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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...
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
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
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.
Shhhh!... keep your voice down.
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.
...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)
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.
Nice try, but generally trivial to break. For starters, there's the always popular method of steaming envelopes open.
Of course, that's pretty easy to prevent -- for example, people who cared have used wax seals for centuries.
That's still a long ways from secure though. For example, one trick (also known for a long time) uses a thin metal rod, split along its length. You insert the rod under the end of the envelope flap, where there's no seal. You catch the letter where it's folded, with one side of the fold on each side of the split, then twist the rod to roll the letter up, and remove it back out the end. When you're finished reading it, you reverse the process to re-insert the letter into the envelope.
It's no accident that, historically, most countries' code-breaking agencies have been attached to their postal services...
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
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.