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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.'"
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").
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.
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.
Don't trust someone else to do what you should be doing yourself.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
- Hushmail was served with a court order issued by the British Columbia Supreme Court (the Feds in Bakersfield, CA had to forward their request to the Canadian government)
- Hushmail glosses over the vulnerability to private key capture in their non-Java based web client, but it is mentioned. The Java client never transmits the private key (you still must trust the client, source code is available; compare the hashes)
- No, Hushmail's TOS do not prevent them with complying with a legal court order. Their users also must not break the law, per the TOS.
- Hushmail followed Canadian law perfectly.
So what can we learn from this? First, don't do illegal things (and use Hushmail or anything else). Second, while their non-Java client is convenient for avoiding the bulk of your traffic getting sucked up by programs like Carnivore, use the Java client and not even Hushmail can hand anything over (they never received the private key, even for an instant).If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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!
FireGPG. I haven't used it, but the blurb seems to indicate that that does the trick, at least for gmail.
Hushmail gives you precisely as much security as they possibly can, and no more.
I don't know much about Hushmail, but I looked at their website, and they seem to want about $50 per year for what is basically GPG, and therefore available free. Except that, since java applets are downloaded from the server, there's no way to be sure that what you're actually running is what they claim that you are running, so their system might have all sorts of insecurities and backdoors, even if their source code looks OK. So they might give you as much security as they can, or they might be a bunch of cowboys. How do you tell? I certainly wouldn't trust them with my secrets.
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.
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.