world even if it actually contributed to the downfall of the state.

> Do you think your encrypted partitions and turned-off admin backdoors protect you much against people with physical access to the hardware?

"Much" more than non encrypted partitions and not turned off admin backdoors? Absolutely. Completely and utterly impenetrable to any attack by any means at all? Not likely, I can think of one off the top of my head that would work; freeze the memory, get an image, power off the system and extract the encryption keys from the image to re-mount the partitions. That's 1) not automatic 2) not easy 3) easy to screw up 4) not undetected

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#80

Post by kijin »

brongondwana wrote: post #2

I'm not sure why you can't do those things on FastMail. (disclaimer: I work for FastMail) Sure we have folders rather than tags, which means you can't add multiple of them to the same message. Probably the biggest lack is that you can't manage IMAP flags via the web interface. Otherwise, our search is now very powerful (since about March this year) and allows you to build filters that show messages from multiple fold…

Just another happy FastMail user here. I don't need tags/labels, so you have everything I need.

I have an Enhanced account that is linked to my domain, and an Ad Free account where important mail gets forwarded to. The latter is accessible from my phone, but the former isn't, so if anyone steals my phone they can only see the last few messages I exchanged, and I can just disable an alternative login (similar to revoking an API key) to lock my phone out permanently. I also set up my default personality in the Ad Free account to send all mail through my Enhanced account, so every mail I send from my phone is automatically saved in my Enhanced account and even has the correct DKIM signature.

One question, though, and I'm sure a lot of people are curious about it. You are an Australian subsidiary of a Norwegian company, but your servers are in the US. What happens when an American three-letter agency wants to see the contents of your servers?

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