Slashdot Mirror
Do Slashdotters Encrypt Their Email?
An anonymous reader writes "Many years ago when I first heard of PGP, I found an add-on that made it fairly simple to use PGP to encrypt my email. Despite the fact that these days most people know that email is a highly insecure means of communication, very few people that I know ever use any form of email encryption despite the fact that it is pretty easy to use. This isn't quite what I would have expected when I first set it up. So, my question to fellow Slashdotters is 'Do you encrypt your email? If not, 'Why not?' and 'Why has email encryption using PGP or something similar not become more commonplace?' The use of cryptography used to be a hot topic once upon a time."
Nor does anyone else. Unfortunate, but true.
Mostly emails I received are senseless..
I don't. I use GMail. I might as well use "1234" as a password.
No.
We email to people who wouldn't know PGP from ABC
Nothing I send over email is that sensitive (does someone really care who is in charge of Christmas night snacks?)
Nobody cares what you say in your e-mail communication. And lawyers can subpoena anything they want, unless you delete it first.
Nobody does. Mail with stupid backgrounds and embedded photos abound, but even a signed pgp message never comes across my way
...but I might attach encrypted file(s) if I really wanna keep something super-secret!.
Because no one else does either.
I do from time to time, still only few of my friends have PGP keys, so it's kinda hard.
If GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail...etc, made it a standard feature then people would use it. But as it is today, nobody knows about it.
Does anyone here encipher their paper mail?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why bother?
Just like all of my posts here, my e-mails have no worth and no one in their right mind would want to read them in the first place.
I do where possible, but sadly most smartphone email clients and web based email (gmail etc) cannot read S/MIME messages without a browser plugin.
and unless you are emailing Richard Stallman with exchanged PGP keys, there are countless systems that look at your emails between here and there. Expecting privacy just doesn't register.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Slashdotters who know enough to have encrypted such things simply don't send that sort of thing in email.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
I've been using PGP for a few years, and on the odd occasion, I'll send an encrypted email to myself. Part of the problem is that no one knows how to use PHP. I've been sending email to thousands of people in an academic setting, and I've only encountered one other person using PGP.
The reason I keep using PGP, however, is because of digital signing: there's a good guarantee that signed messages were actually sent by me. Headers are fairly trivial to spoof. With PGP, a 'hacker' can only impersonate me if they have access to the private key, which requires physical or ssh access, and he or she must be able to decrypt that key.
That said, I wish more people would encrypt their messages. This should be a no-brainer in a lot of fields, including human rights and for health and human services, and I think the barrier to commit to email encryption is still too great.
the place I worked this summer had it set up (it was an option at my level, maybe it was more mandatory/more necessary elsewhere in the organization
so I used it on some work email.
other than that, no.
not that paranoid, didn't want to set it up, recipients aren't set up to deal with it (even at the office, some recipients had trouble, especially when readign email on their blackberries)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
IF the setup, key exchange etc would me easy as 1-2-3 or ie as Skype does in background... Then everybody would use it.
Currently it's just too hard to use for average user.
What's the point. Orig PGP removed, reposted with offending features changed...accordingly. Ahem
Encryption is easy
Getting the people in your address book to encrypt their email is another story. They think that their internet provider's terms of service and privacy policies mean their email is private. This does not take into account other service providers, pipes, and countries along the way that have other ideas about unencrypted streams of text.
Instant messaging over ssl or other end-to-end encryption (like skype) is more secure, as a result.
--
BMO
Sometimes for work, but never for anything personal. Besides - who uses e-mail for anything anymore?
Ultimately decisions about email encryption come down to what threats you think you might be protecting yourself against. I have a PGP key, and on occasion I use it to sign and decrypt emails when I think it matters. The rest of the time I send mail, over SSL, through my own mail server, which will use SMTP's 'startTLS' command whenever possible. Most people I know read their mail either using SSH on the machine that runs the mail server or over some SSL-protected IMAP or webmail interface. Thus, for most cases, the mail is encrypted in transit but never encrypted on the servers. If the threat is one of people eavesdropping then this keeps me safe; if the threat is one of hackers targeting one of the mail servers then it doesn't. Most of my mail doesn't warrant any more effort to achieve any more security.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Because there is very little reason to actually encrypt most emails.
The only situation that I can think of that would require encryption is if I wanted to send someone sensitive material, and we both had the infrastructure to handle it. Most cases this won't be an ongoing requirement so it is cheaper and easier to pay for a courier and/or a lock-box.
What would be more useful is not encryption, but digital signatures for authentication and integrity. At work I am required to sign all emails with a two factor authentication method and I know 90% of my emails originate from work.
No one else I deal with has the proper certificate. I cannot encrypt any emails to others without the certificate. And good luck getting someone else to set up OpenPGP and exchanging keys that way.
Another problem with doing that is that you have to make your public key available, which means that anyone, anywhere can access your email address. No more security by obscurity for all of the mail addresses. Why make them guess common addresses or munge them when they can just look?
PGP is actually quite a pain.
S/MIME is way easier to use if you have a dedicated email client.
And indeed I have use S/MIME from time to time at work when I need to communicate anything sensitive.
Unfortunately, when communicating with family and friends, S/MIME is not an option because they use Webmail (yahoo & gmail);
you cannot really encrypt anything there.
(without painful separate step of decrypting it outside the browser)
But this is the best you can get for free.
igor
Encryption can only deal with the body of text. But who you are talking to cannot be encrypted, and that is almost as valuable as the contents.
F-Costs a lot and To: dont know how to read.
U-Got no time to mess with that which no one
C-will read anyway. I.e., don't waste my
K-time, dude.
Like most of us here, if someone was eavesdropping in on my communications they would not learn much. I've messed around with PGP in the past but quit using it after I thought about how silly it was to encrypt things like my grocery list. I pitty the poor NSA analyst who after several long months of breaking my key simply learns that I had run out of milk and tampons. Going back to reality, I have found it necessary in the past to go through the trouble encrypting my instant messaging traffic. If most people are like me, my messaging behavior is significantly less formal and I would be very embarrassed if some of these discussions surfaces. Fortunately, most standard messaging software uses built in encryption or have plugins. I think encrypting email traffic is generally a good thing, but unless you work for a company where serious consequences for information disclosures I do not suspect PGP as a standard will ever catch on.
my mom posts on slashdot.
I've used it with a few friends. Until both mail client software and popular webmail services implement PGP and make its use trivially easy then email encryption will remain a rarity.
In our business, I routinely communicate with customers using s/mime mail. We set it up as part of the contract (not in the terms, just as part of the meet-n-greet kickoff), so anything related to the contract work goes through encrypted.
Crypto is our business... so it only makes sense.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
There isn't enough incentive to get ordinary users on board. Without recipients' use of PGP/GnuPG, I have no public keys to use and cannot encrypt my e-mails. I sign 99.9% of my e-mails, but nobody ever checks the signatures. Sometimes people ask me what the headers are about, and I'm happy to explain it to them. They usually don't end up caring. Again, to be more blunt, ordinary users see no incentive to get on board.
Insert self-referential sig here.
Your computer will be software or hardware bugged.
Carrieriq showed the plain text deep state joy of https efforts on your average open or closed US mobile device.
Sending encrypted mail will just make the NSA more curious.
Sit down with your family, friends, faith group, business associates and work out a few simple comments that can flow into any text.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I tried encrypting my mail for a while, but gave up. Bottom line - I got tired of explaining to people what they needed to do just to read my email.
Then I tried just digitally signing my email. That caused problems too, because most of our end users have Outlook and Outlook had issues with responding/forwarding when multiple people are involved. A lot of the emails that come my way end up being part of long multi-user threads.
Now I'm on Gmail, so there's not even an encryption option available. Well, technically, it's encrypted when I read it over https I guess... but that only counts if you're being pedantic.
#DeleteChrome
Except for work, my email is pretty darn non-interesting to anyone. Well except the ones that contain steganographic payloads, but they don't look encrypted of course :-).
For internal work email, my employer owns the email system and I connect to it via encrypted connection. Aside from in my browser it never leaves their system. No need for additional encryption.
And they aren't going to send stuff to me in an encrypted fashion, I'm lucky when the site is in HTTPS.
Everything else is just so much junk, if you really want to see pictures of my relatives' pets, or the various musings of random jokesters that they feel compelled to share, you are welcome to them.
Just post your email in reply to this post, and I'll forward it ALL to you.
@BEGIN PGP SIGNED
... facebook happened.
@END PGP SIGNED
I wish my online banks did.
I used to have to reset most of my bank passwords all the damn time - mainly because they used some insane combination of alphanumerics and punctuation. That usually meant them emailing me a new password I had to change the next time I logged in. I've never lost any money, or had my accounts hacked as far as I know because I've deliberately kept the window as small as possible. But it is only a matter of time.
Now a days, I keep my passwords written down in an encrypted file on my hard drive so I don't have to change them again.
My sig (since 2002/2001) on /. has been "Why arn't you encrypting your email?".
The answer is simple -- there was never a critical mass of people exchanging keys nor was there an easy-to-explain web of trust, nor was there a simple, free reliable certificate authority.
In 2002, Outlook Express offered integrated s/mime encryption + digital signatures. Once you installed your certificate (which, was simply double clicking a .p12 file, and entering your import password), you could encrypt or sign email going out, with a single click. It verified signatures in inbound email too, all in an integrated UI.
No one I knew used it.
Even today; Windows Live mail + Thunderbird offer integrated s/mime encryption. Maybe 1 or 2 of my technically literate friends use it. And of those 2, i think only one persists using it to this day.
Back then, when all I had was my Palm Pilot IIIxe, I thought "Whoa. I hold in my hand a portable computer that I can use to exchange digital signatures with". I even kept my pgp key in a note I could beam to someone, given the chance. Never happened.
Nowadays, even AGP on Android doesn't let me exchange keys with someone meet on the street, on the off change they happen to use it. Secure key exchange would be a trivial problem for today's smart phones (provided the carrier isn't using carrieriq to swipe your data....), but there still is no critical mass to make this worthwhile.
And, with most folks using webmail, You'd have to come up with a hackish way to encrypt mail client side (pgp copy/paste to the clipboard? w/ Rich text? attachments?), or just hand your keys to your provider. Doing the encryption server side would make the service provider an easy target for legal and hacking threats.
It's a tough nugget to crack, and it's not going to be solved until mail encryption is as easy to use as Facebook.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Seriously do you say anything via email that actually needs to be encrypted. Hell most of my emails probably wouldn't make much sense to most people.
Email is simply not a medium I would even consider using for sending sensitive information precisely because there are countless places between me and my correspondents where a message could be intercepted. In such circumstances, encrypting my email would simply alert anyone watching that something sensitive is being transmitted. And since the only "anyone watching" that I'd worry about is the government, why bother attracting the attention? If they want to know what I'm sending, all they have to do is wait for me to go to work, enter my house, and install a keylogger on my box. It's not like they even need warrants nowadays for that crap.
If I was going to do something I wanted to hide from the government -- and let's face it, that would almost have to be a major federal felony -- and if I absolutely had to have documentation and accomplices, none of it would be in electronic form to begin with, never mind transmitted over the public internet. Encryption is useful for governments and major corporations that are basically above the law. It's not terribly useful for private citizens unless you're just trying to hide your porn folder from your roommate.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I don't send anything important over email. If it's work related, that's not my problem - that's the company's problem.
Connection between nearby hospitals mail server runs through a encrypted network everything else is unencrypted and employee policy is nothing patient related goes to anyone outside of the encrypted network. Personal email: I save all my offensive remarks for /. posts my email is pretty boring actually.
I also consider e-mail an untrusted source and simply don't use it at all for items that would require encryption.
It'd be great if we -could- use it as a trusted and encrypted form of communication though, but it's only useful that way if it works in all cases.
If I encrypted it the government would start reading it.
I encrypt work email whenever it includes private or sensitive information. But that is only because my company has a global email address book and every single user has published encryption certificates. My company has also mandated that every email gets digitally signed, whether it is encrypted or not.
Which brings me to my no answer, my personal email. I would encrypt all personal email if I could, but the problem is that it is unlikely I could get all of my email recipients (or even most of them) to bother to deal with keys and making sure their email client could decrypt as required. Not only that, I use webmail a lot and it's not easy to get everyone onboard the same scheme that would allow encrypted email via webmail.
If everyone did it, then heck yes I'd encrypt all of my personal email too. If it was as easy as microsoft putting a big button "enable encryption", along with another button "send public key to email correspondent", then everyone would be using encrypted email. But they won't, so I'm pretty much out of luck.
Pna lbh ernq guvf? Vs fb, lbh pna rznvy zr hfvat ebg13 rapbqvat. rot13.com
I encrypt things where it seems to make sense.
For example, personal data on my laptop is all encrypted, because there is a highly plausible threat scenario where my laptop is stolen and the thief uses details from my contacts database, internet history, etc. to conduct identity fraud.
My online backups are all encrypted, because there's no way I'm trusting a random online storage provider with the personal data I don't trust to be safe in my own briefcase.
I don't encrypt my email because it doesn't make sense. What would I be protecting it from? For me, as a non-dissident citizen of a non-oppressive country, what threat exists that would be countered by encrypted email?
Criminals don't have the ability to intercept email on a sufficiently wide scale for identity fraud to be a concern. Government? But I'm not a tinfoil-hat conspiracy nut, so I have no reason to believe my government is a threat to me, and in any case they would have other ways of getting past any encryption I used.
And there's also the little snag that as of today, using encrypted email is basically shouting out "HEY, NSA! I THINK I HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE FROM YOU! MAYBE I'M JUST PARANOID BUT YOU REALLY SHOULD CHECK ME OUT IN CASE I'M A TERRORIST! HERE IS MY EMAIL ADDRESS AND THIS IS THE IP ADDRESS OF MY COMPUTER, SEE YOU SOON!" ... even having nothing to hide, I'm not sure why I would want to do that.
Seriously. Why the fuck would I want to encrypt my email. It's just extra hassle for everyone involved, and the benefits seem to be pretty non-evident.
Who uses email anymore?
Don't communicate sensitive information in email! whether it is encrypted or not!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160
Like every of the ~800 Debian developer in this world, I do use
encryption, and know how to handle PGP keys. My private key is encrypted
in a dm-crypt partition of 2 of my laptop, and I have a revoke
certificate handy burnt on a CD. My GPG fingerprint is also written on
my business card, so that everyone who I met can fetch my private key
from any of the major key servers, and check its fingerprint. My public
key is signed by about a dozen different people, mostly other Debian
developers, which is a strong "web of trust". If everyone was printing
his GPG key on a business card, I could also send encrypted emails, but
I've seen only other DDs doing it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
iEYEAREDAAYFAk7wBSAACgkQl4M9yZjvmklYVACfXYV3ncJnZuKosZJ8k0ZSzc3t
SpQAn0eYtQCIrQeTcBgA1b+Yz58OVqCJ
=EQHO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Due to the nature of my email communications it is absolutely essential.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Why, yes. Yes I do. At least for the few recipients that do too. And
all my messages are signed.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
iD8DBQFO8AWNUy30ODPkzl0RAr75AJ9qYq94sfL00DZxCb3e1tL/HX4uIACeLlbJ
RYRY0ZwfXoKwpyEJn0JzJ2Q=
=fy5a
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
PGP works well with a good email client, but a lot of folks use web mail. It probably is that simple.
I run my own mail server. Anyone connecting to it over the Internet must use an encrypted connection for receiving or sending mail; I don't even open the insecure ports in my firewall. A few of my friends and family members have accounts on my server.
So, when I send email to family members who are using my server, my email is encrypted while going onto the server and being pulled from the server.
This doesn't solve the general problem but it is better than having only insecure email.
The biggest secrets I send over email anyway tend to be the dates we are going on vacation; it is unlikely that anyone would intercept our email and decide to burglarize our home, but why risk it?
If we have a file with secret data we want to send, we usually just use SSH to copy it to one server or another. I'm not the only geek in my family and several of us have Linux servers running SSH.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Between the server and my box, the message in encrypted. I can read my email on an open wifi without concern someone else in the vicinity is snooping. Between my recipient and I, I sign the message with an s/mime certificate. There are a handful of people on the nerdy mailing lists to which I am subscribed that also sign their messages. On the occasion that I need to mail one of them directly, my message is encrypted. Usually though, the message is just to the list or to non-nerds I know IRL, so it's just signed for them.
w.pozkemrkp3.,1zeQmv@aq#mxPwfo7rbclftmB4t2wao
3hp3.xirmd8301kemfuzjeiqoejpakdhqcxhpyhididsyrdy05
If you do software remotely with a group of people, in my experience some kind of email encryption is always used even by non-programmers/managers.
I have observed technical people is more inclined to use pgp/enigmail solutions while corporate clients tend to use S/MIME.
Not everything I write is encrypted, but non-encrypted work-related sensible stuff is the exception, not the rule.
...via email?
So my question is: Do you encrypt anything else?
The average email user doesn't even know what SSL means or why they should only enter their bank passwords after they have verified that they are on a secure site.
So sure I could encrypt my email but no one would take the steps to actually read it then.
Go ahead, I don't use email for anything I need high security on. I can use an IM client with strong encryption enabled to provide me a secure communication medium.
The problem is interoperability. Yes, yes...I know, you can just give out your PGP public key to everyone and they'll be able to decrypt their email. If, that is, they use PGP too, which almost nobody does. And granted, sure...you can install an S/MIME cert in your copy of Outlook and...what's that? Some people aren't using the full-fledged, Microsoft Office-included version of Outlook? Some people are on smartphones too, and have the AUDACITY to want to be able to read the emails I send them on their iPhones? Bah...idiots. They should focus on more important things than the incredibly sensitive email they send back and forth...like encryption!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
To fellow Americans
We have no privacy, Remember that whole 9/11 deal. We are all guilty till proven innocent.
Why would someone want to read my email? Neither my job or life is that interesting to anyone other than a very closed group of people...
/.ers are scared that 'the feds' might snoop their email. So what? What could they possibly read in my email that they would care about?
I encrypt my USB key and portable drive because I have data on that which is sensitive - but not in a profitable way, more in a way that if someone found the data in a lost USB key, it would be embarassing to my company.
The only possible reason I can think of is identity theft, and honestly, I'm not worth that much (do a cost benefit - effort of sorting through my emails to build a profile of my identity, vs how much they could make off me before I/my bank/whoever clued on).
Sure, I'm sure a whole bunch of
I think a better question to ask - those of you who do encrypt their mail, why do they do it? Is it because they really are emailing information that is valueable enough to incentivise someone to select them - of all the email accounts in the world - to target? Is it because they honestly believe big-brother is out to get them and they have to hide their email to stop them? Is it just a way to prove their technological superiority above the plebs who don't encrypt their email? Or is it just that they are more concerned about the possibility of somoene reading their emails than the likelihood of that actually happening?
Or, am I incredibly niaive in believing that identity theft (or some other way of causing me grief) through email snooping doesn't happen much?
We could switch to encrypted E-mail in 6 months if developers had the courage of their convictions.
Firefox is open source, yes? And so is Chrome, I believe? Also Opera?
Don't these projects have an E-mail reader as part of their offering?
All we need is for one of the major browsers to choose an encryption standard and bundle it with their reader, and include a checkbox in the sender that reads "let others read this message" or similar wording.
Overnight people would start using the feature. It would start with Firefox users <-> Firefox users, then expand as people encouraged their friends to use the same standard. People would be encouraged to install the feature in their own reader.
Recipient doesn't have the feature? Various ways to detect and handle this, takes but a moment's thought.
Like a pandemic, encryption would spread to the far corners of the internet.
But no, developers don't like to make the decisions. They like to be consulted by the people who *do* make the decisions ("SOPA is supported by people who don't know how the internet works"), but they don't actually want to *make* the decisions.
This will not change in our lifetime.
Encrypt my email?!? Hell, I encrypt my slashdot posts.
this one is encrypted with a simple rot-26 algorithm.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
They force me to use email at work. Three percent, maybe five percent of everything I get is useful, or needed. At home, on my personal account, that percentage number is much lower. Email is a pain in the ass to manage. It's not worth the headache. Rather than worrying about encrypting your email (which is among the most pointless things you can possibly do), why not set up a corporate jabber server, or tell everyone to get social networking accounts? These things, these beautiful innovations of modern email free living don't have the problems email has, and you can filter out pretty much anything you don't want to read, silence anyone you don't want to hear from. Nobody's ever going to call you when their facebook stops working for no reason, because well... facebook never stops working. And while you may need to find a new purpose for all that firepower you have stored away in your basement for the day you finally do snap, you'll find that you're happier without email, and so is everybody else.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
If somebody with the power to look at my email really wants it, I just have to ask myself this one question: "Do I really want to get hit with a wrench in the face until I give up the encryption key?"
I used to PGP-sign all my outgoing mail, using the modern MIME form with GnuPG.
Then people started complaining about the spurious "attachments" and saying they didn't know how to open them.
If I used the old-style form, they'd complain about the gibberish at the end of the message.
Once again, human backward compatibility fails.
Almost everything I have to deal with securely has a https site. That goes for my online bank, "my page" on a whole ton of various services and so on. In fact most of those go on to tell me they'll never ask me for anything important over email and that if I do get an email looking like that it's probably a identity theft/fraud attempt. So the only reason would be talking with other individuals. Most of those would be much easier talking to in real life. The rest, well maybe we wouldn't want to trade email addresses at all, but use some other service. If I feared that someone would be reading my email, I probably wouldn't like to leave that obvious a trace of the communication in the first place. So it really never fits the bill.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think a lot of people, particularly those in the know, forget what safety really is. Security isn't about wasting all of your resources to protect something that no one is trying to steal.
Case in point: I drive at 154 kph (~100mph) on a highway with thousands of other cars doing the same. The only thing protecting each of us from the other is a dashed white line.
There's no one trying to steal my e-mail from my servers. And that's mostly because there's very little value in doing so right now.
So why not do it anyway? What does it hurt?
Some people do have valuable e-mail, and indeed they should encrypt it. But making everything encrypted is the same as wasting medications. You breed stronger bugs faster than you can keep up.
At work, I am required to encrypt anything containing sensitive information and the receiver is required to know how to decrypt it...which takes no knowledge at all since it all happens in the background. Any time I need to transmit sensitive information from an environment that does not have encryption/decryption capability, it goes by fax or snailmail. It's so 20th century.
...the one or two people who also use encryption. It would be easier if Thunderbird would ever implement the "encrypt when possible" option that's been in the buglist for years. "Always encrypt" is a completely useless option unless you're in an extremely restricted environment.
I do always sign my mail, which occasionally gets me "I can't open your attachment" (usually from webmail users these days, as at least most clients can handle them now) and, fortunately rare now, "I can't reply" (because Outlook would default to signing replies if the incoming message was signed, even if the user had no certificate and then complain because they didn't).
The few people implementing encryption in mail clients have *never* given any thought to usability, and unfortunately, I haven't had time to dive into the code and fix it myself, though I've started trying to get the build environment set up a couple of times.
I would say it depends on what you're doing, most email messages are garbage. I would go with TLS for corporate environments, PGP for personal use.
I honestly don't understand it either. I've been on projects which required us to store the code base on an encrypted partition of a hard disk or usb stick we'd only plug in while working. Yet those very same people were sending sensitive information via email, like SVN addresses with usernames and passwords neatly bundled in one unencrypted email. Hell one of those projects even had their own chat client that used overkill encryption, yet didn't use basic email encryption.
The last 3 places I have worked at have either used 7zip or AttachShield, to encrypt any sensitive information into aes-256 encrypted zip files. Then just tell each other the password over cell communications.
PGP is just way too complicated for people outside (and even some in) the IT industry.
of internet users are not Slashdotters so whats the point.
I only use PGPMail via work which has an automatic way to encrypt email for business purposes. Outside of that, I have little need to encrypt my email. If it is important, confidential information, I don't send it in email.
I use GPG/OpenPGP for some mail and "secure" web mail for other applications. I do not use third party web mail (such as gmail) because I can't control the dissemination or privacy (or longevity) of my mail and while my life is generally boring enough to fit within Eric Schmidt's idea of privacy ("If you have something that you don't want anyone [someone] to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place [at least not though a google property]."), I occasionally write a personal opinion of someone I wouldn't want them to be able to Google later or share a business detail that could be economically damaging or embarrassing (or is subject to NDA) and gMail and all other web mail services are effectively public.
I've used PGP (and eventually GPG) since about '94 and my keyring has about 20 people on it: more than 1 new key a year! Alas, 25% of those keys expired in the late 90s. My address book has about 1500 entries. Why so few keys? As the OP pointed out, it isn't all that difficult.
The answer for me is that the model for encouraging encryption has to be more like S-WAN than GPG-like. I'd love to turn on "encrypt everything" and forget it, but I'd get an error message for 99% of my correspondents, so obviously that isn't going to happen. So I set my prefs to reply to encrypted messages with encryption, which is fine, but it means I rarely (almost never) initiate an encrypted thread.
What I'd like is an opportunistic encryption mode where any message to an address in my keyring is encrypted by default. Any message to anyone I don't have a key for gets a nice little .sig file with a brief notice that their mail is insecure and effectively public and a link to further instructions for getting GPG set up.
One annoying problem is that encrypted mail is not searchable. To solve that, I want my client to extract a keyword list on decryption then upload that keyword list to (my own) server as an unencrypted header to enable searching (implemented, of course, with a stop list for words you wouldn't want to appear in the clear even out of context or perhaps particularly out of context).
For the truly paranoid, this list could be a hash list, though you could still fairly effectively dictionary hash fish, but it would provide some security and reduce the easy availability of information. In fact, all headers could be hashed and still generally be searchable (except maybe date ranges).
I also want my server to store my public key and encrypt all incoming mail with it. Of course it is already transported in the clear, but it makes my server less vulnerable. Once the mail has had an index extracted and the body encrypted, someone cracking into my IMAP server would, at least, not find a historical trove of clear-text data. And my friends without keys would get annoying sig files evangelizing encryption.
Consider the main goal of the NSA: To have access to all communications everywhere, and to analyze them for any threats to US power.
From their mission statement: "Collect (including through clandestine means), process, analyze, produce, and disseminate signals intelligence information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes to support national and departmental missions." "This Agency also enables Network Warfare operations to defeat terrorists and their organizations at home and abroad" (Emphasis mine.)
You assume that they do not have backdoors in any of the vulnerable components of your computer, that nowhere in the software, the OS, or the hardware of the processor did the best-funded security agency in the world succeed in creating a backdoor. You assume that this same agency can't break PGP/AES/whatever cipher you have. And you assume they're not interested enough in what you are sending to make their capabilities public by your arrest.
Only the last assumption is reasonable. To assume that not one Intel engineer is an NSA plant, that not one Microsoft programmer hid some code, that not a single implementation weakness or side-channel attack is present in your encryption app is a very big assumption. Far safer to assume the NSA/China/etc know what you're writing, and keep major stuff off of computers.
Not a sentence!
I do use URL shorteners as weak encryption of URL's sometimes..
but I use mostly IRC and bitlbee that forwards ICQ and Jabber to IRC...
I deleted 3(!) different eMail accounts I had.. It was fantastic...
The last couple places I worked IT jobs had already standardized on sending aes-256 zip files using free utilities like 7zip or AttachShield. Then they'd just relay the password over a cell phone conversation or in a meeting depending how paranoid the client was.
The only time I encrypt is to people on my own corporate email system where I know it is managed properly and hence is a viable option. For anything beyond that if the information is so sensitive that it needs encryption to email then as far as I am concerned it is too sensitive to put into email as I wouldn't trust the vast majority of places to securely administer their mail system anyway and that includes their key management.
I don't. I am a huge privacy advocate, but I don't bother with encryption because I figure: A) the only people looking are the US government (where I live) and that's about the only entity who would be interested, and B) their spyware is probably 10x better than any encryption that's publicly available.
I'd love to know if there's something guaranteed for anonymity, but otherwise it's just not worth it. The bad guys already won, and I don't care if they know that I hate them. That about sums it up.
Ticketmaster wanted my to email my credit card info them to buy handicapped tix as SOP. NOT!
With MS BPOS / Office 365, they have a handy feature called exchange hosted encryption. Essentially what it does is when you send an e-mail and mark it as encrypted, it'll e-mail a short note to the recipient letting them know they've received an encrypted message, along with a link to an SSL enabled site where they can view it (they have to have a PIN code setup prior to verify their identity). It's not perfect, but it's really easy to use and solves the problem of being able to send an e-mail to just about anyone while maintaining end to end encryption. You can even set up rules by domain or regex, so any e-mails sent to MyLawFirm.com would be encrypted, or anything message that contains text matching the format of an SSN would automatically be encrypted. This is great for office environments where you don't want to have to explain the concept of encryption to your users, or rely on them to encrypt messages they should be encrypting.
No, because I don't want to carry a key around everywhere, and because I don't want to (and sometimes can't) install encryption software on every computer I need to use email on.
For me, the extra privacy isn't worth the extra inconvenience.
Has anything of value ever been snooped via email?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I don't encrypt because I don't send anything that requires encryption. Having said that, My Wi-fi is encrypted to a reasonably high level, and if I really wanted to, my OS can encrypt messages and I can use encrypted webmail to send and receive email, so encryption is so commonly available, we don't use it, or we don't know that we are, e.g., Skype or SSL.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
But no one I email consistently does, and its hard enough trying to help them open up a MS Word document in a newer format. Yea, I had to switch to Word from Open Office because no one was able to open up anything I sent. Yes, I tried always making sure I sent things in a Word compatible format, but for some reason someone would be unable to open things up. What's that? PDF you say, strike again, found people to need to email, that for some reason couldn't open up PDF files either.
As much as I feel we should be driving technology, it seems like technology often drives us.
I use an algorithm based on a very large dense LFSR, hashes, and symmetric key passwords implemented in a little notepad-like program that has been shared among my family and various people I email. It's super-easy to use and works with any email clients or web-based email. It's as intuitive as it gets; even the most non-technical of my family can handle copying and pasting a mess of base-64 stuff into the "magic decoder" window. It's even kind of fun for some. Obviously it has its limitations, being best suited for small-ish plaintext messages, not handling files at all, and requiring occasional friends and family face-to-face password exchanges, but we do actually use the thing for anything socially, financially, or politically sensitive.
So hell to the yeah.
Unfortunately, when I try to explain to someone that they need to "encrypt" the e-mail they send me and "sign" it so I know it's from them (even though it's pretty obvious it is), they sound completely baffled. These are people working for our government to run our military operations (dunno about overseas though, haven't encountered them yet).
So I say "lock" it and for some odd reason this is a commonly used phrase for "click the blue lock next to the mail icon in Outlook".
They still don't sign them of course. There's not really a "pin a red ribbon" it phrase yet.
The NSA's quantum computers sneer at your puny compression attempts. Go ahead, use 2-to-the-any-power compression. See if it helps.
Back then, when all I had was my Palm Pilot IIIxe, I thought "Whoa. I hold in my hand a portable computer that I can use to exchange digital signatures with". I even kept my pgp key in a note I could beam to someone, given the chance. Never happened.
Careful there—that might lead to irresponsible behavior.
I use to encrypt email. But then I got a job that required a government security clearance. The person assigned to do the background investigation asked for my passphrase. I gave it to them. I haven't encrypted email since.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
I send email to people that know so little about the subject that they even think DropBox is secure.
I've had PGP for over 10 years, but I'm putting it aside and getting behind S/MIME.
S/MIME has great enterprise support, is built into mail clients like Outlook, OS X Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, iPhones, iPads, and even has browser plugins for GMail. PGP has none of this, sadly.
I've encrypted probably only 7 emails, but I sign almost everything unless I'm sending the email to someone completely pgp illiterate ("Why does this email have random junk at the end?").
I don't want the man to know how I enlarged my pole with wonder pills!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
If Mac OS X's Mail client automatically supports PGP, it is not necessary to obtain any certificate from an outside source. With an OpenPGP application installed on your own computer -- Mac, PC, UNIX, Linux, etc -- you generate your own certificate. See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP/index.html.
Yes, no, maybe.
I use GPG (Enigmail) for really sensitive stuff but typing my very long passphrase every 15 minutes gets old. Also, those e-mails do not participate in my global search, so I try to keep them as limited as possible. My mail store is on a LUKS volume anyway, so GPG is doing a narrow function.
Occasionally I'll find somebody who speaks S/MIME, and then that happens automagically for me. That's nice, but largely a function of mailer integration.
But, in the meantime, a good half of my e-mail, and most of the important stuff, travels out my network on SMTP/STARTTLS connections, so that window of eavesdropping is closing as well.
Use as much encryption as makes sense (oh, that's the hard part, eh?)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
An E-mail message encrypted via OpenPGP remains encrypted on the sender's computer (replacing the clear-text version), on the outgoing server (if retained), on the receiving server (if retained), and on the recipient's computer.
Yes, the sender or the recipient can decrypt it and save the clear-text version. However, that is considered a bad practice that is discouraged.
Sorry to answer with a question, but what would be the best way of managing private keys under a brittle infrastructure constantly under attack, with non-knowledgeable users? Storing private keys on a rooted server or workstation somehow sounds like a bad idea.
No I've never used encrypted email, I wish that there was a universal system for it. The other day I needed a credit card number from my wife. Simple I texted my wife to put the number in a text file and save it in the Dropbox folder. I wasn't in a big hurry so I check 2 hours later, nope not there. Texted wife again to recheck, I got a "It's there stupid" No problem, I'll ssh in. Doh! I forgot to setup dynamic dns when I reset the router for the new ISP. My high tech efforts failed, I called my wife and got the number over the phone. 4 hours later the file showed up in DropBox. I sure wish encryption was to norm in electric communications.
I sign all mail, regardless of whether the recipient has a clue what digital signing even is. In order to encrypt mail, however, both the recipient and the sender must be security aware.
Practically nobody I communicate with - even among the ones who use Linux - cares enough about security to even own a key, even though they regularly include obviously sensitive information in a message.
Unless you're emailing highly sensitive stuff between knowing parties, what is the point, and what happens when your recipient doesn't have a means to decrypt the emails?
It really takes a special kind of paranoia to think you need to encrypt your personal email correspondence.
The NSA is reading everything I write already. If I make them work for it it's just a waste of tax payer money. Clear text all the way.
Well we used to do signaturing (digital signatures) emails in Outlook, however it's a problem for people using smart phones. Or, at least Android phones. People could not forward the mails as the phones lacked these features. So we had to end signing.
It's about time the Exchange client gets upgraded on Android. It really sucks for more advanced features. You can't even search your appointments.
I sign email on one machine, but encryption and even signing requires copying your private key to all the machines you actively use mail clients on, including your phone. Nobody has made a simple and secure protocol for private key download or message upload/sign/encrypt on the remote server. For that matter, nobody bothered making a protocol for contact list sharing, settings sharing, installed plugin sharing, etc, which is why people moved to web mail and things that sync with a phone.
So I have a machine at home I occasionally check mail on, a laptop, a desktop at work, several virtual machines I might need to access email on, a phone or two, etc.. But even if that were all solved there's the problem of replying to encrypted emails, and the fact the subject and recipients aren't encrypted. (Recipient, fine.. that's impractical. Subject: nono.)
So you sent an encrypted message and want to review it later. How? Hope you included a copy encrypted with your own public key (cc'd yourself). Maybe your mail client does this for you. If not the message in your Sent folder is unrecoverable. Want to continue an encrypted conversation? Better make sure your phone or whatever you send mail from this second supports things, and you have it properly configured.
Then there's the fact email wasn't made to be secure and therefore it's broken. DKIM? Sounds good but mailing lists that append things mess things up. GPG should be signing parts of the email and clearly saying what it's signed, but the new idea is to put the signature in the email header where it can be mangled by the next MTA.
Mail headers pretty much make no sense. How do you know which parts weren't spoofed? Can you believe any of it besides whats in your maillog? The answer is yes 99% of the times but only because we still have some trust in the sending MTA if it's a reliable provider.
Mail and it's headers should be append only with clear distinctions of what MTA appended what and everyone signing things for verifiability. That would require a rewrite of the protocol though.
I am AMAZED at the number of people saying "I don't say anything interesting anyway" or "I have nothing to hide".
Picture a scenario like this: You get a new cellphone. When you first set it up, it gives you this question, "Encrypt all your phone calls by default, or Allow us to listen to your phone calls". How many people would say, "I don't say anything interesting anyway, let them listen".
If when you were having your cable modem installed, the cable installer said, "Hey, do you mind if while I'm installing this cable modem, I also install a microphone, so we could listen to your conversations?" How many people would say "sure, I don't say anything of interest anyway".
I think that in these hyperbolic scenarios, most people would say, "Yeah, I actually want my privacy."
So, since we have had all the technology available for years, why isn't encrypted conversation by email the default yet? Why wouldn't people want that?
It would be far more useful to try an approach similar to the relatively recent browser green bar vs. red bar for https.
Green bar - the e-mail client and mail server have verified end to end trust CA SSL certificates and are using SSL encryption point to point. Red bar - server is not available on SSL or client cannot connect to mail server on an encrypted link (SSL, encrypted Exchange, etc.)
The reality is until Microsoft puts such functionality in Office Outlook and Exchange at the same time (along with free patches for prior versions) as well as Google and Yahoo, there is no expectation for this to be a viable solution.
A few years following such a coordinated switch, maybe one could add a prompt regarding, "Send E-mail Insecurely?" or have a option bit to ask as a policy.
Also, giving out a PGP key is silly from a security standpoint because now your points of failure are every person to which you needed to give a key rather than trusted. Not exactly great for the non-security minded sales guy down the hall.
The download link with one-time or per-recipient passwords options are great for files (I love them) but usually too much trouble for most people as well as inviting people less security conscious to click links in e-mails when maybe we shouldn't.
Don't you know "THEY" read the encrypted ones first?
I generate signed certs for my accounts, and my wife. With iOS5, I can even add the cert to the iPhone. So, me and my wife now encrypt all email between ourselves as a matter of course.
I'll happily exchange encrypted mail with anyone, but so few people do it. And the fact that I have my wife's machines set up tells me it ain't that hard.
But, hay, with people posting on twitter and facebook their location and travel plans, what the hell. Who needs privacy and veracity.
No, I don't, because other people don't care, so they use shitty software. Webmail is the worst, because it'll never be very practical to handle client-side decryption or signing of webmail. (Yes, I've seen some heroic attempts with some ff plugins, but they're not as nearly as convenient as even a mid-1990s email client.) Outlook is bad too, but at least it has the excuse of trying to push a rival standard (an unquestionably inferior one, but nevertheless quite legitimate). Webmail, OTOH, is just a technological step backwards to .. before you had TCP/IP on your PC. I just don't know how else to put that. It's like dialing into someone else's computer and running mutt, which was fine in the 1980s, but we supposedly had a revolution since then. I guess not.
It's ok to admit things aren't going well; shit happens. I do think everyone who has posted here saying email encryption isn't valuable, though, needs their geek cards revoked. Those kids should go back to playing their xboxes and leave the tech discussion to people who are willing to take a few seconds to think about things.
Your email is uninteresting? Well, so is your newegg https checkout page! Why the fuck does anyone care about all the CA integrity problems that have come up lately, if encryption and authentication have no value? Give up https if you think pgp isn't important, because most everything you do with https isn't even half as personal as email.
Your communications don't need to be private? Neither does the list of URLs you've visited which happen to have "like" buttons on them. But somehow when Facebook decides to profile you, you have a a hissy fit. Yet if someone *cough*google*cough* were to profile you from your everyday emails, you would be creeped out -- just kidding, you'd bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For corporate use in the Netherlands, a message signed by a valid certificate can be considered the same as an autographed document. This could potentially put the company in trouble, and hence, no on does because no one wants to be held responsible.
on my work network, we've got an integrated PKI that makes it easy for people to exchange their public keys. If I'm sending someone a password or other sensitive information, I'll encrypt it against their keys there. If I'm just talking to someone (ie: not doing anything sensitive), encryption is off, signing is on. If I'm sending from my personal email, the only person I encrypt to is my work email.
I think the big reason that email encryption in general hasn't taken off is that it's a huge pain to exchange keys. Some keyserver attempts have been made, but frankly there's not been enough adoption in any circle I've seen to really call it a success. The only time this stuff seems to really work well is when there's a corporate directory and a mandate from management that says "you will get a pki certificate, and you will publish it on the global address list".
I use s-mime encryption together with a free SatrtSSL certificate. Works perfectly with the OS X mail app. I used to use pgp for many years but the problem was that it did not integrate to well with my mailclients and also almost nobody was using it. S-mime is easy and fully implemented into any decent mailclient today.
I've tried and stopped doing it for the reasons mentioned many times already.
But I've had some success with a zip package that includes GPG, my public key and a batch file that encrypts everything you put in an enclosed folder. It's a bit of a hack, but it's easy enough so I can send it to someone and get encrypted files back. It would be great to have a more polished cross platform package though...
One of the key difficulties is if you are including attachments in encrypted e-mails. This often results in your e-mail being quarantined by (depending on your viewpoint) over judicious anti-virus software as it is unable to scan the encrypted e-mail and guarantee it is virus-free. Your e-mail never arriving rather defeats the purpose of sending it in the first place.
I appreciate that a well configured system can get round this difficulty, but most end-users do not have well configured systems, they have the operating system or software's default settings which are rarely if ever encryption friendly. (If encryption came by default, how would the likes of the NSA and GCHQ spy on us?)
Off-the-record messaging is fucking trivial. I've many friend with whom I use off-the-record messaging.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It seems that a lot of people from hackish communities use PGP. These people are usually very sensitive when it comes to privacy. It strikes me that they have no trouble with the common practice to list name and e-mail address on one of the PGP key servers (e.g., http://pgp.mit.edu/). This seems to me very odd considering what a registry like this offers in terms of abuse. I would also really like to use PGP but I don't want my details listed on one of these servers. So one approach would be to not put the complete name info in the key to start with. Of course this kind of sabotages the "web-of-trust" idea, but for me, this doesn't work anyway because I would give my key to possible correspondents in person or on business card rather than have them look it up on a key server. I would be very interested to hear what more advanced PGP users have to say on this.
Encrypting email for the most part is a waste of time...UNLESS...
If you're doing something illegal.
Even if you're not doing anything illegal
IT'S just email.
From a business point of view, if you're sending email that is THAT sensitivel over the public internet you should be caught and fired.
Really... it's JUST email...
Encryption/signing only makes sense if the key distribution happens on a well defined domain (e.g. inside a company). It has always been beyond my grasp why i should sign messages to people who have no trusted way of authenticating my signature. However, in the last company i worked for, keys were more or less correctly distributed for another purpose (logging into the WLAN), so i imported my key into thunderbird and used for signing my mails using s/mime. I was the only one who did, however, at least anybody *could* no verify if that mail was from me - if he really wants (or needs).
I don't care.
I wonder why nobody has mentioned TLS/SSL so far.
No, I don't encrypt mail - anymore. Like most here, I tried for a good time, had my PGP key in my .sig and website online, fingerprint on business cards, etc. I think I sent about 5 PGP-encrypted mails and received the same number.
Reason: Nobody else used it.
So I went to the level that I could control. All the SMTP and IMAP traffic between myself and my server is encrypted, and if the other side supports TLS, so is any incoming and outgoing SMTP. It's not perfect, but it is better than giving up completely. Opportunistic encryption is the best option you have if you don't control the other side, and I believe that PGP should be a huge lesson in humility for us crypto-geeks. Because we don't control the other party, but we thought that we could/should.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I encrypt email every day.
no, I don't have a sig
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
hQEMAxpxdNC/Rmn+AQgAm5IX6HFgCmGLAfU+LxrBngamZzs5XYu53KtMNsk2Tio/ S7lgDr2D28e1tf4oOB0sPBq4Y0ZND40IUnI3o9XOBid/s3ySTCck4Vch4boXG/bL A1hSbF7blRDlGa6LhCxbwur3DM33pJHYLg8i22Bv12+94QysAl3fYpjYw8qXYVMY HrigiYGOi6ik8mUijfMrh8zuL7OytV3YUP2YqoYZVN8r9izvR5eVrIO2cz9xT6o7 NqP8G6NxpOAhGEYNyRmuvZwh3Qfo5x5EOVQZOPVHQAs7svZvAzZG+dNjHf7cNK9t z5+2h/xqz6rRmi/DfowAvZUahBLc4rGt4lgJOVPSjtJ2AZUjdwsjgSA7lYDbxfZ0 /gR4fT4HS+0Znw6HDSp6ZXFNZS2kvKRVtOpP9z09DUbT6q1XHiwo7iWe3/HPNQL9
Z9hSYRVclxwkgcD7XyIEz4kYPIAbrE1WCwEGicVE78BahIDvOshRw2EsuN1UplXR
6usNM9QaBQ==
=aj+t
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
As it isn't universally available, the volume of mail generally is high and I don't email much of interest anyway, there doesn't seem much point.
I thought the modern way however was to shout your personal information/plans down a mobile phone whilst in the busiest places possible. No encryption there either.
In 10 years as a software developer, I've had an almost countless number of passwords, credit card numbers, highly sensitive documents, and more sent to me via unencrypted email. Almost on a daily basis.
No matter how hard I try, people just won't use encryption. I managed to convince everyone in the office to use S/MIME, but this lasted about a week before people decided it was too much work.
It's not like they don't understand the risks so much as there doesn't seem to be any 'easy' turnkey systems out there that are cheap or free. S/MIME is included in all major email clients, but it's a pain in the arse to setup - I ended up having to do it for everyone myself.
Personally I think email clients should automatically (without user intervention) generate an s/mime key and sign all outgoing mail, and encrypt all outgoing mail where a signature is known. This way you'd end up encrypting all email without even realizing it. (Of course you'd still require user intervention to copy private keys between your different computers......)
4096 bit RSA keypair. I use GPG (GNU implementation of openPGP) with Mozilla's Thunderbird client. Thunderbird has an extension called enigmail that work great with GPG. The real problem is not enough people use it to make it useful.
No encryption. I prefer steganography.
Whenever my partners receive a picture of my cat, they promptly retrieve the nasty contents hidden inside.
And the police spies won't even suspect I am an outlaw.
V rira rapelcg zl fynfuqbg cbfgf!
I've rarely, if ever, had a good reason to encrypt my email. I think the largest number of encrypted emails I ever sent was on a "crash Echelon" day back in the late 90's, which was hardly a good reason. ;-)
I used to sign almost all my non-list emails. (Mailing list software sometimes didn't like signed messages.)
But the problem with signing is that some very dumb (usually big business or government) mail gateways would see the PGP/GPG lines and assume encryption, even though it was just a signature. That meant my mails were being blocked regularly "due to encrypted content", which was a PITA for both me and my recipients to deal with.
Frankly, because of those kinds of issues, I gave up even signing my emails.
I would still sign or encrypt if there was a good reason to, but given my email usage I think signing is more likely than encrypting. And even that would be fairly rare.
I thought it was interesting this topic came up now here as it also just came up on my Linux Users Group mailing list last week. A local friend and I tried it a couple of years ago when a pgp/gpg plugin came available for Thunderbird. We both had it set up and it seemed to work OK, but to what end? As near as we could tell, it was him and I, and no one else. 'kinda pointless. I do think we should be using it. I think businesses transmit entirely to much confidential client information around the country. I believe we all, myself included, need to be more security conscious.
I have a public PGP key on my website (http://mshenrick.dyndns.org - currently down), but I've never used it, as I rarely get emails from people, just companies, and my emails aren't that sensitive, or the ones that are, are from websites and they don't support encryption
Well, if you are on an apple, then s/mime works very well for encryption, on the basis that both parties have each other's keys. As long as one signs one's emails with a pkcs7-signature the key is transferred. So a typical transaction goes (signed email: hi, do you really need my password) (signed return: yep, I do) (encrypted email: ok it's p455w0rd ) (encrypted return: I have reset your password to Gh0-dA6-Ly3-d3cu-dNl )
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Because the physical storage of private keys (for when I reformat me drive, switch computers, do whatever that obligates the new installation of the private key) is troublesome, that's why. Also: because we're at RSA-4096 now, for reasonable security (that is, for my job at least), and that's just *damn long*. O, and thirdly, because good, simple, elliptic curve implementations (in *C*, not C++, thank you very much) are left wanting at the moment.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Encrypt it ? Against who ? The Germans ?
Ive got Thunderbird and PGP set up on my Mac, on my linux laptop and my wifes windows PC. The problem is noone else I email does, so it's pretty useless. I also need a good PGP client on my iPhone that can just hook into my iMap server, otehrwise I loose that handy mobile access.
Personally I wish all my mail stored on Gmail was encrypted seeing as US lay allows all that mail to be tapped for any reason without a warrant if older than (I think) 30 days.
I have used raw PGP/GPG and Enigmail with good results but usually only when exchanging emails with customers who want certain data to be encrypted, e.g. the keys used to port knock a device for example.
I can't help but think how prevalent encryption would be now if every email client's setup wizard auto generated a keypair (or allow you to import them) and just enabled it without some big song and dance. Forcing people to root around in broken CAs and obtain certs from a CA for $$$ and repeat the process every 6-12 months was a recipe for disaster.
I feel like an outcast at work for flat out refusing to send passwords and other secret strings in plain text. Even when it's only going within the same Exchange server. Eventually I had to give up because nothing was getting done and no one was sending me any public keys or any other method of sending secured information. It's sad really because it's a HUGE global IT company, also reason for being an AC.
No because if it's really sensitive, I don't communicate it via email.
I don't encrypt my email, because nobody gives a fuck about my private correspondence, except the recipients (I hope).
It's not used because people mostly use Microsoft products. Outlook can't use it nor can Windows 7 phones. The nice bit is that people who would consider using it are already using Linux so we can speak to each other securely if we want to. :)
I do encrypt any sensitive information (source code that while not secret is not public either). I also encrypt e-mails to senders that I know have PGP-keys. Unfortunately, most of my e-mail communication involves sending mails to groups of 10 people or more, most of whom don't even know what PGP is.
I use a similar password system (a basic formula with 8 characters, including letters, numbers and symbols, and a way of changing it for every application). This works well for most purposes (e-mail, academic logons, etc.), but generally not for financial websites (my credit card company, bank, brokerage account). So I have a different system for financial sites that _doesn't_ use any special symbols. This seems like a bad idea. Why would any website (especially one that wants the highest security possible) forbid the use of certain characters?
Most Americans have switched to twitter/facebook for all their communication needs. They are being spied on by hackers, feds, foreign entities, 9gaggers and the entire milky way galaxy. They're going to worry about their email encryption? Now that's the best line I've heard all day.
I use quadruple ROT13 to encrypt all my data.
The value of encryption for public communication is limited. Unless all parties involved are 100% diligent there will always be an unencrypted copy available somewhere. Instead of adding overhead and procedures for dealing with encryption I find it best to avoid putting sensitive information into email just as I avoid doing so in other public places.
I don't, because nobody does.
When somebody in my organisation requires a new password the user is either required to walk to our office to collect it. When that happens we explain PGP-encryption to the user and help him/her to set up a key. The next time this user needs a password we offer to send it through PGP-encrypted mail, to any mail address under the users control.
If a user is unwilling/unable to come over to our office we suggest to find a few colleagues with PGP (we know people in most departements) and get a key into our web-of-trust.
with DKIM
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
People still use picture post cards, despite that not being secured even by an envelope. This isn't bad, per se. It just is.
On top of that, _Why Johnny Can't Encrypt_ already gave an inkling why email will lag: It's too much of a cryptonerd's game. There's no obvious workflow, the process is tricky, and so on, and so forth. There is no easy fix for this. Notice how there are two competing but incompatible systems (s/mime and pgp/gpg). We'd need a single standard way of containing keys that both supports web-of-trust and hierarchical trust relationships (but as part of multiple trees, not just one). Most of that, like how to deal with multi-dimensional trust calculations, is still an open research question. "Trust" is in fact a misnomer; it's trustworthyness, not trust itself, you're assessing. The trusting you do afterward. If that trustworthyness calculation turns out too complex or opaque, people will shrug and do the trusting anyway, on no evidence and even in the face of strong hints not to do that. Thus the current ways we use crypto ensure that no matter how good the algorithm, it will be easily defeated by a bit of social engineering. All current systems really do practically invite doing exactly that.
The recent ruckus around SSL only tells us that the PKI idea is too limited and brittle. Also note how the most widespread web-of-trust implementation is just as much not very well thought out: Putting your key on a keyserver means you're leaking information that you then cannot remove. You can only revoke the key, but not the metadata, thus providing a valuable intelligence source.
How then? I don't know. But we do need more options. Workable ones.
Why should I encrypt youtube links of lolcats I send to my wife?
So say we all
So, my question to fellow Slashdotters is 'Do you encrypt your email? If not, 'Why not?' and 'Why has email encryption using PGP or something similar not become more commonplace?' The use of cryptography used to be a hot topic once upon a time.
What benefit does encrypting email provide to me? If the recipient's computer is compromised then the attack likely already knows all the passwords and passcodes and has access to any and all keys anyways, and if the recipient's email password is simple enough to be compromised then likely the recipient is gullible enough to fall for social engineering anyways. In the end the end result is the same either way.
i'm looking for a script to logon to my gmail and sign any email in the drafts folder.
Pendango i found was no good because i had to carry it with me.
This is important because i travel in parts of the world where kidnaps are common. I want to be able to prove it's me with signing. Encryption may attract attention but it's useful against the pretty thief, which is why i'm glad i had my passwords encrypted on my phone when it got stolen.
I once needed access to a credit card i'd left at home with my folks. I relised i had no way of communicating it securely. In the end we had to split the transaction of that info over email and a voip call. On reflection a pots phone would have been better... In fact encrypting voip is another must do.
Convieience is a big part of security
A blog I run for the wealth
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in cases that i send scanned documents (IDs, bills etc) I use a simple encryption method. Making a encypted compression archive (7z or zip or rar) and using my telephone number as the key and telling the recipient that over phone. Simple, not uncrackable but the recipient is able to decrypt it without great computer knowledge...
I leave it up to Google, Yahoo and Hotmail to encrypt my email such that only I and my digital masters have full access...
For personal life, I have and use GPG, albeit rarely. Most people that I communicate with just don't get it.... Work on the other hand, nearly half of all of my communications are encrypted.
'Do you encrypt your email? If not, 'Why not?'
If Gmail offered it as an option and people on the other end could decode the message without any special skills, I'd use it. The convenience factor is major issue.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
99.99% of the communications I deal with have no reason to be encrypted.
I'd guess I'm fairly normal in that respect.
While it might be nice to encrypt sensitive things, I generally just don't send anything truly sensitive via email. Given how little I send is actually sensitive, that's easier than
a) adding a small procedure to EVERY email I send for no real value, and
b) end up failing because the bulk of people don't use it anyway.
Encryption/privacy obsessives are like the digital equivalent to the people obsessed that everything causes cancer: probably fundamentally right, but to follow their prescriptions would mean such a decrease in quality-of-life that most people disregard them hoping it'll ultimately never significantly matter. Oh, and tiresome.
-Styopa
For encryption to be used and valuable, it has to happen transparently to the user, none of the encryption plugins I ever tried to use got anywhere near that, they added so many junk into the process that it just wasn't worth the effort. Heck, the fact that they where plugins in the first place, not build in features of the mail reader alone is enough to make encryption a failure. And no, this isn't an issue with individual lazyness, but the problem is that encryption is only really safe when everybody is using it. If you are the only guy in town using encryption, that just makes you suspicious, makes you look like you have something to hide. Furthermore, email encryption already sucks on the concept levels, subjects headers are often not encrypted at all, thus just inviting accidental information leakage. The biggest problem with email encryption however is that To and From headers are not encrypted, which for a lot of big brother like surveillance is really the only information they are looking for anyway, as who communicates with whoem already gives them most of the information they need. This renders email encryption near useless and the To/From header issue can't be fixed by moving to a different protocol anyway.
The sad part in all this is that PGP/GPG could have added value to email not by encryption, but via signing. And while I do see signatures a lot of times on mailing list or private mail, where it really serves little to no purpose, I never see it in the places where it would be needed: Mail from Paypal, Amazon, a bank, etc. It's completely idiotic that I have to fish Paypal mail out of my Spam filter, when a simple signature could easily distinguish junk from legitimate mail. Further more it would make phishing a good bit harder, if a signature would allow to distinguish scam from mail automatically.
All that said, I do use encryption when its available an easy, the Pidgen encryption plugin is sort of usable, but even there just barely, as messages get lost in there on a regular basis when you communicate with somebody who changes clients between communication or other mishaps happens. It's annoying, and just goes to show that usability, which is among the most important things with encryption, always gets the least amount of thought.
I encrypt email whenever I can. Why is nobody else's business any more than what I put into a snailmail letter is anyone else's business.
However, most email users do not have the skill to setup encrypted email handling. Until the mass email servers - gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and similar implement OpenPGP in their web clients, nothing will change. Encrypted email needs to be the default, not the exception. Governments world-wide will freak out over that.
There are some downsides too.
* Encrypted email stored on an IMAP server cannot be searched using the normal interface. I'm not certain those messages can be searched at all, except manually - 1 at a time.
* Key management pretty much sucks.
* Interoperability is easily broken. Even between nerd - experts - sometimes the encrypt/decrypt process stars do not all align. Had an email 2 days ago that I couldn't decrypt. The GPG tool on the other side was running under Windows - so there's no way to know what the real issue was.
My corporate server is Zimbra. A feature request for OpenPGP support was added in 2007.
Android doesn't have built-in OpenPGP support. I don't know about iOS, but I doubt it.
Corporate-types prefer the x.509-based certs so that a corporate key can be added to every encryption. This means that the company can access the messages. GPG will not do that on principle, hence it will probably never become widely supported, demanded, by the Fortune 50 companies.
If Microsoft, Mozilla, Debian, Redhat and that other company pushed GPG certificates to a public key server and automatically attempted to encrypt messages to the same email address, then encrypted emails could become a standard. Even if we all used passphrase-less keys, we'd be more private. A nearly trivial way to share the private key between devices is needed too.
For those people who do not have public keys on the key servers, a middle-man service needs to hold the encrypted email and forward a URL so that the intended recipient can view the message securely. Of course the middle server can't have access to the unencrypted messages or governments will mandate unencrypted access.
V nyjnlf hfr ebg guvegrra gb rapelcg zl frafvgvir rznvyf naq frafvgvir vasbezngvba!
you can use leetkey if you don't want to deal with keys, etc., but you and the other party have to agree on a password (one time password, hopefully).
You can't handle the truth.
PGP and the like are NOT easy to use.
It might be easy for slashdotters to use (and even that's debatable), but it's incomprehensible to the average schlub, and since 99% of the people I send email to aren't slashdotters, it's useless anyway.
I just don't send private data over email.
I tried enigmail. The first time my email client updated it was no longer compatible and that was the end of it. I'm not important enough to spy on and don't email stuff that's worth stealing
Yes, because I'm paranoid. Hahahaha, just kidding. I'm really not. I use it in a few situations. Most important to me, is communication with my wife. We encrypt all emails, because sometimes we need to send something like bank account numbers or passwords or similar things. I love the added security that comes from having those encrypted. I also use encryption sometimes at work, not often, but I work in research and its nice to be able to send documents to my boss and back encrypted. Even though I have no thoughts that anyone is trying to take it, still when the document represents four years of difficult research, I like not worrying about anyone getting except my boss. But probably the biggest, most frequent, reason I use it is for the signatures. I sign all my emails now. And I really wish that was standard practice in the world. Spam would become almost non-existant if you could get everyone to implement signatures. Frankly its incredibly easy to use and set up, so I can't really see the arguments against using. The only one you tend to hear is "why? no one wants to see my stuff". That's a week argument for me. It may be fine for others, but for me I guess its more of a "why not?" If you have people that are interested in it around you, use it. If they don't care, then you don't have much of a choice.
Why? Because I send very little email to individuals. Most go to email lists. Encrypting that would be counter productive. As far as "private" emails go, all that I send are "Happy Birthday!" or other greetings. I don't send anything that I wouldn't feel comfortable posting on a bulletin board in a public place. Anybody who talks about their multinational billion dollar scam via email is an idiot. Even with encryption, such can be broken, if the breaker is dedicated enough and has the money.
- (Almost) Nobody else uses it (the old videophone problem).
- Because so few use it, I have few opportunities to use it. Therefore, the cost in time per use is very high. Nevermind that by the time I go to use it again I've forgotten my password and have to generate a new key... I've got a dozen PGP keys out there on the servers. Don't know the passwords to any of them anymore... Send me something encrypted and I have a near zero chance of ever being able to read it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
I do use PGP to sign my messages, but I don't use it to encrypt messages
because most people I send email to don't have a public key published.
Setting up a public & private key pair is not part of the default setup
process. Average users don't know how to manage passwords let alone
Managing key-pairs.
Let's be frank: It's not that PGP is difficult, it's just that the
system is cumbersome to lazy dumbasses.
My 75 year old retired Air Force mechanic neighbor knew next to nothing
about computers when I helped him and his out of state family by giving
him my decent used computer. Two months later he's now proficient at
using GNU/Linux + Gnome (never uses the terminal). After I explained it,
he now signs and/or encrypts his email messages with PGP.
Point is: He's not a dumbass, he's willing to learn. Most people ARE
either dumbasses or not willing to learn. My neighbor and are are
(slightly) ahead of the curve. It's really no more difficult than
learning Win7 + $ANY_PROGRAM...
The folks I develop software with use encryption, so we do encrypt
messages between us. This simple feature is just "more effort" or a bit
"too complicated" for most morons to use.
I blame the defaults. Windows is prevalent only because it's the
default OS installed by the OEMs. People bitch and moan, but adapt to
the changes in Windows... They're mostly lazy gits.
Remember when XP came with a firewall that wasn't enabled by default?
Back then worms were rampant! Even though all we had to do was turn on
the damn firewall to stop them from spreading... NO AMOUNT OF ADVOCACY
COULD CHANGE THIS FACT: Most people would not enable the firewall.
Hardly anyone changes the defaults. MS finally shipped a service pack
and enabled the firewall by default. Guess what? No more worms.
If it was the default, then people would bitch a bit -- smart folks
would just assimilate the process; Afterwards it would be the norm.
THAT'S the "Tyranny of the default".
My biggest gripe is that email itself is shite. When I send HTML
formatted email, my software also sends the plain-text version, it's
multi-part... Even the encryption suit complains that HTML messages
may not working correctly with PGP. Fact is: These protocols are OLD.
Email was never designed to be secure! PGP was not designed to be very
extensible.
SMIME is a step in the right direction, but what we need are protocols
with the security built in by default (in an future-friendly extensible
way).
Why don't I use PGP? Because Morons.
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Remove the spaces from the first line of the PGP sig key.
I got a retarded "Filter error".
Hey moronic Slashdot devs: It's not just "an awful long string of letters there."
It's a fucking PGP signature you twits.
I guess that's just one more reason not to use PGP, everyone's a moron.
"Do Slashdotters Encrypt Their Email?"
What? Are you kidding? This is tin-foil territory, man. They even encrypt their comments!
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
because 99% of the people I email are not smart enough to decrypt my messages.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who uses email anymore? It's all about VoIP i.e. Mumble.
What the world is telling us is that it believes the chances of someone intercepting email over the network or stealing them from your mail server, and the costs associated with that vulnerability, are less than the costs of maintaining all the encryption keys and other information needed to provide global end-to-end encryption. This is just a fancy way of repeating that most people don't care.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
True, but many people that require your email to be signed (such as my employer did) require your key to be signed by someone that performs some sort of identity verification.
When I originally had to do this, I actually got my key (for free) from verisign, where they did that "deposit two random small bits of change into your bank account" thing, and then you had to tell them what the amounts were.
I don't think comodo did that with me, it's been awhile since I signed up. I had to switch to them when verisign stopped offering free personal certificates and mine with them expired.
I suppose I could have just rolled up my own self-signed cert when my verisign key expired. but at that time someone suggested comodo and I went with them.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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Jgffdsiurewugh37675326754%^73838kjudzy87^%656565
10 I don't encrypt my mail because the people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption
20 The people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption because they don't have to be because no one sends encrypted mail.
30 GOTO 10
http://www.beatsdredrecoo.com/
Yes. I use both S/MIME and GNUPG email encryption--with GNUPG preferred--to the extent practicable. However, the major problem with encrypted email is the "other half" of the communication. I invariably find that people do not reciprocate with encryption or do not use encrypted email at all. (In fact, in the past year, I can count on one hand the number of encrypted emails that I received from outside.) Despite point-and-click encryption options, despite automated encryption (e.g., FireFox can automatically encrypt), despite freely accessible software, the reality is that most people do not use encrypted email. Unfortunately, it will probably take a major event to help people recognize the volatility and accessibility of email. (And in the US, the so-called Stored Communications Act or state wiretap acts provide little, if any, protection.)
Sadly, part of the reason for people not encrypting their email is that they believe all encryption standards to be broken. Having seen several forensic analysis software suites with options to decrypt PGP, I doubt PGP's effectiveness in keeping out unwanted eyes. I wish this were not the case. I am aware of the many news stories where encryption was hailed as preventing evidence from being gathered but I doubt that just the encryption was the problem. On the one hand you have the fact that encryption is not integrated into email for everyone, and the other you have the lack of trust in a truly unbreakable encryption standard. You'd need both to happen to convince the masses to switch to encrypted emails.
Long time ago, I pretty much switched to Thunderbird because it supported S/MIME flawlessly. Private keys are stored in password-protected "software security device", a storage file protected by a password. The password is only needed when you have to sign or decrypt the mail, so it could (and should) be a strong password.
Fast forward few years, here is Thunderbird 3.0 . In their infinite wisdom, the developers decided that it's such a great idea to store POP/SMTP passwords in the same "secure storage", so the passphrase is reused for protecting S/MIME keys and POP passwords. So now, my only options are:
- enter a very long passphrase each time thunderbird is started
- use a weak passphrase making the whole thing pointless.
Such a PITA. Idiots.
Do you encrypt your home phone conversations? Do you encrypt you SMS text messages? Are your Facebook messages encrypted? Do people use email still?
So here's the general question. Why would I go through the trouble of encrypting a mail to my wife asking her, "Do I need to pickup milk?" The problem with PGP is that it requires the users to do something that normal users (non-techies) have no idea why and how to do it. For secure communications between companies that need to ensure their communications is private, securing communications between servers is usually good enough: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/smtp/securing-smtp-email-traffic
It's a pain in the neck, so I only encrypt a tiny fraction of technically sensitive emails and only to a short list of correspondents working on the same project.
That email is insecure may be common knowledge among slashdotters and others of their ilk, I'd hardly say it's common knowledge among the general population of email users. People don't know or care how the Internet works, so they don't understand the concept of eavesdropping. I think the only security issues most people have any concept of with regards to email are phishing and "hackers" breaking into their accounts. The idea that there's a program or system out there which can defend against eavesdropping is even more remote to most people, let alone the knowledge or ability to find, acquire, install, and setup such a solution.
As for those of us who know all about the dangers and the solutions: For almost three years my email signature included an invitation to send me encrypted and/or authenticated mail using PGP, and not a single person took me up on it, or even inquired about it. And this was while I was in grad school for computer engineering and working at a tech company. So I took it out my sig, because clearly no one is interested. In short, I don't use it because there's no one for me to use it with, and I think that's how it is for most people. Your web of trust is a web of one.
Besides, I don't worry about encrypting my email because I know better than to but private stuff in emails. I use gmail, so the web client knows what I'm typing anyway, and trusting the person on the other end to handle private messages securely is a joke.
Slashdot is not a game, Slashdot is not a game. Crap, I just lost points.
My experience is the reverse.
People like the conceptual idea of encrypting their email so it's really really private and no bad people on the internet can intercept and read their information - Bletchley Park and code breaking, James Bond, spies, secret communications - people are exposed to these ideas and get them, even think they are cool and clever. People get codes and code breaking as an idea. They'd really like to be able to send private details to their friends and feel really secure that nobody can read the details apart from the intended recipients. As somebody who helps a lot of friends and neighbours and elderly relatives with their online activities, this fear of intercepted private communications is one of the most frequently voiced: "I'd never do online shopping because somebody might steal my credit card details" "give me a phone and I'll tell you my bank details, I'd be scared to put them in an email to you in case a hacker read my email and stole those details" etc.
But their eyes glaze over at the process you need to undertake to carry out secure encryption and easy decryption.
It will take off when you can operationalise it for people for whom shopping through amazon is the limit for complexity in online activity.
On a lighter note, after the Manhattan project, the secure safes were examined and I think the two top combinations were segments of Pi and E.
First, people want to communicate, easily.
Second, the government and law enforcement would rather you did not encrypt communications. It makes it easier for their monitoring, and cheaper.
You would not generally encrypt something unless you had something to hide (or at least that would be the prosecutor's argument)
Privacy is assumed and trust is assumed (not correctly), but we all want to live in a trusting safe world and will find that or tell ourselves that to lessen the stress.
All these are social factors that can give some explaination why things are as they are.
E-mails go to all sorts of people who read them in all sorts of environments.
If you wanted an encrypted line of communication specifically between two mac-enabled folks this would work. But in that case, I think there are probably solutions out there for all OSes.
Most e-mail nobody cares if other people read it. And if there is something "secure" its lost in the vast sea of data of the internet. This is good enough for 99.9% of the people out there.
I think that most people who feel they need to encrypt their regular day-to-day e-mail are laughable in that they think that anyone else really cares what they are writing.
... and while i won't go as far as signing this comment (i admire the dedication folks, but really...), i try to use it as much as possible. I have done PGP trainings for the masses (see this and this, in french) and I'm doing my best to strenghten the web of trust.
I am also very curious to see where the STEED project leads us, it looks like a nice way to popularize PGP.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Well, this will get me laughed at on /. , but anyone using Lotus Notes can send encrypted/signed e-mail to anyone in their address book by default, and Notes can encrypt any local databases with one click. Say what you want about it, but having PKI built in and required to use it has advantages.
Many (most?) industries have regulatory requirements that business communications be available to regulators, or legal requirements to answer subpoenas, or auditing requirements, which necessitate keeping the message in plaintext to be produced later.
In environments like that, user-to-user encryption is forbidden, unless there's a key-escrow system in place, which defeats its purpose.
Have you tried iPGMail - http://ipgmail.com/ - for the iPhone/iPad?
I hardly ever encrypt my email because most of it doesn't contain sensitive information worth protecting. Maybe once a year I send someone I know something sensitive, so I encrypt it. But that only works if I have reason to trust the recipient's public key.
I do sign email more often than encrypting it. Whenever I make an official company announcement or release announcement about one of my free software projects, I sign that email.
I think you are missing something.. people DO use encryption in email.. we call those people "people who need encrypted emails"
I don't encrypt my email, because I really have no personal information that I care about going through email.. if I had a lot of important info going through my emails I would encrypt them.
This is just like asking.. "Anyone can read the tcp packets when browsing the web, why does anyone ever connect to non-ssl encrypted sites?" or "It's possible to track the origin or destination of every site you connect to on the web, why doesn't everyone use tor for every web session?"
The answer always comes down to.. when a person has a need to encrypt, spoof, or hide.. they will find a way to do it.. Till that time they will do everything insecurely because it is not a priority for them.
Granted sometimes that "need" is simply to calm down the paranoia some people have.. which is not a bad thing.
The other side of this is that encryption technologies aren't being marketed by big business because they want to read your emails because user data, profiling, and directed marketing is the booming business of the 2000s. Encryption would start cutting into profits.. I bet if 100% of the users on gmail started using encryption Google would ban encryption haha.
No! I don't encrypt email because the recipients are not capable of dealing with it. The best I can hope for is signed email.
For this reason, I am always keenly aware of the fact that I am communicating on an electronic post card for anyone to see, so nothing important or secure is ever transmitted via email.
The problem is hinted at above: you can publish your public key, link to it in signatures, but you can't get anybody to send you encrypted email. Likewise, who can you send encrypted email to?
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)
whatdoesitmatteryouhavenoideawhatthisstuffisforanyway
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
If it worth doing it, it is also worth overdoing it.
No, because people who are non-technical won't invest the time in building a web of trust. The whole concept is bizarre if you're not familiar with the issues. You have to generate a fingerprint from your key and then talk to someone (in person, ideally, perhaps on the phone) so that there is proof that you are you? And you have to establish a graph of trust that include everyone in your address book. Not even Alice and Bob want to be bothered with that.
So then the alternative to web of trust is to centralize certification with a third party like Verisign or Thawte (oh, except Thawte doesn't offer class 1 S/MIME certificates any more). Then it's up to each individual to validate their identity with a CA, pay the fee, and hope enough of their friends do likewise to justify the cost.
So then you have Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. These companies already have access to your social graph, and seems to me they could provide services to validate identity and issue certificates. But their business model wants to mine your social graph and your communication, so encrypting isn't in their best interest.
I've always wanted to encrypt my e-mail, but I could never talk any of my friends into doing it. If nobody is set up for encrypted e-mail, nobody can read your mail. Web sites have also dumbed-down their web pages by preventing autofill. Because most idiots - excuse me, netizens - don't use encrypted password databases such as Apple's Keychain, using them has been made much more difficult. We're all forced into a lowest common denominator internet.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I'm a tech support guy for PGP (now owned by Symantec), so I have some unique insights into email encryption. I think the vast majority of people using email encryption are doing so for regulatory reasons. For the most part, they are financial institutions or deal with financial institutions. Very few individuals are worried about personal privacy, but rather the security of corporate and financial data. Even if they are worried, storing it behind a password is sufficient for them.
Even without using PGP or an OpenPGP-compliant software (like GPG), there's still a fair amount of security built into email these days. All webmail uses HTTPS. SMTP uses STARTTLS to secure the session before any useful data gets sent. When we use a mail client, many of us are using POP3S or IMAPS which, again, adds in SSL. The transit layer is encrypted from end to end, even if the data stored on a mail server or in our mail client is not. Encrypting the individual messages is only really necessary if you're concerned about the messages being obtained from your local hard drive or a mail server. For most of us, I imagine that really isn't the case.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I don't and never have, what I'd quite like to know is does anyone here know someone who has _intercepted_ email?
At work we need to send and receive client information to and from billing companies and OpenPGP is used along with a handful of SFTP and FTPS servers. Getting a new business partner set up with OpenPGP-compatible software is usually not a big problem (we've only had one private key emailed to us) and it just works after it's set up.
I have a personal PGP key and so far only use it to encrypt backups generated from a cronjob and send them to offsite storage.
One of the key difficulties is if you are including attachments in encrypted e-mails. This often results in your e-mail being quarantined by (depending on your viewpoint) over judicious anti-virus software as it is unable to scan the encrypted e-mail and guarantee it is virus-free. Your e-mail never arriving rather defeats the purpose of sending it in the first place.
Surely you're not talking about OpenPGP here -- I'm pretty sure the whole body is encrypted there and noone can tell if it's one long piece of text or a dozen attached .exe viruses.
Also, citation needed. I don't see why an anti-virus company would be smart enough to acknowledge the existence of encryption, and at the same time stupid enough to forbid it.
Follow one simple common sense rule: Don't write anything you would object to the whole world seeing. Problem solved.
The answer to the anonymous reader's first question is mercifully short: No, I don't encrypt my email, but I sign all email sent using my primary personal email address. Answering their second question requires greater detail, because it turns on how I and (more importantly) the people with whom I communicate use email.
I don't sign all email sent using any one of my personal email addresses (one mailbox with multiple aliases) because that would require issuing a unique certificate for each and every address. While that's possible, my PKI doesn't make it easy to create or manage that type and amount of keying material. (I'm not sure any PKI does.) I don't know if it's possible to include multiple email addresses in a single X.509 certificate, whether by directly including multiple email addresses in the certificate's DN or by some mechanism similar to the Subject Alternative Name extension, but even if it were, I add new email aliases to my personal email on a regular basis, which would require re-issuing my user certificate each time. Re-issuing my user certificate isn't practical, because to do it right, I think that I'd have to revoke the old version of the certificate even if I used the same keying material. I operate my own CA, so I wouldn't have to pay to re-issue the certificate (which would be the other way to solve this problem), but I wouldn't ask my correspondents to trust my CA certificate - too risky. Instead, each correspondent would have to decide (again, every time I add a new email alias) to trust my new certificate, which isn't really practical especially for correspondents who don't know me personally. I will cheerfully admit that signing my email is purely an intellectual exercise on my part because I doubt that any of my correspondents verify my digital signatures, never mind the fact that everyone I write on a regular basis uses web-based email clients that do not support S/MIME.
I don't encrypt my personal email because none of my correspondents publish certificates. I don't sign/encrypt my email at work even though my client issues its employees and contractors X.509 certificates, both because none of my correspondents outside the client publish certificates and because up until very recently I didn't have a smartcard reader (so I couldn't use the certificates that were issued to me). I can't sign/encrypt my corporate email because my employer doesn't issue certificates. Whenever one of my employers or clients has tried to deploy email encryption as part of a service provided to its customers, it's had to assume that almost none of its customers are even capable of standards-based email encryption (e.g., S/MIME), hence the proliferation of solutions like ZixMail.
I'd love it if I could encrypt every single bit of correspondence, but it just isn't practical.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I'd love to encrypt my emails. But I'd never get any of my recipients, business or family, to install the sfwr so they could decrypt my traffic. Simple reason. Not everybody is a geek.
I've never seriously looked into it because I've assumed that the receiving side is also going to have to set up some kind of decryption or whathaveyou. I don't mind spending half an hour on wikipedia and google figuring out what to set up. However, teaching/doing-it-for my dozen or so regular important contacts (actually more, but let's be conservative) I don't think so. It won't take only half an hour for them. And they'll probably need me to redo it for them after a week anyway.
I'd do it with a geek friend if we had something to be secret about, but I don't really.
Also, I'm on the gmail like everyone else so there would be the hassle of figuring out a different setup to use. (Damn you Qualcomm and you're ditching of Eudora 10 years ago!)
Stupidity is its own reward.
Despite fully intending to for several years, I haven't actually sat down and devised a coherent plan for key management including an authoritative physical store for the private keys (a problem because in any given day I use 4+ computers and not one of them accesses my email directly), revocation certificates, choosing a reliable keyserver, and choosing a web-based way to distribute my public key to anyone so inclined.
To make matters worse, I'm still in a state of severe digital identity flux (SDIF henceforth). I've been in SDIF for a number of years, and the problem is compounded by the fact that all the commonly used and centralized "identity authorities" (self-styled) are corporate and make me acutely uncomfortable. Until I resolve SDIF and establish the requisite collection of identities, boundaries to each, and reputations, I feel as though what digital assets I have aren't worth the trouble, especially if it's going to be temporary. I don't want to go to all the trouble of planning things (as per paragraph #1) only to then have to revoke and re-issue everything.
I used to encrypt my emails to the few people I knew who supported PGP, but guess what? Most folks don't have PGP and frankly, they don't care, and most emails I write you can read - if you really want to know where my daughter's cell phone was, or what I was planning on making for dinner....
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
And when I do need encryption I attach an encrypted file. My hard disk is, however, encrypted.
Let make email client to use encrypt based on reception's perference.
Sender do not make the decision encrypt, but receiver does.
Whew - thanks for the info. I don't use it myself, but GP's comments made me wonder if mail clients with encryption/decryption could really be that stupid.
But only when I have to.
I have a couple of healthcare-related jobs and we need to encrypt emails with client names.
At job 1, we use GPG and I'm in charge of solving any problems. Unfortunately, it had been deployed long before I started. When employees' hard drives crash they have to get a new key, get everyone else to import it, etc.
Now everyone has an iPad, which means most employees no longer encrypt email unless the message contains sensitive information and both employees still use their PCs for email. In practice this means that a lot of emails contain initials in place of names that are indecipherable to the recipient.
After my most recent clean install, I went a while without encryption, but kept getting emails that were encrypted, so I gave in and installed it.
At job 2, my business partner and I are both on gmail, so I trust the SSL to be secure enough. When I email the county, I use a zix-powered portal they provide to send sensitive information -- more often than not they reply without taking any security procedures.
Encrypted comment begins now...
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin)
Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org/
jA0EAwMCe0la60+pZSWuyV8bBnhItg/xbBvgbDi1bzHD2lNv77zrOESsRrQbjAaQ
jf/UbbNeDDcxk4xdSo+vzXSFVwHa6KylaSHnkj2xi39PCA1FbMWcyQs6S+7uyDIm
gKO6V2U4ku8S1iFGlpF28w=3D=3D
=3D18He
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
This old dog worked in software security for ages. I learned back then to never give away my social security number, credit or debit card number and I NEVER USE ON LINE BANKING, not even to browse my account balance. I go to an ATM for that balance.
What is on the net is my name, and my email address. On my system (laptop and isp email accounts) I carry no confidential data about me or anyone else.
Email for me is social.
When I have a confidential document to email, the attachment is encrypted, and my recipient is able to decrypt. But no encryption keys are stored on disk. They are pulled down in an encrypted stream, and that extracted from it.
I guess you could say I have protect my confidential information.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Please elaborate on this point.
I think what you are saying is that if I have an email which needs to go to bob, mary and phil. That I can create a PGP key which utilizes bob, mary, and phil's public keys and that email can be opened by bob , mary and phil's private key.
I have never seen this, can you show me an example of how you would accomplish this using a GPG or PGP interface.
All you have to do is add more recipients, the message gets negilibly bigger for each one, maybe a few hundred bytes.
In PGP, just drag more keys to the recipients list.
No different than I have my PGP program set to always add me to the recipients list, so I can always read messages I sent.
Encryption is not a technical issue. It's easy to get GPG running with Thunderbird. Im pretty sure that it's just as easy with other programs/platforms. What I found quite annoying: Having to enter my passphrase when I sent an email, can almost certainly be solved by unlocking your passphrase when logging in (on Gnome at least), like they do with other programs. If it's technically possible to do this already, then it would be quite easy I suspect to build this in for GPG/Enigmail. And hence, not technically challenging to do this for other platforms.
I think the real problem is that it's not installed/setup by default, and the passphrase unlock mechanism is not default or currently NA on some platforms. If it were, then all of this would be purely an awareness problem. If all the above were default, i'd just have to click the button for encryption and my email would zip away.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
I tried to use it over a decade ago. Even other guys that were into encryption with the exception of one guy found it to hard to deal with. Anyone outside of a computers science background, FUGETABOUTIT! I might as well as to go to the moon. Besides, what's so secret anyhow? Someone might know I'm having family over for Thanksgiving or I blew a Mustang away with my Caddy? What's really surprising to me is how few people use encryption between machines with mail (sendmail). It's easy to do, yet so many people won't do it. Just set up the certificate and away it goes!
Encrypt? No. But I will occasionally *sign* an email, if it contains, say, a contract attachment or some similarly important business-related content.
but I used to work for PGP...
my email is too cryptic
Works for us at work, and for grandma. The decryption process for unwashed masses is as simple as http://www.7-zip.org/download.html run the setup, 'next' your way through it (which end-users are awesome at, ask any malware developer). Double-click your .7z file and it prompts for a password. Sure its only symmetric encryption and the pass-phrase needs to be sent via secure out-of-band method but it beats PGP.
The Post Office is ideally positioned to provide encryption key generation and distribution and become a key operator in the secure communications space. Imagine if they charged $1 to provide every a PGP (or GPG) key pair (by going to their URL and performing a key generation process) and served as a PGP/GPG key server.
When I want to send a secure Email, I got to their server and pull down the public key of any person I want to communicate securely with.
The thing that makes it of value for the Post Office has to be some on-going revenue. Perhaps a 1-cent charge for domestic mail encryption services?
How do they get the penny?
They serve as the broker not just for the keys, but for the mail trasmission. WHen they create a key, instead of creating a key for "bob@gmail.com" (or whatever) they key is created for "9347283492534324@securemail.usps.gov" (for example). My Email arrives at their server, and they turn it around and send the mail on to bob@gmail.com. Sure, Bob and I could exchange key pairs and cut them out of the loop. But would most "regular people"?
Using this scheme, then it might be possible to achieve the secure and assured internet identities needed. If the USPS can be trusted (and they are certainly trusted for scads of financial transactions today, including the mailing of Christmas cards full of cash) the could extend the micro-transaction scheme to put Paypal and other on-line payment systems out of business.
Of course, they'd have to lay off half of the 500K union guys working at the USPS now since this would continue to eat into the vanishing surface mail bundle. But that's OK, IMHO. It's going to happen anyway.
Just a thought.
So, a lot of people mentioned that if a webclient supported encryption then all would be well. However, this is very flawed. Hushmail for example launched, and everyone was very happy that it launched with PGP support... What noone realizes is that you must store your private key on their server to make it work. As such, hush mail can now see all your mail. You are dependent on them being reliable with your information. This makes it no different then GMAIL. AND Because the security isn't really there, it makes it MORE dangerous. If I believe that no one can read my messages except the intended reader, there may be reveal information that I would other wise not write in email form. This creates a false sense of security, for both the user of such a service, and the people who send encrypted mail to them. Without webclient support, which is near impossible. Then it becomes near impossible to make widespread. People don't really use think clients.