Chaos Computer Club, Others Scoff At German Email Security Move As "Marketing"

The move on the part of three large German ISPs to provide more secure email, marketed as "Email made in Germany" (Deutsche Telekom's part specifically was mentioned here yesterday), has drawn sharp criticism from security experts, according to a report at Ars. Among those experts are members of the Chaos Computing Club, and GPGMail lead Lukas Pitschl, who responded to the move from Deutsche Telekom, GMX, and Web.de to encrypt all email in transmission with SMTP TLS : "'If you really want to protect your e-mails from prying eyes, use OpenPGP or S/MIME on your own desktop and don't let a third-party provider have your data,' he told Ars. 'No one of the "E-Mail made in Germany" initiative would say if they encrypt the data on their servers so they don't have access to it, which they probably don't and thus the government could force them to let them access it.'"

Comments

Its a start

[maas15]

It's a start, at least the passwords are safe... there's a tendency for security communities to scoff at nearly any half improvement

Re:Its a start

[Dan541]

It's a recurring problem in the IT industry. Anything that isn't 100% secure gets dismissed.

SMTP TLS goes a long way towards making email more secure. So long as the providers aren't pretending they are unable to hand it over to law enforcement (encrypted on the server) then it isn't a problem. User education is the key.

Re:Its a start

[Opportunist]

A start, yes. Whether it is in the right direction is debatable.

The problem is that things today are marketed as absolutes. Just like in this case. IT IS SECURE is bull. And the ones providing it know it. It's a better choice than many alternatives, yes, but you know how people will react to it. Just like they did to antivirus and firewalls. I have antivirus, so I needn't be wary of infections anymore, the antivirus will take care of that!

Sadly, that's not the case. And people will react in similar ways here. Because they don't want to deal with security, they want someone else to do it for them. If there is not somebody like this, they will, at least maybe, be vigilant. If there's someone promising them privacy and security, they'll rely on it.

Re:Its a start

[Dan541]

SMTP TLS does absolutely nothing for security if even one provider in the chain doesn't use it.

Nobody has claimed otherwise.

SMTP TLS is for securing traffic between servers, no one has said that it will prevent your provider from being complicit in handing over your personal data or that it will protect you if NOT used. Not sure why you felt the need to point out the obvious, BTW did you know an empty Fire Extinguisher won't help you to fight fires?

SMTP TLS does protect email the fact that it doesn't provide 100% anti-james-bond security doesn't make it useless. Is the lock on my front door useless, since it won't stop a sledgehammer, crowbar, chainsaw or law enforcement?

Of course it does become a problem if someone touts it as offering more secure than it really does, but this is also a problem that exists with physical security. Yet we don't so readily dismiss our wooden doors, glass windows and cheap residential locks.

Re:Its a start

[ogdenk]

1.) SMTP TLS has been around for a while.

2.) It can be used to encrypt traffic between client and server and serverserver assuming one end isn't using some 15 year old MTA or is too lazy to set up TLS.

So no, it's not a backwards step. It helps prevent sniffing e-mail traffic on the local LAN from client->server at least and most of the time serverserver. It's more like they are 15 years late doing something that should have already been done. It does NOT help with mail stored on the server so if it's hacked/siezed you're still screwed.

The biggest problem is the NSA is basically trying to render SSL/TLS useless by bullying CA's into handing over keys.

The NSA has shown us the most basic weakness with TLS/SSL recently. Really, until everyone starts using GPG or SMTP is replaced with something more modern, there is no such thing as comfortable end-to-end e-mail security.

But you're right, they shouldn't try to instill a sense of false security but that's not the same as NO security. SSL/TLS does really help and any mail provider that doesn't support it by now should be considered insane and possibly blacklisted.

Think about it though, if they came out and told the public "we're spending a bunch of money and resources to help e-mail security out a little bit so people can have a slightly smaller chance of reading your mail" they would get screamed at.

So what ever became of public key escrows?

[goombah99]

When public key encryption first came out in the late 70s, the promise was we would all have escrowed public keys. A public key would be linked to an e-mail address in the same way a DNS server connects a URL to an IP. I woul dnot need to know your public key ahead of time, my e-mail client would quietly fetch it for me using your e-mail address, and then encrypt the message.

So basically by now all e-mail should be encrypted by default if the future had panned out the way everyone thought in 1976.

All that's missing is ubiquitious public key servers and a universal protocol for binding a key to an e-mail. We do this a zillion times a day for DNS, so it's not technologically difficult.

Why didn't it happen?

Re:So what ever became of public key escrows?

[MichaelSmith]

I use the enigmail extension for thunderbird. It transparently handles the encryption and decryption of messages. It looks up PGP keys on key servers for recipients of the messages I send. I store my key on pool.sks-keyservers.net

The choice of key server is entirely up to me. It is not built into enigmail.

Re:So what ever became of public key escrows?

[MichaelSmith]

Stop using a web browser for a mail interface.

Well yeah but web mail is used by many people for its convenience. People rely on it for cloud storage. Telling people to stop using it won't make them stop, not easily.

Re:So what ever became of public key escrows?

[goombah99]

I use the enigmail extension for thunderbird. It transparently handles the encryption and decryption of messages. It looks up PGP keys on key servers for recipients of the messages I send. I store my key on pool.sks-keyservers.net

The choice of key server is entirely up to me. It is not built into enigmail.

Cool. But this isn't really fixing the core problem of universality. If everyone uses a different key server, then I have to know what key server someone used to send them an e-mail (and vica versa). We don't have that problem with DNS. every URL gets resolved. the DNS servers push out best guess routing tables. The whole internet is transparent to the user just given the DNS and a URL. It should be that way for e-mail.

Ideally you could imagine that the DNS resolver would also resolve translation of the e-mail address to a public key. It could cache the keys itself, or know what key server to query. The problem with that idea perhaps is that there are more e-mail addresses than URLs. So what you want to do instead us have the url in the e-mail address proivide the service.

THat is, if I want to send an e-mail to foo@hotmail.com then my client query's hotmail for the public key for foo. If hotmail decided not to particiapte the DNS could provide an alternative address for a catch-all server of keys.

But I just don't see how this works if everyone is using a different service provided for their key. How can my client know what to do??

Re:So what ever became of public key escrows?

[MichaelSmith]

There is an online pool of key servers with a limited number of entry points so that each client knows which servers to search for keys. It is very reliable and I have never had to manually search for a key to exchange messages with a person. Finding the keys isn't the problem. Complacency is. I recently worked with a group of security conscious people who had PGP set up. I encrypted all the messages I sent to them initially but they sent their replies in plain text so I gave up.

Enigmail here searches pool.sks-keyservers.net, subkeys.pgp.net, sks.mit.edu, ldap://certserver.pgp.com

Re:So what ever became of public key escrows?

[icebike]

The enigmail configuration has a keyserver setup UI with defaults loaded, which makes the upload of keys quite easy. If we are not at the point where my mother could do it, then we are close.

But this requires I know the keyserver used by every person I might e-mail. How do I know that ahead of time?

No, any key server will do.
And there are hundreds of them, and they all talk to each other.

Any modern email program will have a pgp plugin which will query the server for you