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PGP Universal - Usable Email Security?
An anonymous reader writes "For years, noted cypherpunks such as Brad Templeton, Ian Goldberg (PDF link), Bram
Cohen, and Len
Sassaman (PDF link) have been calling for easy to use email encryption solutions
which involve little crypto comprehension on the part of the user. Now, it seems like someone has listened: PGP
Corporation has announced its PGP Universal, which says it 'shifts the burden of securing email
messages and attachments from the desktop to the network in a way that is
automatic and entirely transparent to users'." The Register has more information on these newly announced proxy servers.
Did you read the article? It says: "Transmissions between a client machine and PGP can themselves be encrypted using SSL."
So transport between client and proxy can (and should) be secured. Of course you'll need appropriate authentication mechanisms at the client end to make sure the client is trusted, but as long as you trust SSL the actual data transmission itself shouldn't present a problem.
This looks like it doesn't accomplish significantly more than the existing SMTP option STARTTLS.
It does. The classic problem with STARTTLS is that it isn't end-to-end encryption - there is no guarantee that your mail server will use STARTTLS for the next hop, or that the recipient will use (SIMAP, POP+STARTTLS, whatever) to download it from their mail server.
With this solution, the first hop is encrypted with SSL (just like STARTTLS) and after that the message itself is encrypted/signed, and any MTA hops beyond that don't need to be encrypted if the message is.
There is a Client Key Mode that doesn't store the Private key on the PGP server. In this mode the admin can't view your key. Read through all the FAQ's.
Pine/GnuPG ask me for a passphrase each time I encrypt and/or sign a message.
Actually, you're only prompted for a passphrase when signing an e-mail/file, not when you encrypt. If you're getting prompted for both, then you're most likely doing a sign/encrypt rather than just an encrypt.
Encrypting uses the public portion of the recipients key, which isn't passphrase protected.
Sounds a lot like what Zixmail (zixcorp.com) and several other companies provide. It would be nice to see some kind of standard emerge that most ISPs offer as a free service -- StartTLS/SSL to an SMTP server, which then looks at a special header or whatnot and contacts a global database of IDs/Keys (e.g.: like DNS for domain names). Problem is that it requires a lot of people to all make up their mind a certain way and it's going to take some time.
Many of the standards of today (DNS/SMTP/etc.) came about while the Internet was a comparatively homogenous collection of universities, government and military sites mostly in English-speaking countries, with little or no commercial interest.
Nowadays I'm less confident in the RFC process -- clearly it is still there and still works, but as the Internet has grown, so has the time for a convergence on new and important standards. Case in point: IPv6 -- it's been around for years, but few sites have actually made the leap.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Doesn't Anubis do this already? Why would anybody implement something like this, when a free alternative exists.
http://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/
Not to mention it has many more features than this, and no NSA Backdoors =)
-miah
Got this e-mail this morning...
Dear PGP Customer:
We are pleased to announce the shipment of PGP(r)Universal.
Thank you for purchasing products from PGP Corporation. Over the last year, we have met with customers around the world to help us design a new generation of security products. Our goal was to take trusted PGP technology and deploy it in a way that would allow customers to finally secure all their electronic assets.
The result is PGP Universal, a new architecture and product family deploying proven PGP technology at the network level, making email security both automatic and requiring no user intervention. By combining a
self-managing security architecture with the proxying of standard email protocols, PGP Uiversal enables customers to achieve measurable email security.
In customer meetings it became clear PGP Uiversal must meet the needs of five groups:
- Executives that want to comply with rgulations and minimize risk
- Business units that must communicate privately and securely with customers and partners
- Security groups that must enforce and measure email security
- IT organizations that don't want to change their processes or integrate new technologies
- Users who just want to do their jobs
PGP Universal was built with these needs in mind. It offers:
- Automatic key generation and life cycle management
- Central and uniform security policy control
- Policy enforcement on both inbound and outbound email messages
- Automatic and transparent operation to users
- Automatic and transparent operation to the network
- Easy and incremental deployment
- Practical and cost-effective to secure everything?
- Full compatibility with existing PGP Desktop products
PGP Universal is available immediately for purchase or customer evaluation. An FAQ and white paper with detailed information are available at www.pgp.com/universal.
Information is also available at www.pgp.com, from your PGP sales representative, or a PGP Certified Solution Provider.
Thank you for your interest in PGP products.
Sincerely,
Andrew Krcik
Vice President, Marketing and Products
PGP Corporation
No, the security here is by running SSL between the client and the PGP Universal server. RTFA
"i don't have any of that. it's too confusing".
"I don't have any of that. We broke it ten years ago and have our own in-house algos. But if I told you that, I'd have to kill you."
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
why my opinion matters: i have actually used this software as an end user. i have no affiliation with pgp corp. i just got a beta download and a manual, and sorted it out on my own.
let me try to describe how it works. i'm no expert, but i think that might be a good thing in this context.
say you and i are on the same mail server, using the pgpu proxy. i send you a mail. the server says "hey, me@domain.com has no keypair". "me" has authenticated to the smtp server to send the mail, so we're going to trust "me" and generate a key pair. another will be generated for "you". when "you" check mail, it trusts you based on the imap authentication, and decrypts the mail. ultimately, the "passphrase" on the keys is the imap/smtp authentication.
this gets you encryption that took 0 effort on the users' parts, no effort on the part of the administrators beyond the initial server setup.
the user can't forget to encrypt.
you are no less secure than before, as you are still trusting based on imap/smtp authentication. but now the messages are stored encrypted on your normal mail server.
should your server get rooted, the messages aren't readable.
or if an it person with root on the mail server decides to poke at the ceo's mail, it won't be as easy (especially if that person isn't an admin on the pgpu machine).
since this is just a proxy, it can be dropped in seamlessly with a simple dns change, so you don't need to change your clients. assuming they are all using SSL already, you're done. if they aren't on ssl, there is a windows client that can be installed via active directory that will secure the desktop -> server connection. or you can just tick the "use ssl" box in any decent mailer. since it is a standard protocol, the client app doesn't matter, leaving you free to use mac/windows/linux/whatever. in my testing, the clients were macs running apple's mail.app.
it took me about 20 minutes to get it set up and working in the lab for internal mail encryption/signing. that includes installing the software.
the installer is an appliance type thing: boot off the cd, install, reboot, you're done.
regarding the keys all in one basket, there is a backup facility built in to the software to make sure you have your keys in the event of a failure.
i haven't done anything with sending mail to external users (outside of your company), so i can't say anything for/against it).
all in all, i think it's a pretty neat product. i actually don't know a thing about the pricing, but it brings value for a low admin overhead.