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.'"

Comments

Re:Missing from the article

[Albanach]

The Register ran an article on this last week. From their piece:

US federal law enforcement agencies have obtained access to clear text copies of encrypted emails sent through Hushmail as part a of recent drug trafficking investigation.

The access was only granted after a court order was served on Hush Communications, the Canadian firm that offers the service.

Hush Communications said it would only accede to requests made in respect to targeted accounts and via court orders filed through Canadian court.

Not as big a deal as you think

[headhot]

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.

Re:Entirely secure?

[Kadin2048]

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. Huh? The security of "passphrase encryption" depends solely on how hard your password is to guess. Aside from that, it's AES-128, which is perfectly good encryption. If you use a trivially-guessable password, you're sunk. But if you used, say, 19 random ASCII characters, you're at more than 128 bits of randomness. At 50 guesses per second you're still talking about a brute-force time that's 2.15805661 × 10^29 years, based on my quick envelope-back numbers. And if you're at all concerned about the government spying on you, you'd better be using those sorts of passphrases.

(Of course, if you use a single dictionary word or only a handful of ASCII characters, then the brute forcing is trivial, but that's a PEBKAC problem, not a cryptographic one.)