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Advocating for privacy in Australia

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Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#91

Post by bad_user »

Boulth wrote: post #69
bad_user wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo ProtoMail is snake oil: When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway. To workaround it, for sending to email addresses without a ProtonMail account, AFAIK they also give the possibility to send a link to a ProtonMail interface for decryption. And a…

> When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway. Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. (ProtonMail is one of the biggest contributors to Openpgpjs). > To workaround it, for sending to email addresses wit…

>> Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted.

That cannot be for unencrypted emails, which is how most communications over email are going to be, because:

1. Most people or businesses are not on ProtonMail

2. Usage of PGP is nice, but very few people have published PGP keys

3. Opening a link to view a message is a big problem; personally I ignore such emails, can’t remember the last time that happened

It also doesn’t work for unencrypted emails being sent to you, which are a majority.

If I were to guess 99%+ of emails sent or received by ProtonMail customers are seen by ProtonMail’s servers in unencrypted form.

And this is why ProtonMail is snake oil.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#92

Post by dane-pgp »

bad_user wrote: post #91
Boulth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway. Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. (ProtonMail is one of the biggest contributors to Openpgpjs). > To workaround it, for sending to email addresses wit…

>> Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. That cannot be for unencrypted emails, which is how most communications over email are going to be, because: 1. Most people or businesses are not on ProtonMail 2. Usage of PGP is nice, but very few people have published PGP keys 3. Opening a link to view a message is a big problem; personally I ignore such emails, can’t remembe…

You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users? If it didn't allow receiving such emails, it wouldn't be an email service, so it sounds like "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition.

Perhaps, rather than focusing on "most communications over email" (which don't involve ProtonMail's users whatsoever), it's more fair to ask whether ProtonMail enables encrypted communications with non-ProtonMail email users, and what threat models it is reasonably secure against.

You're right, though, that there are trade-offs to be made when it comes to using web-delivered JavaScript (although these problems need to be solved at the web platform layer [0], not unilaterally by a single service provider), and ProtonMail do not exactly advertise their security limitations (and nor do any other webmail providers).

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed...

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#93

Post by bad_user »

dannyw wrote: post #72
brongondwana wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - that's pretty much exactly it. If someone needs end-to-end encryption, it's only safe from intermediate third parties if they aren't trusting software which is updated by those third parties. So we use effective methods to protect the privacy of our users while performing our civic duty of assisting law enforcement when bad actors use or abuse our platform, and we never pretend to use the bulk of our custome…

It's weird that you take this stance. It almost feels like you're implying that ProtonMail is a bad actor, and end to end encryption is bad because 'civic duty'. That's like "but terrorism". I understand that you're not a privacy-first company, but still, your communications haven't been reassuring me. There is extensive documentation (e.g. Yahoo FISA) that ALL content not end-to-end-encrypted is ingested for bulk su…

Most email being transmitted on the Internet is in unencrypted form.

Most people are not on ProtonMail and do not have a PGP key published.

If I were to guess, I’d say that 99%+ emails sent or received by ProtonMail customers are seen by ProtonMail’s servers in unencrypted form.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#94

Post by grincho »

dannyw wrote: post #72
brongondwana wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - that's pretty much exactly it. If someone needs end-to-end encryption, it's only safe from intermediate third parties if they aren't trusting software which is updated by those third parties. So we use effective methods to protect the privacy of our users while performing our civic duty of assisting law enforcement when bad actors use or abuse our platform, and we never pretend to use the bulk of our custome…

It's weird that you take this stance. It almost feels like you're implying that ProtonMail is a bad actor, and end to end encryption is bad because 'civic duty'. That's like "but terrorism". I understand that you're not a privacy-first company, but still, your communications haven't been reassuring me. There is extensive documentation (e.g. Yahoo FISA) that ALL content not end-to-end-encrypted is ingested for bulk su…

iMessages are encrypted, but it's Apple who hands the client one or more public keys with which to encrypt them—and that's each time; there is no key pinning. They could easily hand you a public key whose private key they or another malicious party knows. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 and especially page 58 of the linked https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#95

Post by jorvi »

cyphar wrote: post #77
brongondwana wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands. Of course the "people are planning to leave us because of the hamhanded way you introduced this legislation" is a major part of all our feedback to legislators. The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now (seriously, we have a minority government which h…

> The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands. Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US. > The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now…

> Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US.

Not for European users. Microsoft is fighting this same fight in the US (albeit with surer footing since the European data is stored by Microsoft Ireland). Basically, another country can compel a company to provide EU users their data as much as they want, if the data is stored in the EU and the request is not legal under EU law this data may not be shared and the company will be in extremely deep legal shit if they do.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#96

Post by randaouser »

mLuby wrote: post #17
randaouser wrote: post #14

Im hoping to resolve this using a "searchable encryption" scheme leveraging homomorphic encryption and elliptic curve based el-gamal. This would allow law enforcement to search for key words on encrypted data sets. This prevents leakage for both parties. THe use case for emails is a tad clunky as the bag of words would require precomputing, however, it is privacy preserving for both parties. If you feel this is somet…

1. Once a user identifies messages containing the search term, what are they supposed to do then? The message should still be un-decryptable to them. 2. Can't a user search all common words against a message and then rearrange those found to roughly match the message length. There are only so many ways the words "noon begins the tomorrow revolution at" can be arranged and make sense.

1) Can you clarify which users? The government issuing the search query is unable to decrypt the messages. If they flag it, they can order a warrant against the individual to decrypt the message.

2) A random salt is used so only exact keywords will match (I have a fuzzy matching implementation using jaccard similarity and minhashing but that is an extension). To answer your question technically yes, but what you describe would require many interactions with the data source as the content producer must apply the encrypted queries against their encrypted data.

Again, I am trying to provide a solution that is beyond just giving someone the ability to read your private messages without your consent. No doubt it will require work from sidechannel attacks so appreciate any feedback

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#97

Post by chimeracoder »

InGodsName wrote: post #50
Jedi72 wrote: post #7

Good writeup. Since I can already see not everyone here actually read the article, here are some highlights. > Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption. ... While FastMail is not directly affected, we don’t support this legisl…

I wonder why no one has ever made PGP user-friendly. Some might argue whatsapp or signal or Telegram E2E is exactly that. I talk about the email.

> Some might argue whatsapp or signal or Telegram E2E is exactly that. I talk about the email.

These three are not equivalent.

Signal is the gold standard for secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging. The client is open-source, and (at least on Android) builds are reproducible. It's possible to audit the code and confirm that Signal isn't intercepting the messages via side-channel and sending them to Signal's servers, encrypted with a different key. It also notifies you whenever a users's public key has changed (ie, when they switch to a different phone), which protects against someone hijacking your phone number using the telecom system.

WhatsApp does encrypt messages with per-user keys, but it's not end-to-end in the sense that Facebook still manages the keys and could provide you with a compromised key. Facebook also produces the only client, which means that it could easily eavesdrop messages and send them to Facebook's servers via a side-channel. Until recently, WhatsApp also didn't notify you when a user's key had changed. This wasn't a "backdoor" as the Guardian sensationally reported it, but it is a security liability for users looking for secure end-to-end encryption.

Telegram is completely insecure. For starters, group messages on Telegram are sent... in plain text. No encryption whatsoever.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#98

Post by bad_user »

dane-pgp wrote: post #92
bad_user wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. That cannot be for unencrypted emails, which is how most communications over email are going to be, because: 1. Most people or businesses are not on ProtonMail 2. Usage of PGP is nice, but very few people have published PGP keys 3. Opening a link to view a message is a big problem; personally I ignore such emails, can’t remembe…

You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users? If it didn't allow receiving such emails, it wouldn't be an email service, so it sounds like "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition. Perhaps, rather than focusing on "most communications over email" (which don't involve ProtonMail's users whatsoever), it's more fair…

>> You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users?

Don't downplay the problem. An overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users get is in fact unencrypted. Not only that, but an overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users send is unencrypted as well.

It might get encrypted after the fact, but that email passes through their servers, which means ProtonMail can be coerced into doing blanket surveillance if the law allows it and any claims that ProtonMail protects you from that are bullshit.

>> "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition.

It's not my definition, that's just what you get with email.

E2E encrypted email can only work if it's optional (e.g. PGP, when both parties agree on the keys), which is for secrecy, not privacy, because a majority of email sent or received will be unencrypted, because that's just how email was designed, that's how it works.

I don't have a problem btw with ProtonMail's implementation per se. Certainly it has value in certain contexts ... like if all of your work colleagues or all of your family is on ProtonMail, then you can have some peace of mind, but then again for a controlled, small group you can just go with PGP directly, which would be more trustworthy actually.

The problem is that many of the claims being made are bullshit. No, ProtonMail is not 100% e2e encrypted, in common use their servers will see most of your emails sent and received unencrypted and it will not protect your privacy.

So that's why it is snake oil.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#99

Post by Leace »

bad_user wrote: post #98
dane-pgp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users? If it didn't allow receiving such emails, it wouldn't be an email service, so it sounds like "encrypted email service" is something that you have made impossible by definition. Perhaps, rather than focusing on "most communications over email" (which don't involve ProtonMail's users whatsoever), it's more fair…

>> You're accusing ProtonMail of being snake oil because people can send unencrypted emails to ProtonMail users? Don't downplay the problem. An overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users get is in fact unencrypted. Not only that, but an overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users send is unencrypted as well. It might get encrypted after the fact, but that email passes through their servers, which m…

> An overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users get is in fact unencrypted. Not only that, but an overwhelming majority of email that ProtonMail users send is unencrypted as well.

Could you cite your sources? I'm wondering what are the exact percentages.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#100

Post by cyphar »

jorvi wrote: post #95
cyphar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands. Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US. > The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now…

> Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US. Not for European users. Microsoft is fighting this same fight in the US (albeit with surer footing since the European data is stored by Microsoft Ireland). Basically, another country can compel a company to provi…

There are restrictions in the Assistance and Access Act which mean that a defence against the civil penalty for non-compliance is that it would violate the law of a foreign country if the act would be done in a foreign country (see s317ZB(5)).

But my point was that these protections don't extend to Australian data -- the location of the data is irrelevant to jurisdiction if you're talking about Australian data being stored by an Australian company.

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