81–90 of 157 posts
http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/cse/2008/3193/00/31...
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…
The only way I can think that webmail could be secured is through changing HTTP and HTML standards to allow the web browser to arbitrarily encrypt forms and decrypt elements with keys unknown to the web server plus disable JS inspection of form elements and elements set as encrypted.
I can't imagine the difficulty in getting it through the standards process let alone implementing it securely though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silly question: If you can trust DNS, and require every client to connect to an SMTP server with TLS/SSL, and only permit SMTP server->SMTP server connections over SSL, how does that not fix the problem? End to end encryption and MITM countermeasures should solve the issue, no? Then all the NSA knows is which mail server is talking to which mail server. I admit, I could be very wrong. Please tell me why.
Well (E)SMTP works effectively by connecting, then knocking on the door and asking for a list of capabilities (EHLO). When the remote SMTP server says "no I don't support TLS", what are you supposed to do? Email only works at the moment because in this scenario, usually the sending MTA just says "what the hell" and delivers it over the wire in plain text anyway. The moment you force TLS as a requirement, the internet…
> Any fucker can buy an SSL certificate and
> masquerade as someone else.
How might I simply buy an SSL certificate and masquerade as https://www.google.com?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly, I want to applaud mailpile for their efforts. Next, I'd like to respond to you with what our product is aiming to solve (because that is what I know best). > All innovation in the secure email space has been blocked for the past 13 years by one primary problem: webmail. We are working on solving this very problem. We do this via js crypto. The main problem with js crypto is modification of the crypto with th…
How trust worthy is the js crypto? For a long time people believed hushmail to be safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_p... Regardless of how safe it is, the problem is still social engineering hacks, key loggers etc (you'll always have this issue) - just wondering to what lengths a government will go...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't mailbox rotation enables attacking it by comparing users in different mailboxes - the users who stayed over some time in shared mailboxes , probably want to communicate with each other ? And few hundreds is a pretty small group if you want anonymity. And according to the presentation in the link you gave(very interesting work on the subject of anonymity) - if messages are posted correctly, using the right tools…
I would imagine that any shared mailboxes should be capped to force mailbox rotation at the exact same time. Once a mailbox hits a predetermined limit, all the peers refuse to accept additional messages. Basically the exodus of users from a mailbox should happen all at the same time. Those users then randomly choose any of the other new mailboxen out there being formed. You would never be with the same cohort from on…
Regarding multiple keys: Using multiple emails/nym accounts gives you that.
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…
Sure, if the authorities targeted you specifically, they could probably pry the unencrypted keys from the server's memory (although with considerable effort it it was a dedicated or collocated machine) but widespread adoption of that model would completely stop dragnets. Only narrowly tailored investigations would be feasible, no mass surveillance.
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.
The usual argument against JS crypto is that a compromised (either technically or legally) host could send a malicious version of the code to steal your keys/data. A browser extension could in theory be used to verify the code against a signature or something to that effect, or it could sandbox the crypto routines and keys from the app itself (though that wouldn't prevent the app from stealing the decrypted data)
And it'll "just work", so ordinary people have a chance to use and trust it too.
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…
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…
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…
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…
Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the future? And I hope their PGP implementation is really user-friendly. This sounds like more of the same of what we've had so far, perhaps with the ability to become a little more mainstream, but I don't see any breakthroughs in terms of encryption here, like say the…
Why even bother with S/MIME? How long until the government corrupts the certificate for it if Mailpipe becomes as important to them as Lavabit was, in the future? The way I see it, Mailpile won't be issuing certificates for people to use, they merely enable you to use your existing certificate infrastructure. I have a machine with a certificate authority that issues S/MIME certs for us to use internally for sensitive…
If you're right - what does Mailpile solve ?