Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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...
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.
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.
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.
That used to be funny before we discovered our governments were actually torturing people. Nowadays I don't find it funny.