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Hushmail Passing PGP Keys to the US Government
teknopurge writes "Apparently Hushmail has been providing information to law enforcement behind the backs of their clients. Billed as secure email because of their use of PGP, Hushmail has been turning over private keys of users to the authorities on request. 'DEA agents received three CDs which contained decrypted emails for the targets of the investigation that had been decrypted as part of a mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Canada. The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorities, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.'"
the authorise overlords
"How do you possibly get "authorise" from "authorities"?
First suggestion of the spell checker?
But more on topic:
What do you expect when you PRIVATE key is stored somewhere you do not control access to? kind of dumb, if you ask me.
I really hope that they go out of business for this. I mean they extremely deserve it. I know that they probably didn't have much of a choice to hand over the keys, but to continue advertising such security... That's not cricket.
What alternatives are there besides Hushmail?
I guess this is a brief lesson in why one should never fully trust the encryption of your private materials to a third party.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There are several facts missing from the article:
1) Was there a court order? Or Canadian equivalent?
2) Did hushmail lie? The obviously commited willful deception, but did they outright lie?
3) Did hushmail violate it's TOS?
4) Did hushmail do anything illegal?
Of course, what the article did mention is important, especially to hushmail, and potential hushmail users. However, it would have been nice if they had dug a little bit to answer these obvious questions.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Surely this will do for them? How can they base their entire business around providing private email then just hand over CD's full of them whenever the authorities come knocking? Terrible.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
No mater how secure a company claims to be, you can't expect them to not fallow the law.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
This is only possible because users want the convenience of letting the Hushmail servers do the encryption on their behalf. To do this they have to hand over their encryption key, and once it's out of your control, so should be any expectation of privacy.
I'm not sure what users expect. If a legitimate legal request that is clearly going to stand up to any legal challenge comes in and you give the company the ability to decrypt the messages you send, the company has no option but to comply.
If Hushmail users want privacy they need to put up with the inconvenience of using an applet to sign their messages, and should be checking the hash of the Applet each time it is downloaded too so they can ensure it hasn't had a backdoor added. ideally the applet shouldn't send anything over the network, it should just encrypt the text and pass the pgp encrypted text content to the browser compose window. Then the user can check the data doesn't include anything they didn't put there themselves.
kind of defeats the purpose, I'd say.
How do you possibly get "authorise" from "authorities"?
Remove the second t, second i, and reverse the e and the s.
(the summary was C/P'ed from TFA, so this is all I got...)
you'd be expecting hushmail to turn up on fuckedcompany.com soon...
...if the website was not currently fucked.
Really though, come on. A firm that sells privacy as a feature and then gives it away to anybody who asks is about as crooked as your doctor telling your friends about your medical records on request. I had a hunt for the hushmail T&C to try and see if this was mentioned in any legalese but had no joy locating it.... The Internet being notoriously unforgiving on such matters I would not give too hoots for hushmail's future business regardless of whether they claim they had no choice or not
They used to release the full source code to their Java applet that handled encryption/decryption, and provided instructions for building a byte-exact replica of what they distribute.
Theoretically, hushmail can be used in a perfectly secure manner; download the source, check it for back-doors, compile the applet yourself and memorize its hash. Then whenever you use hushmail, just verify that the hash of the downloaded applet is the same as the one you compiled yourself.
Probably hushmail was just feeding a tainted applet to the specific targets of the investigation, otherwise I'm sure some other astute user would have noticed the change in the applet signature. The typical muscle-bound steroid dealer probably doesn't have the time to memorize and compare hashes though...
Is everyone forgetting that this is a relatively small company. How many people believe that if The Suits show up with something that looks official on paper that a company with people who want to look out for their own families and such will say "No, we're not giving you that." If the algorithm is secure, you have to keep your own key. I'm not willing to go to prison for your secret, let me know if you find someone who think truly is.
Considering the article is written for an Australian website, "authorise" is indeed the correct spelling.
Don't trust someone else to do what you should be doing yourself.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
....reminder of the typical "make a claim of one thing and do the opposite --- and profit"
Oh so typical of the computer.....
--
Qrpelcgvat guvf rapelcgrq pbagrag vf n ivbyngvba bs gur Qvtvgny Zvyyraavhz Pbclevtug Npg.
I have used Hushmail for ages, and it is entirely secure. These users did something foolish - they demanded, then got, then used a "more convenient" version of Hushmail that did the encryption on the server instead of on the client.
Standard Hushmail downloads (& caches) an applet on your computer that encrypts & decrypts your private key with your passphrase. Only the encrypted private key is stored on Hushmail servers, and your email encrypted with the public key. They don't give your decrypted email up to authorities, even with a court order. Because, by design, they CAN'T. The unencrypted private key is never on their server.
The new & improved Hushmail works without you having to have Java support or download an applet. It can only work by decrypting the private key server-side, which means Hushmail has (at least briefly) the information to decrypt all your email. Which means that if they get a court order, they must capture that information and provide your decrypted emails or they go to jail.
Of course, with the applet they could give you a new one that sends them the decrypted key - I'm not sure of the legality of them doing so, even with a court order. However, this is not what happened - all they did was provide information they had on their servers, as required by law.
The only way to be sure of your security is to build a device by hand that does all the decryption & display on the device, inspect all of the code you put on it by hand (preferably compiling using a compiler you wrote in machine language). Oh, and only read email on the device in an opaque faraday cage, naked.
Hushmail gives you precisely as much security as they possibly can, and no more.
First suggestion of the spell checker?
Maybe you meant a grammar checker?
They complied with court orders for their SSL webmail product, the more secure variant uses a java applet. Nothing of note here except how stand-up hushmail have been about it.
emails aren't read by the authorise and submissions are edidet by the slashdot janitors.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
do not trust anything electronic for communications anymore...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Hushmail has 2 options, client side encryption which is done via a java plug in, and server side encryption.
They only had the keys to give away for those people who chose server side encryptions. They don't have the private keys for those who cleint side.
Also, when you choose you method, Hushmail tells you that server side is much less secure. They and anybody else operating in the US would have to turn over the private keys they heald with a court order.
Whats the leason? Key your private keys private. Duh.
Here is a link to a wired article about the same issue. However wired actually bothered to contact the Hushmail and got a response from the CTO Brian Smith. Apparently it is not a clearcut as the OP and TFA suggests. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai.html
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I guess some of you actually use it, so maybe it does do some legit service, but from the description of the thing it sounds like a great "honey-pot" to me.
1. Present yourself as a way to keep secrets from people.
2. Sell/Give those secrets to the people directly.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
These comments are misguided.
The crypto is fine. It's just been applied in an obviously flawed manner. Of course if some third party obtains your private key, your should assume that your communications are no longer secure. What part of that is hard to understand?
There way asymmetric crypto is supposed to work, you generate the key pair yourself. Then you give out the public key. You never ever give out the private key.
As an exercise, think about the following scenario. You go to a website which purports to offer some kind of secure service based on asymmetric crypto, using for example PGP keys or X.509 certificates. The site asks you to supply a bunch of identity information. It then generates a key pair for you.
What part of this scenario should you trust? The answer: no part! It's not the function of another party to generate your key pair for you. You must do this yourself. You must closely guard the private key, store it securely, never give it out, and avoid transmitting it in cleartext. Got that? Then your problems are over.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
This only applies if you use their webmail service with server side encryption. They have to have your key in order to encrypt/decrypt server-side, and they have to turn it over to the authorities if they have a valid warrent. It's the law.
If you use their client-side Java applet to do the encryption on your computer - as they strongly recommends that you do - then this is not an issue. Hushmail never see you keys and thus cannot be compelled to hand them over.
Several other sites covered this story earlier in the month all without the crappy sensationalism of slashdot. I first saw it at arstechnica, which linked to an interview with the CEO by wired.
I'm not usually one to hard on individual slashdot editors, but this is the 4th intentionally misleading troll that zonk has posted today. It is crap like this that caused me to not renew my slashdot subscription so many years.
It was on the Cypherpunks list - then picked up at CRYPTOME.
http://cryptome.org/hushmail-rat.htm
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Trust no one.
May I assume that the contract has a clause stipulating that they will give up anything "with a court order"?
What?
No. They should be sued into oblivion for clear breech of contract for starters. This is one of the most disgustingly slimey things I have seen in a while. Those that take privacy seriously, which should be all of us, were lied to by a company that was supposed to help. And don't give me that tired "well I have nothing to hide" bullshit. When the government and other busies make it their business to prohibit and/or punish a great number of activities that really are no one's business it behooves us as purportedly free people to limit access where we can.
I've been getting text message SPAM advertising a site, whose WHOIS records point to a HUSHMAIL account.
Andy
What do you expect when you PRIVATE key is stored somewhere you do not control access to? kind of dumb, if you ask me.
Except, according to hushmail's docs, that's not the case. They may have your private key, but according to the docs, it's AES-encrypted with your passphrase, and never leaves your local machine in any other state. That doesn't seem so dumb.
How did this happen? Fuck knows. It isn't supposed to be possible. Hushmail's system was supposedly designed so that they couldn't do this, even if they wanted to. Perhaps one of them was running with an incredibly weak passphrase and hushmail cracked it on behalf of the feds...? All I can think of.
Passphrase encryption is weak shit, also it's trivially easy for them to launch a man in the middle attack ... having a secure and valid keychain is just as important as having a secure private key.
Much better article... amusingly, the one that had bubbled to the top on digg about 2 weeks ago.
That may all be well and good, but the fact of the matter is that the design of Hushmail is flawed.
You never give your private key away to anyone ever. Period. Giving Hushmail a weakly encrypted private key is fishy to start with, but then entering the passphrase to decrypt it in a Hushmail controlled applet is just stupid.
And it's completely unnecessary because there are very good encryption utilities in existence and it's very trivial to set up a system that is a thousand times more secure than Hushmail. How about Debian + KMail + GnuPG? You don't trust Debian enough, because it's a binary distro and who knows what they secretly put in there? Use Gentoo.
Perhaps the tinfoil hat crowd will say things like "but there might be a backdoor in your hardware", but Hushmail wouldn't save you from that. And let's be honest here: no one really believes that anyway.
You may have thought yourself very witty when writing that penultimate paragraph, but the fact of the matter is that in today's world you can actually be as good as sure.
Lovely.
Well the same system is supposed to make it so that they cannot reset your password. A friend of mine forgot his pass. It took him weeks. Maybe 5 or 6 weeks of constant badgering and they finally reset it. I never used hushmail again........
If you need to email trade secrets, banking information, or any other sensitive information, the way to do this is by learning to use PGP or your encryption standard of choice on your own, and then generate and store your own private keys, and send the emails through any service of your choice, already encrypted.
For added security, send the public key to the other party by postal mail so none of the keys ever see email; only the encrypted content. Furthermore, encrypt the sensitive content between streams of random length from /dev/random, so that anyone trying to crack the encryption will see a bunch of hogwash even if they attempt brute force methods.
How awesome is it that a company's reputation and income has to suffer (potentially unrecoverably) in order to comply with a court order, all in the name of The War on Drugs. Yay America: putting business out of business and restricting citizen's rights to their bodies, all at the same time!
The company, based in Canada, was issued a warrrant by a Canadian court to hand over information. That information, via an agreement between the two countries, was then given to US investigators who made the original request.
Technically speaking what happened was the alleged criminal was using a more "insecure", but also more convenient, version of Hushmail's product. What occurred was that said individual typed their password/phrase into their web browser and sent it to Hushmail. HM was then able to decrypt the individual's messages and had to send them off to the police as it was legally required to.
Hushmail has a version of their product where the encryption and decryption occurs on the individual's machine via Java. The catch is that you have to wait for the applet to download and run, which it seems the alleged crimincal was not willing to do.
The company was clear in their description of their more "convenient" product offereing: if you give us the key, we can decrypt your message. If you don't want us to decrypt your messages then use the 'more secure' version of our product.
--
I'm not related to the company in any way (not even a customer), just like to set things straight as the summary is a bit sensational.
Even security companies have to follow the law and the courts. If you don't like that live in a place where there are neither.
The situation here is not like the (alleged) AT&T-NSA program. Everything was done above-board.
The difference, I would think, would is fairly obvious to most people. GMail and Yahoo don't give you a promise of "unbreakable encryption for your emails" that even the government can't break. There's no question that Google will share your information when properly ask to do so by law enforcement. It's in their Terms of Service. You know what to expect and you use your GMail or Yahoo accordingly.
On the same token, while I am appalled at HushMail's actions, it's for a different reason than most here I suspect. I don't have a problem with HushMail sharing information about customers engaging in illegal behavior with the authorities. Those people don't deserve their activities to be protected - they're illegal. But I DO have a problem with HushMail not disclosing that they're doing it right up front. Now, I've not fully read their ToS so maybe they do but their statements on the website would lead you to believe they aren't.
Really though, why would anyone use a PUBLIC service to conduct illicit activities? Setting up a private mail system complete with encryption is trivial and MUCH more secure.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
This seems to me like an example of a much broader issue, which is the plethora of concerns, including privacy concerns, that surrounds the whole concept of using the browser as a platform for applications. People have been struggling with this forever, ever since Sun and MS first locked horns over Java applets. Over and over, we've seen security holes in IE caused by MS's poor handling of the javascript security model. Over and over, we've seen nonproprietary, multiplatform solutions (javascript, ajax) battling with proprietary ones (flash) and proprietary, single-platform ones (silverlight). In the present situation with hushmail, the problem was that although hushmail had a good, secure design that used a java applet, a lot of people didn't want the hassle of installing a java runtime, so they provided an alternative using JS. But JS isn't fast enough to do encryption, so the encryption had to be done on the server side. Maybe tamarin will help with this kind of thing, but in general, security, privacy, and user control are always going to be serious problems with web applications.
Find free books.
That the NSA and CIA are widely believed to have the best hackers and cryptographers in North America.
The most successful hackers have been social hackers... and will continue to be.
If they can reset the password , it means that the emails themselves are not encrypted using that password . Otherwise , resseting your password would result in loss of all your emails .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Your first round of decrypted messages are worthless meat eating mammal, for the the party of interest encrypted the messages twice-- once before going into Hushmail and again when Hushmail scrambled it before sending.
It is if they mean "authorise" (or "authorize"), but not if they meant "authorities", which is what the AC was getting at.
Correct spelling, wrong word. It should say authorities.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Basically, Hushmail has two main modes of operation. One of them is (reasonably) secure, the other is a trainwreck.
In one mode, the 'secure' one, you -- the user -- access their site and download a Java applet to your browser, which contains the OpenPGP encryption engine. You type your emails, they're encrypted on your machine, and sent to the server that way. Hushmail never, at any point in the operation, knows the password to your private key.
Now, because a lot of people use browsers that don't support Java, as of a few years ago, Hushmail came up with an alternative, which doesn't require it. Instead of using a Java applet, it works like a regular HTML/HTTPS webmail system, and all the encryption is done on the server. This means you don't need to be able to run the Java applet on your client machine.
However, and this is the crucial part, when you use this second mode even once, you expose the passphrase to your private key to Hushmail. And that's how they could decrypt all the messages. Once a person used the insecure service, they had basically sold themselves down the river. Hushmail had their passphrase, and from there could decrypt their private key, and from there get at all their messages. (Or at least their incoming messages; I don't know whether Hushmail encrypts outgoing messages to the sender's private key as well as the recipient's.)
From what I can tell, if you used Hushmail and were careful to always use the Java-based service, you wouldn't necessarily be vulnerable to this sort of attack. Since Hushmail wouldn't have your passphrase, the most they could do would be to hand over your encrypted messages and encrypted keys to the Feds, who would then have to try to brute-force your private key. (Meaning, everything would rest on how good a passphrase you used...)
Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I know it is more of a PITA, but there is a good reason why open source crypto like PGP exists. Encrypt it yourself, that way only you and the person YOU share the key with will be able to read it. Thats my 2c,anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You can't take the sky from me...
Would you trust a secure webmail company that uses Outlook? This certainly looks like a printout from Outlook to me. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/files/hush_klp.pdf
The difference is, google and yahoo do it without cause. Your mail is advertisers' wetdream, orgasmic even. You think googlemail exists because . . . right, because it gives advertisers primo targets.
I sent someone who shall not be named a hushmail and I hope they stand by their conviction and deny all attempts to get details. It's personal and has not in any way been criminal or civily prosecutable in nature. (#18826893) and BTW all charges are being dropped - according to my ex :P BITCH!
Or they could just encrypt your password at runtime with their own secret key and send it to themselves along with the emails.
Is to only ever decrypt a message on the receiving client.
When I log into the server and give it my user name then it should pass my client back my encrypted private key and a message encrypted with my public key. Authentication is when I give the plain text message back to the server encrypted in it's public key. This proves I am who I say I am without giving the server the ability to decrypt any messages.
The server should only know enough to route a message between the appropriate clients. Even the subject of a message should be encrypted.
Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from ... there's no reason (other than it being more difficult) that Hushmail couldn't be forced to "poison" their Java applet, or backdoor its encryption engine. Unless you're going to examine the code yourself each time, you have no way of really trusting it. But that's a lot more technically difficult than just grabbing the password from the server-side decryption engine, which appears to be what they did.
The applet is signed. They could make themselves invulnerable to this attack by wiping the key they signed it with. This would mean if they ever have to introduce a new applet, it would have a different certificate associated, and users' browsers would prompt them again whether they wanted to trust the applet. Knowledgeable users would then know not to trust the new applet until they'd confirmed that it was trustworthy (e.g. by decompiling it and comparing to the publicly available source code for the official applet).
Hushmail is still very secure if you use their Java applet to generate your keys, that way key is on your system not Hushmail's server. If you do it through the page they store your keys on their server making it possible for them to be subpoenaed for it. There is a warning on the page about this, but I guess it needs to be in huge bold letters in order for people to actually read it.
It is impractical for just about any of us to audit the claimed security of any provider, public or private. You can't be sure that they really provide the safeguards they claim. Unless you're an encryption genius, you can't even examine open source code to verify that it is secure and doesn't have weaknesses.
I don't personally know the principle employees of Hushmail or of any other security service providers, nor do I personally know Phil Zimmerman or any other authors of the encryption software. For all I know, these companies and individuals could all be fronts for the NSA.
I also fail to see how other posters to this topic can claim that the technology is rock solid? How do they know? How do I know if they too are fronts for NSA?
So what am I left with. Nothing but trust. If I trust the provider, then their technology is irrelevant. If I don't trust them, then their technology is irrelevant. In this instance, Hushmail has proved that they are unworthy of trust.
If you use a company that promises to hide your messages from the government, you can be sure that that's the first place the government looks!
'Those people don't deserve their activities to be protected - they're illegal.'
They deserve to have their activities protected unless those activities are wrong and it really isn't for Hushmail to say whether or not they are wrong. Illegal really has nothing to do with it. Many things were illegal in Nazi Germany or are illegal in China, or Russia, or the United States, or that doesn't mean they are wrong or immoral. Many laws are innately immoral.
Unfortunately many people forget that even a democratic government is an entity in itself with interests that differ from yours and from the actual citizenry. Even if the books weren't filled with preposterous laws that would make criminals of good decent and ethical individuals total law enforcement would be a bad thing.
.....Oh, and only read email on the device in an opaque faraday cage, with a tinfoil hat.
The problem with that reasoning is that the authorities don't necessarily know that you're up to no good before they read your email. That's the entire reason they are reading your email, they want to find evidence of illegal activities. That in and of itself should tell you something: innocent people will have their emails read because they look suspicious. We only find out about the times when they find something because those are the only people they charge and bring into court.
HushMail IS private. It is a private entity providing an encrypted email solution by contract. This is not the U.S. Post Office (which, by the way, has much more protective privacy laws for some reason). I suspect you mean, "Why would anyone share confidential information that relates to illicit activities with a third party?" I think the answer is exactly what you pointed out: HushMail bills itself as a provider of private email. As such, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in the communications. That should bring it within 4th Amendment protection (although I doubt any court will hold so).
I just can't imagine sticking my PGP key and passphrase anywhere near my web browser. Sure, I use NoScript and all that jazz, but browsers are some of the most insecure programs in existence. Encryption keys are supposed to be kept as secure as possible; it strikes me as insane to let them touch the swiss-cheesiest app on the machine.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Mark my words, there's going to be an effort to make any personal encryption illegal. I know all the arguments about why this "can't happen" and why we'll all be able to get around any law regarding personal use of encryption, but that's not going to stop the government from trying to outlaw it. And it's going to happen under the guise of "fighting terrorism". Further, it doesn't really matter if Mrs Clinton or Rudy Ghouliani become president. Either one will try to outlaw personal use of encryption. I'm not one of those people who believe there's no difference between the two political parties, and I don't believe any of the other Democratic candidates would go this way, but my sense is that Mrs Clinton is as enamored with secretive authoritarianism as any Republican corporatist.
Now, to be fair, Hushmail was probably pushed pretty hard by the NSA or FBI or DOJ to give up the PGP keys. They're trying to make a go of their little business and some alphabet outfit comes and basically lays it out that they can either play ball and let go of the keys or cease to exist. They couldn't even go to court to fight it because the government just has to say that "national security" is at stake and the case is thrown out. That's how bad it's already become.
But still, any provider of online communication services who does this must be given the consumer death penalty. It may be unfair to boycott a company that is otherwise good when they come up against this type of government bullying, but if we don't make a stand, every single company we rely on is going to fold to the government. We have to let any company that is going to handle our information that giving up our stuff without a warrant means they lose their customers. We're going to have to be every bit as ruthless as the corporate power establishment that is masquerading as our government.
If any of you have Lexis/Nexis, just take a quick look at the unbelievable acceleration of the destruction of our constitutional freedoms that has happened in the last 7 years. Although there's always been a push/pull in this kind of thing (after the Nixon years, the pendulum swung the other way for a while, with many laws protecting our freedoms shored up by congress), there's never been an administration that has been so outright hostile to our Constitution, and never has there been a court system so willing to acquiesce to the "Unitary Executive". If you look at the current makeup of the Supreme Court for example, we have a majority of activist, anti-freedom, reckless justices from the Chief on down. It's chilling. If Bush gets one more appointment, it's game over for at least three generations. Even without one more appointment, the Court has never been this hostile to personal freedom and willing to lie, twist and simply ignore our Constitution.
It's time that we take privacy and our freedoms into consideration with every decision we make, especially the economic ones. My wife and kid and I have already decided to make every effort to subvert the consumerist agenda that is being forced down our throats. Instead of borrowing to spend, we save. Instead of investing in the corporations that are our adversaries, we invest in family and neighbors. No carrying balances on our credit cards. No home equity loans to take vacations or buy HDTVs. Interestingly, our standard of living has improved. And when a company is hostile to our interests, we don't do business with them, and we encourage all our friends to stop doing business with them too. We're rooting for a horrible xmas buying season. When we heard that consumer confidence fell dramatically, we cheered because it means people are waking up. Once we realize that corporations use the same FUD to keep us buying and borrowing that the government uses to get us to give up our freedoms and privacy, we learned that there are worse things than a downturn in the economy - especially since the current economic model is feeding on midd
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't forget that you have to verify your public key out-of-band with anyone who you want to communicate with, and vice versa. If not, you can quite easily be man-in-the-middle'd.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Trusting that Hushmail isn't doing wacky things with information you send them is a far, far cry from trusting that there are no backdoors built into PGP. You have only Hushmail's word to go with in the former case, but PGP and GPG have both been extensively audited and reviewed; you (or more accurately, someone with the time and inclination to do so) can look at the code from top to bottom, which isn't the case with a web-based service like Hushmail that you're trusting with your goodies.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In principle I agree with you, but I think there is the same problem with focussing on immorality as there is on illegality. Standards of morality differ, and what's worse is that when something is 'immoral' people get much angrier than when something is illegal.
Prostitution, for example, varies widely in whether it is considered illegal or immoral. I would be appalled if supposedly secure communications could be seized because they contained evidence of consensual sex for money.
The only position I find tenable is that secure communication must be considered a right of free people. Yes, that means that the murderers, child molesters and terrorists will have it too, but the alternative is that nobody has secure communication.
Certainly there are technological solutions, such as proper use of encryption. But because of cases like this I would like to legal and social support for the right, such as laws making communications that were 'reasonably believed to be secure' inadmissable as evidence. I would also love to hear a group like the NRA saying that the right to secure communication is as essential as the right to bear arms. It certainly is in my mind.
.evom ton seod gis eht
then don't go crying when the give it to you in the end, for they will. Companies are only interest in their bottom line, and if it means shafting their customers, they will (Think RIAA). If I was transmitting an e-mail with any sort of encryption, I certainly wouldn't use a company to do it. I'd use PGP (of some sort) and standard e-mail. I'd also go the extra step of wrapping the e-mail and past it into an e-mail. Convenence to some means all or nothing. - Kc
-- Kevin C. Redden kcredden@ gmail 392992
The first mistake was probably to have the servers on US territory. If your servers are on US territory there's no way in hell your emails are secure from the government.
The second mistake was not fighting the court order. What, just roll over? That easy? Goddamn.
I'm no expert but I'm sure there are ways to distribute the data around the world in such a way that, if served with a court order in any one place, the data you're forced to provide is useless.
Also, witness the fact that Google challenged those court orders to provide log data. Ultimately, the log data was not useful to law enforcement because they didn't connect search terms to IPs. Google had gone out of its way to make sure this information was not available, the only way they had available was to simply not record this information. Hushmail could have done something similar, simply refuse to offer an app which would have private keys stored on their servers.
Come to think of it, it's very odd.
Check out this user testimonial from their site:
It's like they're trying to attract terrorists! GEE, I wonder...
They're not actually claiming that one thing you think. They have two products you see, one secure, and one lame and convenient. This is unsurprisingly about the lame one.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Calm down. No need to be appalled. If you look into it, you will see that the account owners intentionally disabled the "troublesome" secure interface (enabled by default), which hushmail discourages. They also inform you of exactly what that means when you do it. This article is FUD designed to scare people away from using a really good free service.
It's all because of this (now) irrational dislike of Java. Guys, it's not bad any more.
Get your own free personal location tracker
So what can we learn from this? First, don't do illegal things (and use Hushmail or anything else).
This smarmy advice sounds great until you start talking about dissidents in totalitarian countries trying to get the word out about what happens there.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Just one minor mistake, if they hand the encrypted mails to the feds, it doesn't matter how good your passphrase is, since it's only used to encrypt your private key (which they don't have anyway). So it would only depend on the size of the key you selected when you generated, which is pretty secure even for small keysizes (I think PGP's lowest keysize is 1024 but I only use 4096 anyway, it's not like modern processors can't handle the 256 bits it encrypts with it).
So yeah, if what you say is true, you'd be almost invulnerable if you had only used the java applet (assuming it didn't send your private key to Hushmail anyway). Why go to all this trouble though? Just get Thunderbird with Enigmail and you're set, without any third parties to fear.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
You're mushing two things together which are massively different in scale, if not in nature. Total paranoia is utterly useless; there are different levels of likelihood for a security breach depending on what you do. If you transmit data in plaintext, it's possible that nobody will be paying attention. If you use GPG, it's possible someone is TEMPESTing you to get around that. We use different methods to achieve different degrees of security. Lumping everything you didn't make from scratch yourself into "it's about trust" is silliness.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think it's pretty damning for Hushmail if the insecure option is the default.
It's one thing if they offer the server-side, non-Java implementation as an option for people who just can't use the secure one, but it's quite another to offer a supposedly "secure" service and then make the insecure version the default.
I was ready to write most of this off as sloppiness by people who should have known better, but if Hushmail makes the non-Java version the default for new accounts, and makes you go into "Advanced" settings in order to enable Java and get real security, they're really not delivering what they're advertising.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you want something that is easy to use and doesn't store any messages on the service, the Voltage Security Network (http://vsn.voltage.com/) is a good alternative. It's based on IBE (Identity Based Encryption).
PGP, GPG, etc. barely works for us geeks, but if you want to be able to send secure encrypted email ad-hoc to anyone (i.e. dad, grandma, your accountant), without the recipient needing to install anything or get a password from you, Identity Based Encryption is the way to go.
Detailed here back in October.
https://www.w4ck1ng.com/board/showthread.php/secure-hushmail-6246.html?p=26237#post26237
Additionally here's the DEA's case
http://static.bakersfield.com/smedia/2007/09/25/15/steroids.source.prod_affiliate.25.pdf
'Standards of morality differ, and what's worse is that when something is 'immoral' people get much angrier than when something is illegal.'
True enough, that is why I don't believe in legislating morality. Not all things that are illegal are immoral and the laws should reflect what is needed for a stable and functioning society not what is needed to punish immorality. I believe that juries as originally empowered (with the duty to determine if the application of the law in a case is just, not merely whether the defendant violated it)are the best method available for discarding cases where applying the law is also immoral.
'But because of cases like this I would like to legal and social support for the right, such as laws making communications that were 'reasonably believed to be secure' inadmissable as evidence. I would also love to hear a group like the NRA saying that the right to secure communication is as essential as the right to bear arms. It certainly is in my mind.'
Agreed, and for many of the same reasons. That is one of the flaws in our corrupt two party system (how did they con people into believing a couple dozen independents is 'one party' and that only giving them two choices was somehow more?) one party supports free speech but would leave citizenry unarmed and at the mercy of the police state and the other claims they should be armed (for hunting) but supports every other aspect of the police state.
It would be a shame if their CEO happened to "disappear"...
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I differ with you on this. The value of privacy is in the security it provides you -- the "right to be secure in [your] persons, houses, papers, and effects." It's, in many ways, a right to exclude, like property. The very violation of that right to exclude is a form of trespass without the need for someone to abuse that violation further.
The other problem here is that you will most likely never know what someone has done with information gleaned from your personal papers and effects unless they do something public with it. That doesn't mean that they haven't done something harmful to you. The lack of security over one's own secrets means that one may be restrained from doing something that isn't wrong but is illegal and from doing things which aren't even illegal but are disapproved. That's an unconscionable restraint on liberty.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No mater how secure a company claims to be, you can't expect them to not fallow the law.
I'll assume you meant "follow." This is true. However, we have absolutely no evidence that HushMail attempted to FIGHT this order. This should have made a big stink about it and tried to come up with ways to protect their users both technically and legally, but instead they just rolled over and tried to keep it quiet to avoid letting it hurt their bottom line.
They lied to their customers by pretending to offer them a security that was as ephemeral as their own spine.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Your emails are encrypted using your private key, not a "password". The password (or passphrase) is used to unlock the private key. It's perfectly possible to change the passphrase required for your private key without damaging your ability to read or send your emails. It's still the same key, it just needs a different pattern of bits to be able to use it.
Of course, they shouldn't have the ability to reset your key's passphrase. Maybe it took them 5 weeks because they had to brute force it? :)
They're suspected of doing something illegal, which is a highly significant difference. Any innocent person (including you and me) can be suspected of doing something illegal just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I agreee with the rest of your post, I just felt the need to draw attention to that point.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
At all.
If you want privacy "dont use any American companies services". The reality is any information services provider based inside the USA has to hand over records to the US Government even without a warrant at any time. Thus any private details are as secure as if you kept the same records within any other authoritarian state (China, Burma, Vietnam etc). I would not even be surprised if Hush mail has a black box router hooked into their service cloning all the data and routing it to the NSA in the name of "National Insecurity".
I encourage anyone who cares about privacy (and many other issues) to look into voting for Ron Paul.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/privacy-and-personal-liberty/
No, of course he isn't perfect but atleast he is different.
It's really sad to see this drivel modded up as 'informative'. The only thing I see in this posting is
a clear demonstration of the poster's lack of knowledge.
Shame on those who modded this up!!
The fact of the matter is that relying on a third party to provide security for your communications
is at best naive and at worst stupid. There are simple ways to use computers for secure communication
and some of them do involve PGP. However, just using strong cryptography leaves a communications fingerprint
which is likely to draw attention from all the people and organisations that the encryption was supposed
to short-cut in the first place.
In short, anyone who was using hushmail for anything really important should be preparing for the knock
on the door...
The following is inexact, but illustrative. FireGPG just calls GPG. You click encrypt, it sends the text to be encrypted to GPG, you enter your passprhase in GPG, and GPG encrypts it and returns it to FireGPG, which puts it into the e-mail in place of the plaintext. Enigmail for Thunderbird works the same way.
Not a sentence!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A25871141
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I heard about this a few days ago, when I was in the process of trying to figure out the easiest way to encrypt my mail using Apple's Mail.app on Leopard. Most everyone writing online recommended using S/MIME instead of GPG, and getting a no-cost certificate from the South African company Thawte to use for signing as well as encrypting email.
The question I could not answer is how trustworthy is this Thawte-issued "certificate"? One blogger claimed that the key was actually generated in my own browser, and then only the public key transmitted to Thawte to store, thereby theoretically keeping my private key private. But this is certainly not how it appeared. I submitted a "request" for a certificate and then 5 minutes later it was emailed to me from Thawte as an attachment, which was picked up by Keychain and that was that. As far as I could tell, they generated my key for me.
Is encrypting my email this way vulnerable to the same flaws as the Hushmail service? I really don't trust Thawte to keep whatever information they might have about me away from the Feds, if they ever came knocking. Hell, I don't even know if Thawte IS the Feds! If this certificate-issuing system is indeed flawed, can anyone recommend a better process to use strong encryption with Leopard's Mail?
And that's why Ron Paul gets my vote.
In China rule by a fascist (i.e. capitalist/national socialist dictatorship) one-party clique, the use of encryption by "citizens" is strictly forbidden. Some people do use GPG, but at a risk of being detained at the regime's whim. Most ethnic Chinese consider themselves "historically conditioned" to complying with their regime's rules and restrictions, as long as they themselves and their empire grow richer. However the Chinese regime is also holding several non-Chinese peoples (in Tibet, Mongolia and East Turkestan) under brutal and even genocidal occupation since the communist dictator Mao ordered his communist army to invade their territories immediately after seizing power in China in 1949 (after the USA had defeated the Japanese who had occupied parts of China, Manchuria and Mongolia until 1945).
In order to wipe these non-Chinese nations off the map in eternity, Mao's regime embarked on systematic "Final Solution" plan which involved ripping off these nations' natural resources for exploitation by the ethnic Chinese "master race" and building up a massively militarized Chinese-controlled police state.
In Tibet over a million Tibetans have perished after their country was turned into a one huge gulag, with hundreds of thousands suffering from torture and rape before dying. The Chinese-built road, rail and air transport infrastructure aimed at relieving Tibet from its great natural resources is also used for settling massive numbers of Han-Chinese migrants in the Tibetan territories, leaving Tibetans increasingly in a minority in their own country! Meanwhile Tibetan culture, language, religion and history (all completely non-Chinese) are being systematically wiped out in order to permanently stamp Tibetans as an inferior and backward "Chinese" untermenschen (sub-humans) without proper identity.
Now, according to the "law" written by the occupying Chinese "communist party" clique, it is illegal to discuss any matters which might somewhow give legitimacy to Tibetans' calls for actual self-rule. But since the Tibetans' 2000-year-long independent history, language and its sanskrit-based script (distantly related to Hindi), old Buddhist religion originally from India and their unique fusion of south and central Asian culture and identity are all inherently non-Chinese, practically any talk of native Tibetan affairs can be ruled to be "splittism", with punishment familiar to the victims of Stalin and Hitler.
A few months ago, on August 1, a Tibetan man named Ronggyal Adrak walked on the stage during a massively policed Tibetan "cultural event" in the Tibetan province of Kham and called for the Dalai Lama (equivalent to Pope to Catholics) to be allowed to return to Tibet from exile.
Details of his imprisonment and the secret Communist Party "court" ruling only leaked out because his case was an unusually
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
"Not supposed to be possible" by even Hushmail by design is not "true" - you may be thinking ZeroKnowledgeSystems's network of old, which closed shop shortly after September 2001.
Like the others I would suggest looking at Ron Paul. I think he is very compatible with your beliefs.
There's always #RonPaul on freenode if you have any doubts.
http://www.expertvoter.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG2Ra_eI680&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6t_H69yOKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3xovHYYOrg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHS_y94H1Dk&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG2Ra_eI680&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Kuf9a4SQ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UuivYdiS5w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg - Google interviewing RP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmKwlE3fO-Y - Google summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8pLpI5rzKI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efrt2h1AH_A&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP5ON9jjoLc&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyUcrBQIiJI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJKGfAWQUo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK-_x2l9aM8&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev4AEyac10o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2KU02lsfH8 O'reilly, Malmedy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zex8uW_9pqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=styYIG-fiEc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJrtUpptYGE&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kll9-nR4uVs - Land of the Free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rh6KIRflYg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdx9803IEgE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emPzgtywYNU&feature=related Ron Paul's Fight For Freedom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWmWlhBtA-w&NR=1 - Summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAwvlDJgJbM - Ron Paul Schools Ben Bernanke Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJUXIb27AOI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ3T5REZ11Q&NR=1 Ron Paul Mops the Floor with CNN Anchor (05/20/07)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmc60JmaLbE "The Constitution is just a piece of paper" - G.W. Bush (CIA)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzLidmu_UpY&feature=related - Ron Paul Debates Federal Reserve
Never put in an email something you don't want your mother or the police reading ... :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
im not sure if anyone here knows Jose Saramago, he is a Portuguese Nobel Prize, and he wrote a very nice book, called "Ensaio sobre a Consciência", in English maybe its something like "Essay on conscience" and he created a fiction history about a country, where, 80% of the population voted in blank. the government said something was wrong, there was someone or something trying to manipulate the citizens, so, they had another voting, and this time 85% of the population voted in blank. The government panicked, there where tanks in the street, no one could talk in big groups, etc. basically , the country was under a dictatorial fist. Well, i wonder if something like that happen, what would happen? I guess ppl arent smart enough and they keep voting...
sorry for eventual bad english, not my mother language
You seem to be implying that most laws are immoral or that we seem to be living in Nazi Germany or something.
The US/Canadian governments gains little by decrypting emails of their citizens, mostly due to our political systems. The same can't be said about decrypting the email of people who most of us would agree are doing "bad things". Think organized crime, terrorists, etc.
First and foremost you need to declare outright what your position is: are you saying that most laws are immoral? are you saying that our government is reasonably comparable to Nazi Germany? Our point of contention seems to have little to do with encryption.
From their home page, if you go to "How secure is Hushmail", they make it quite clear that they will protect you from various warrantless searches by virtue of the encryption. In the Limits section, they also make it uite clear that IF they receive a valid court order, they can and will turn your communications over to law enforcement.
Just to be more clear, they point out that hushmail is not an appropriate choice if you intend to break the law.
Really, did anyone expect them to strike the colors and relocate to international waters, becoming fugitives in the process, to protect a customer from a valid court order?
If you need a higher level of security than that (for example, if you believe your government mighy bully the Canadian courts into issuing a court order for a non-criminal activity) then you MUST keep the secret key and the software that uses it on your own machine under your exclusive control. There are no excptions.
And you just take their word on that do you? Hrm... great job. You'll never have any real security no matter what you do if you're that dim...
There is actually a much easier, more secure way than you mention.
Rather than using special mailers, setting up servers, etc..., you could do the following:
Granted, you have to do copy and paste for every send and receive, but there are a lot fewer potential compromises in this scenario than the one you mention. Even if you are using Putty, you still run the risk that someone has a keylogger installed on the public computer - having SSL or SSH functionality won't do you any good in those circumstances.
So what, really, does this buy you:
The difficulty in encryption nowadays is that you either go with something secure and less convenient, or you go with convenience over security. With encryption, though, if you don't get it right the first time, you might not get a second chance.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I'm not necessarily saying that you're wrong, but that's not how I understand the 'secure' Hushmail mode works.
My understanding is that even if you use the Java client, Hushmail retains a copy of your private key on their server, encrypted using AES-128 with your passphrase of choice.
Were this not the case, you would need to carry around your private key (using a USB stick or some other media) in order to have it available for decryption when you used Hushmail. While secure, this would defeat much of the convenience of using Hushmail in the first place. (Why not just carry around your keys and GPG, or heck, a whole bootable Linux distro, on the stick instead?)
So what Hushmail does is keep everything on their server except your passphrase. That way, you can fire up any computer you want, and the only thing you need to have available is that passphrase, which you can memorize (or store in some other convenient fashion). They send you the Java applet and your AES-encrypted private key, you enter the passphrase, and the key gets decrypted and can be used by the client-side applet to read and sign messages. At the end of your session, the applet throws everything away.
In the insecure, non-Java mode (which may be the default?!), all the encryption is done on the server, which requires that you send the server your passphrase (via a SSL connection) so that it can decrypt the key and perform the decryption or signing. Thus, in this mode, Hushmail has everything: both the encrypted key and its passphrase. That means they can get the decrypted key, and that means they can sell you out to the Feds or anyone else they so desire.
While there might be some way to keep your private key and not even turn the encrypted version of it over to Hushmail, I'm not sure what advantages that mode of operation would have over just using your email provider of choice, and carrying around your own GPG binaries (perhaps with an entire OS, limiting your avenues of attack to hardware- and TEMPEST-based ones). Once you have to have something with you that's too big to memorize, you might as well just keep everything with you and trust no one.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Okay, sure, you didn't give out your public key. But say you want to correspond, securely, with me, and say also, that the Feds are tapping the phone.
Here's how it plays out: I go get my own public/private key pair. I email you my public key, but in the process, the Feds intercept the email, and alter it so that it's their public key, not mine. The reverse key exchange goes the same way. Then, when you send a message to me, they decrypt it, read it, and encrypt it with their public key. Then they forward the mail to me. Because I've accepted your public key (which is really the Fed's key), I think it is legitimately from you. And I trust you. Problem is, the Feds can now read all of our emails, even though we think they're securely encrypted.
What's the solution? Oh, you could publish your public key, but how would I know that the html I'm receiving is really from your website, and not altered by a proxy? Or you could call me and recite your public key, but then we may as well be using private key encryption anyway.
Security is not as straightforward as merely following the directions.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
One point of clarification: By default, they don't store your key. The point is that because they could store your key, the feds can demand that they do so next time you use the webmail version.
If they really wanted to be clever, they could wipe the key after breaking it into 100 factors, any 20 of which would be enough to re-construct the key, then distribute that to 100 independent 3rd parties. That way, if they want to update the code, they could sign it only after scores of outsiders have reviewed it. It should be hard to sneak a back-door past that. If the government wants the code-signing key, they have to serve subpoenas to a large number of outsiders for the key factors without someone blabbing the fact and blowing the investigation's cover.
Encryption keys are supposed to be kept as secure as possible; it strikes me as insane to let them touch the swiss-cheesiest app on the machine.
Yeah, but when you've got insecure apps on a machine what else can be secure? If your web browser is sufficiently insecure, what's to stop a buffer overflow from giving someone access to a file that you haven't specifically opened?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/pgp-creator-def.html
Actually no: then you are on to the next problem, the one after that, etc. You are certainly right about guarding your private keys, but there is more to data security than that. Obviously if you store your messages on a box that has a rootkit or is a zombie, or is otherwise hacked, you have no security. Supposedly the FBI has done this. If you read the messages on an unshielded CRT monitor, that's a security hole, since the images on the monitor can be picked up remotely. Then there are the new "sneak-and-peek" searches. And on and on. Those who really are into drug trafficking face a truly difficult security problem, because the FBI has quite a bit of resources to spend on getting into their business.
As you correctly noted, the crypto that is freely available these days is plenty strong enough provided you use it properly. I think it was Bruce Schneier who used the image of crypto being like the lock on the door, whereas security is the whole house: not only the lock on the door must be sound, but the whole building (door, hinges, walls, foundation). Crypto doesn't solve all your problems: it solves one of your many problems.
$META_SIG_JOKE