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Is Hushmail Still Safe?
Ringo Kamens writes to ask if the use of Hushmail can still be considered a secure method of communication:
"For a long time, Hushmail was considered a very secure email provider until an affidavit (PDF) from a DEA agent in 2007 showed that they had handed over 12 CDs of possibly decrypted data to law enforcement. Now, Cryptome has posted that the Hushmail encryption program is no longer the same program for which Hushmail releases their source. Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?"
The answer depends on how naughty you are.
For the kind of low-level crimes I like to commit, Hushmail is safe as milk.
If you like to blow up American stuff, it's not so safe anymore.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
you're probably better off encrypting your emails yourself instead of allowing a third party to convince you that they have encrypted it.
...one can't trust encryptinon if it is done off site. Point.
If you want your communication secure encrypt it on your computer which you trust. This is the only way to keep it secure...
of course it is.
its just that simple.
unless you can review (and understand) what's going on, line by line, you can't REALLY trust it.
what is at stake, here? the gov's are at an all-time power-grabbing frenzy for violating your personal privacy. corporate, too, for that matter.
it was once said that no one would be allowed to sell or market encryption tech that 'the big guys' would not be able to break; meaning our government. I once worked at a picture phone company (mid 80's) that was starting to go down the 'encrypt your video phone call' path (using old switched56 tech) and we were told we could NOT do our own encryption unless it was 'breakable' by, well, certain agencies.
believe what you want, but no commercial (or even freeware) encryption that is avaiable to YOU AND I will be worth anything other than 'for show'.
I fully believe that. you would do well to mistrust your government, too, given how greedy they have become on the rights-grab thing.
locks only keep honest people out. there is NO WAY to keep the gov out, anymore. and that means that others, too, have backdoors (you think the gov is the only entity that can 'get to' this kind of stuff?)
anyone who trusts encryption for their life, in this day and age, is deluded.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Depending on how you define secure then no, Hushmail is not.
Personally if I want to send encrypted mail I will do so on a PC I have direct control over, I will carry out the encryption before the email goes anywhere. And depending on the type of encryption used, I might even carry out the encryption on a terminal which has no network connections etc and after encrypting the mail will shutdown the PC and leave it shutdown for a while - this setup would have no swap partition etc, or if it did it would be a minimum of baseline encrypted.
As for Hushmail - its secure if you trust them to use suitable encryption algorithm, key material, psuedo random number generator, secure processes (not the program kind, the how to do the job kind), secure network, no shady or otherwise agreements with third parties (inc. governments) to provide decrypted data, not to store your orginal plain-text mail for any longer than the time it takes to encrypt it, securely erase the plain-text version etc etc etc. Probably enough holes to drive a bus through...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
It appears that this was reported back in 2007 on The Register.
There is indeed a clause in the clarified terms of service mentioned by the above article that states that your data is not safe from law enforcement authorities with a court order from Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada:
We are committed to the privacy of our users, and will absolutely not release user data without a court order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, which is the jurisdiction where our servers are located. In addition, we require that any such court order refer specifically by email address to any account for which data is required. However, if we do receive such a court order, we are required to do everything in our power to comply with the law. Hushmail will not accept a court order issued by any authority or investigative agency other than the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada. Other authorities must apply to the Canadian government through an appropriate Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty and request that a court order be issued by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada.
We'll make great pets
if your communications are such that you think they require encryption. It's really that simple. As soon as those packets leave your premises you can simply assume that whatever is in them even if it is encrypted to the hilt is public knowledge.
rely on face to face contact if you want your communications to be secure.
MP3 Search Engine
What the hell is Hushmail??
One way to help mitigate this risk is to decentralize aggregated services. If there were five hundred different equivalents to Hushmail, one of them going down would be less of a threat, and many of them going down would be impossible to keep quiet.
The main problem I can come up with is market differentiation; Mom & Pops work in meatspace because physical proximity matters. With the Internet, when a product (like encrypted email) is difficult to differentiate, it is hard for more than a handful of competitors to gain traction.
A solution to that is to make end-user tools easier to use and more common. For example, everyone could use a GPG plugin for their email client without the risk associated with one of the handful of major providers being breached.
Which leads, I think, to the conclusion that one very good thing one could do to support free speech would be to promote GPG and personal asymmetric keys. You might do this by helping develop the tools, or even just by using GPG to sign your own emails, and adding a .sig that explains what you're doing.
Just thinking out loud...
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Any developer that has worked closely with jar (zip) files should have immediately notice a possible issue with this announcement. If you use the jar tool to create a jar archive with its default options, it embeds a new MANIFEST.MF file which has a new creation time; therefore, you will get a different jar checksum even if you are archiving the same exact contents. It would have been simply possible that the Hushmail build process created a new jar file (with identical files) for each type of software distribution that they use. The only way we can be sure is to compare the file list and checksum for each file inside of the jar archives.
I haven't done this verification, but neither has the cryptome author, so I suspect this is a non-story.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...when you encrypt via the web interface.
The only secure way is to download the encryptor (source code available) and encrypt before it leaves your machine.
Or you could do what the terrorists do and encrypt a file with one of the bazillion encryption utilities and openly send it as an attachment via hotmail. Duh!
No sig today...
If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad. Even then you've got to worry about Van Eck Phreaking or FPGA eavesdropping.
In general it's a bad idea to be confident in your encryption - if the Germans hadn't been so confident in Engima they might have done much better militarily.
Any provider like this can ultimately be compelled to cooperate with security services and you've therefore got to assume they are working with major governments to compromise your communications. Common sense really.
That said, something like Mixmaster is a good place to start. Makes it very difficult to be located by any legal process although (of course) it won't help if the NSA takes an interest.
Hushmail? Compromised almost as soon as it was set up I'd wager.
"Ringo Kamens writes to ask if the use of Hushmail can still be considered a secure method of communication"
.. :)
No, it's most probably controlled by one of the brancges of the security services
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?"
Depends on the laws you intend to break.
God know everythign, he is everywhere and sees everything... so he knows what kind of data you encripted, he knows what program you used and what the key to unlock is.... so the next time you go see a priest, you better not mention it, he might had a little talk with God about it.
Hushmail was never safe, not from a cryptographic perspective. Hushmail kept a copy of your private key, AND the passphrase for that key would be sent to their servers. The drug investigation demonstrates why that is unsafe, but anyone with a basic understanding of cryptography knew that it was a possibility long ahead of time.
It is a matter of convenience trumping security.
Palm trees and 8
Now, Cryptome has posted that the Hushmail encryption program is no longer the same program for which Hushmail releases their source. Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?
I think the submitter answered his own question.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I just write nonsense anyway.
1 Your high-school girlfriend cheated on you
2 The Government can't be trusted
3 Peer review of published encryption standards is worthless
Fascinating. Are you asserting "1 AND 2 ERGO 3" or "1 ERGO 2 ERGO 3"?
...is that nobody talks about Hushmail.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
No person or entity can remain true to two or more masters. As long as there is an "agent" involved who must answer to some other authority, the punishment of not cooperating the "other" master will be weight against protecting you.
The best bet is to encrypt locally with your own self-certified keys, only give the public keys on a need-to-know basis.
If you can add an obscure encryption scheme on top of that, so much the better. If underneath all that you can use an obscure document encoding and character format, or even unused language like Navaho, you're good to go.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's just a matter of time. This almost always happens faster than the designer imagined it would take.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Is every story posted on Slashdot now inaccurate or completely false?
Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:
"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"
It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)
Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf
And more:
http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifehacker.com/software/home-server/geek-to-live--set-up-a-personal-home-ssh-server-205090.php
The guy who posted on Cryptome checksummed the wrong file. He should have compared the website file (HushEncryptionEngine.jar) against applets/HushEncryptionEngine.jar not HushEncryptionEngine_3-0-0-30.jar.
...the rubber-hose technique of cryptanalysis. (in which a rubber hose is applied forcefully and frequently to the soles of the feet until the key to the cryptosystem is discovered, a process that can take a surprisingly short time and is quite computationally inexpensive)
I use snail mail. It's safer because it's sealed. Snail mail FTW.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Every bit of information that travels across the internet is recorded and logged somewhere, whether it be with the ISP, in a data-warehouse like those that AT&T maintains, or even administrations like the NSA themselves.
So long as the means of encryption (including the public keys) have been transferred over the internet, you are susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack.
The only way to have truly secure and encrypted communications is if all keys involved, including public keys, were swapped privately (without the internet, such as with a disk).
Encryption does well to protect you from identity theft, some hacking, and minor illegalities such as piracy, but if you really need it to protect yourself from the State, it is worse than worthless against an ISP or government (because not only can they decrypt it, but they know that something is up) unless all keys were traded privately, person to person.
>If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad.
The NSA permits AES for the government's own data.
Google "Venona": a one time pad only protects you if you do everything else right. That's a general lesson: assuming you stick with something semi-respectable, operational doctrine and procedures matter more than your algorithm.
Was either Thomas Jefferson or Lazarus Long. Both of them were well worth listening to.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You make it sound like not just anyone can be (of those who haven't already been) declared a terrah-ist. It doesn't take much - and as with so many things these days, they don't even need a warrant to get you into "the club". All they need is for you to have a laptop and you're fair game. If you have a laptop and they haven't picked you at the airport, don't get high and mighty - remember there's literally nothing to stop them from doing it when you're 100% legal or not. Habeus Corpus and all that jazz we learned in High School is more or less out the window at this stage.
Have you seen the watch list or heard of some rules surrounding this or something?
-Matt
Hushmail only stores your private key in encrypted form, encrypted with your passphrase. It gets decrypted only on your machine, by the Java applet. Yes, this does mean your security depends entirely on the strength of your passphrase. Use http://www.diceware.com./
As for hashes being easy to crack, please. A dictionary attack isn't a crack of a hash, and reversing a hash algorithm is still beyond the state of the published art. Making collisions, yes, but recovering original text, no.
Why are we posting so many rhetorical questions to Slashdot lately?
Anytime your private encryption key is "over there" you are at risk. If your private key is stored on *their* servers in such a manner that *they* can get to it, your privacy is at risk.
As a software developer, I'm in a pilot program to use encryption for digital signatures. Despite the relative simplicity of using openSSL functionality, it's been surprisingly painstaking and laborious to put everything together.
See, real security requires outright paranoia. How do you prevent your CA key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all-but guarantee that it hasn't been? To do this, you have to make it not only unlikely, but impossible to be compromised in every conceivable way. How do you prevent your client's private key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all but guarantee it? How do you prevent a malicious client from obtaining a signed certificate? How do you prevent 3rd parties from MITM attacks? How do you provide high-level security for all the above, while still providing redundancy for disaster recovery? How do you prevent compromises stemming from a social engineering attack?
Not including implementation and ongoing maintenance of these procedures, the cost of just proving that you have all these measures in place runs to many thousands of dollars!
A solution that answers all these and every conceivable related question is surprisingly difficult, and many, if not most, of the problems are not technical, but social.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I wrote a little article on it here http://handbookrevolutionary.com/2008/08/03/is-hushmail-still-safe
Also, the Cryptome post has been updated. Apparently the Java checksums do match (or at least do now, who knows if they changed it when caught).
"Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?"
When was Hushmail ever safe?
When was ANY kind of encryption "safe"?
All you need is a high level of persistence given a level of encryption.
I guess you could call something safe if the time required to "crack" a encryption scheme is greater than a human lifetime.
Have you seen what's under the black boxes in this pdf: http://static.bakersfield.com/smedia/2007/09/25/15/steroids.source.prod_affiliate.25.pdf
My acrobat reader version (for linux) displays the letter, and then it applies black box overlays, so for a short moment I can see what's behind them. E.g.
page 9 (of pdf doc - not the letter itself). ... is subscribed to Tyler S, STUMBO, DOB: ** 09-14-19xx **....
the same applies to other black boxes (SSNs and so on).
it NEVER WAS. What were you thinking?
I bet they show you advertisements for Hushmail.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
Privacy is more than encryption. Who is more likely to store and hand over your IP information to anybody trying to track down the owner of an e-mail address? If they find you then they can force you to decrypt it for them - unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a cell, that is.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What about encrypting the message twice with two different algorithms for better security? The question here is that brute-force decrypting a message with a computer requires some way of knowing when it's decrypted. Normally one would assume that means that you actually get reasonable message text out of it. But if the correct decryption still only gives you random appearing garbage how can you even know when stage 1 is complete and you know which cipher text to start working on as stage 2? This approach would appear to multiply the problem by the number of possible keys in stage 1, yet isn't known to be widely used.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Only the Paranoid Survive. They've been working on this for fifty years- while the rest of the world was fighting gooks and commies, these men have been secretly negotiating a planned Armageddon.
This will unmask the black boxes.
pdf2ps steroids.source.prod_affiliate.25.pdf
perl -pne 's/^\d+ \d+ \d{3,10} \d+ rf$//' lt steroids.source.prod_affiliate.25.ps gt original.ps
Replace lt with less than sign and replace gt with greater than sign. Just feeding the file into the perl and outputting the result.
As of just over a week ago, Gmail has a built-in option for forcing HTTPS. See the official blog entry regarding it.
To enable this, you can do this:
Seriously if it's a commercial company based in the US, forget about security. They can easily be pressured to do everything the government wants.
If you want security you have to do it yourself. Install Gnu Privacy Guard and encrypt all your e-mails. Then use TOR hidden services to set up your own e-mail servers to be sure your traffic information will stay private.
Since Mozilla plugins have a braindead interface for calling other programs (no way to directly work with file descriptors) it's impossible to securely pass the passphrase into the gpg executable without either sticking the passphrase on the command line (which shows up in process lists, etc.) or writing it to disk and redirecting the file to standard input when running gpg. FireGPG opts for the temporary file method. Look at ./content/cgpgaccess.js for details.
The upshot is that it's stupid to use FireGPG on any untrusted computer, or any computer where you might at some point lose control of the disk, since it probably has both the encrypted private key and the passphrase on it somewhere. The temporary passphrase files aren't even wiped before they're deleted, at least as of revision 454.