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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.
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
"Honest men have nothing to hide."
Not only is this statement false; it is dangerous.
If an honest man comes up with a new, beautiful, invention, shouldn't he hide it until the patent forms come out?
If an honest man writes a personal email to an honest woman, thanking her in detail for the honest sex they had last night, would he be suddenly dishonest if he didn't want those details accessible to any snoop a few years later?
If an honest man writes an email to his honest colleague, and makes some honest fun about the way that his honest customer dresses, just the way that colleagues often jest and jape, is it that big a stretch that he wouldn't want that email to surface years later in some lawsuit?
If you are living your life in such a way that you never write or say anything that you would like to keep private, I wouldn't call you "honest," I would probably call you "bland." And I don't believe that being bland is a virtue to which we should aspire.
God is real unless declared integer
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.
You need to look at what this is targeted at. It's not really for hiding anything illegal, most large companies would have used some form of crypto (having used PGP's Outlook plugin, you can't get much easier). But more for everyday things that really appear harmless, that come back and bite you. Best example off the top of my head:
Microsoft subpoenaed Netscape for all those internal message board documents, saying how much better IE was than Netscape. Nothing illegal, but would have been great to be killed automatically, look at how much damage *legal* posts did.
Now, someone actually subpoenaing a couple emails of printed off is probably very little of a concern, when compared to possibly gigs & gigs of emails laying around that can be subpoenaed and gone through, that would not only include the couple of printed emails already, but possibly even more.
I look at it like security, just because the only truely safe system from network hackers is a unplugged system, doesn't mean I shouldn't throw in the towel and not secure the systems that are plugged in.
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
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.
"Honest men have nothing to hide."
The most obvious and American counterexample to that is the voting booth. It has a privacy curtain, and I bet you use it.
Honest people have things to hide from dishonest people. Hiding your vote protects you from being threatened or rewarded for your vote. Hiding your business plans prevents your competitor from beating you to the punch. Hiding your homework prevents other students from cheating. Hiding your phone number prevents some telemarketers from bothering you. Hiding your home address prevents customers from bothering you after business hours. Hiding an embarrassing (but ethical) hobby provides enjoyment of life while protecting from harassment. Hiding your religion protects you from persecution.
As for your comment about not breaking any federal laws, clearly you haven't read the US Code (or the Federal Register, since the Supreme Court ruled that administrative regulations have the force of law) lately. Flush the leftover pills from a prescription down the toilet and and the question is not if you have broken FDA and EPA regulations but how many. ill you be prosecuted for that? Probably not - unless someone decides you have something they need. What's that? One of the customers for your database consultancy is the local mosque? Hmmm...
Before you flame back, please spend a few hours at your local library scanning through a couple weeks' Federal Registers.
To you other points: countersuits are a nice idea, unless you are facing an opponent with 100,000 times your resources. Then you are screwed, because even if you win your $10,000 award will not cover your $500,000 in legal fees. And it is nice to think that the feds only go after "bad guys", but the definition of "bad guy" can change quite rapidly. Just ask Mr. Ashcroft.
sPh