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Self-Shredding E-Mail
yoink! writes: "I just read an article on CNN.com describing a self-shredding e-mail system. With all the persistent e-mail documents gathered by the Government in the MS Anti-Trust case, and the massive shredding of paper documents by parties in the Enron fiasco, it's no wonder people have been looking for an electronic solution to a material problem solved years ago with some cutting tools, a motor, and a garbage bag." One of the companies highlighted here was called Disappearing, Inc. when it was mentioned a few years ago, but now several others have joined the fray.
How bout not sending anything that could get you in trouble? Common sense should prevail here. But in the wake on Enron, I am sure they will do well.
One thing I did not see in the article, what happens if the person on the other end saves the email as an attachment, or saves it? I doubt it would be able to "shred" that. This is a very niche market item imo. Once again, DON'T SEND IT IF IT COULD GET YOU IN TROUBLE.
Sent from your iPad.
People still will be able to print out messages, or make screenshots of their MUA - ESPECIALLY when they know that the mail is going to self-destruct. So these expensive systems still won't guarantee against a copy surviving (especially if it's something hot that could be used to blackmail somebody, such as the order to shred all records...).
;-)
In short: Why waste money on a system that prevents Email from getting read by Law-enforcement-officers? Why not simply do nothing illegal?
Why not use outlook. It does that whenever it wants on my Unverity (randomly).
I fear however that they might be in for a surprise when the apparently "self shredded" messages pop up at all those likely and unlikely places like backup tapes, swap files, printouts and the like.
It's probably safer to employ a clean and transparent corporate culture, then getting kicked in the but by embarassing messages popping up on ol' backup tapes.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
With a traditional document (esp. in the case of sensitive items) versioning is kept to a minimum, and hence the total destruction of a 'mail chain' would be possible. With digital documents it is too easy for multiple versions to exist - using the email example you could have multiple vendors and multiple sysadmins with mailbox backups, many of which could be unknown to the individuals concerned.
With digital documents there will always be an tension between the desire to be able to fix a system that breaks (using backups) and to digitally shred sensitive items. This will probably mean that there will never be as much certainty with digital shredding as traditional shredding.
have nothing to hide. I don't think shareholders would see an email shredder as good news. Sure, you've reduced "liability," but you could further reduce it by having a higher set of moral codes. If I was a shareholder, I'd probably dump the company if news that the company needed to protect itself from itself.
Its too bad that company execs won't see things that way. I guess the most valuable thing then to have as an investor is the list of Dissapearing, Inc's clients.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
When encrypting a message with PGP you can use the -m option (or sellect the 'secure viewer' if you are using one of the windoze versions) Doing this prevents the recipiant from saving a plain text version on their disks
No, it isn't as good as "shreading" and there are ways to cercumvent this if the recipiant was so incliend, but it is a good substitute providing you trust the recipiant.
If you dont trust the recipiant then WTF are you doing sending them such an e-mail in the first place!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
"Self-expiring" email schemes work essentially the same way: a trusted key authority generates and stores encryption keys for any and all email. Reading an email requires authentication to the key authority, which either returns the key or decrypts the email. After a preset time, the key authority purges the encryption key, after which the email encrypted with that key is theoretically unreadable.
These schemes have several practical problems and weaknesses:
1) These are closed email systems. Composing, sending, receiving and reading all protected email *must* take place within the system. Communication outside the system typically involves a web-based email solution-- you don't actually send the email, you send a URL to a server that hosts the email for the recipient, and a one-time authenticator to access it.
2) There is no protection for email that is removed from the system. Screen captures, saving as text, etc. all remove the email from the "expiry" system, rendering it moot.
3) The key authority is a central point of failure. Reading any protected email requires that the key authority be online and available, and that it's keystore be intact. Any interruption in this services makes *all* email hosted by that service unavailable-- and this is (conceivably) all email in your enterprise.
4) If the key store is ever archived-- a typical response to worries about (3), above-- the archived keys can be used to access old mail that has otherwise "expired," or "shredded." There is nothing in the application of the encryption that prevents an archived key from being used past its valid date, should it be recovered from a backup or recovered forensically the key server's storage.
Just some thoughts.
-- Cerebus
Back in the distant mists of time, when we had cc:mail in house, messages were deleted from the server after 15 days. Since it was not pop3 and all messages were kept right on the server instead of downloaded to your hard drive, it meant that after 15 days it was gone for good. In theory, backups were made. But the person in charge of cc:mail and the backups had . . . issues with the backup, so itwas hit and miss anyway.
If people wanted to keep a message, they did what every one using these e-mail shredders will do: either print it directly or copy and paste it into word and print it from there.
Maybe for personal email. But a corporate email system is the property of the company. Anything you create on corporate time becomes the property of the company. An email you send to your co-worker does not become the "property" of the co-worker. It's still part of the corporate network and is still the property (and responsibility) of the company. Thus they have every right to "shred" the message.
They have every right to tell you not to print it out and save it; but of course that's what people will do if they know the messages will be deleted after a certain time. I print out and save messages to cover my own ass.
Which brings up a point. I print out the stuff with full headers, with message ID and info when it was sent; however, does it really serve a purpose? I remembered thinking that while watching "Clear and Present Danger", when Harrison Ford prints out a memo and shoves it into the other director's face saying something like "here's the proof". What good is my printout if I don't have server logs to back up that the message was actually sent to me? What good is a backup of the server logs if I can't prove it wasn't tampered by myself? I know my boss will believe me if I used it as proof to protect my ass, but would a jury? Am I just wasting trees?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
My very first manager at my first real corporate job drilled into my head that you assume every email you write will be published in the paper... if you aren't comfortable with that then it shouldn't be said in email. It's a rule that's served me well...
--Rob
I wonder how this stuff interacts with spyware that logs keystrokes, viewed screens, email, etc.
Of course, talk about being hoisted by one's own petard:
Company X installs spyware on its machines - "to protect itself"; and the results wind up as evidence in a court trial, including "shredded" emails. Concievably, Company Y could send the email, and have it recovered from X.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is absolutely true. However, these systems are not at all designed to foil the presumed intent of the recipient to copy the content (as DRM systems for copyrighted entertainment content are). They're designed to give a level of automatic prevention against inadvertent copying.
Consider, as an example: I run a business in which sensitive information is bandied about by internal corporate e-mail. In order to keep a whole variety of bad things from happening to that information (subpoenas years later, inadvertent forwarding to somebody who shouldn't see it, proprietary information being leaked by cast-off hardware), I enact an electronic document destruction policy; one year after an internal e-mail is sent, it is destroyed. I mandate use of one of these self-shredding systems to help enforce my policy.
Now I haven't really helped anything from a strict can-it-be-done standpoint: a whistle-blowing employee can still take the aforementioned camcorder and set it up; a sysadmin who's for some reason obsessed with archiving all his mail can probably download a crack for the system in question. These issues are pushed into the realm of policy, but the number of such issues that have to be dealt with strictly by policy means decreases by an order of magnitude. What I have really accomplished is to drastically reduce the probability that something will happen that nobody in the organization intended.
From a security standpoint, this is great, but from a historical perspective, this is an archivist's nightmare. How do you write a biography of a famous figure of the information age without their email to go through? (I know, insert MS trial email joke here.) How many current biographies of presidents, CEOs, entertainers, etc. are based on their mounds of personal correspondence squirreled away in six million shoeboxes in the family archives? With self-destructing email, the possibility of finding such a treasure trove in email form just got even smaller than it already was.
Was that out loud?
describing a self-shredding e-mail system.
Been out for years, described here. You can even get a demo version!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Self-shredding e-mail is cool. But messages that kill themselves if they contain the strings "Get Out of Debt" or "Penis Enlargment" would really kick ass.