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Silent Circle, Lavabit Unite For 'Dark Mail' Encrypted Email Project

Posted by timothy on from the it's-so-spooky dept.

angry tapir writes "Two privacy-focused email providers have launched the Dark Mail Alliance, a project to engineer an email system with robust defenses against spying. Silent Circle and Lavabit abruptly halted their encrypted email services in August, saying they could no longer guarantee email would remain private after court actions against Lavabit, reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden."

6 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Did the NSA just kill SMTP? by Defenestrar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's been around for what, 40 years? Working, (relatively) anonymous, and totally insecure mail transfer with tons of inertia. Never thought I'd see the day where there might be a small sliver of opportunity for another protocol to actually happen. Ars has a nice article about it too.

    1. Re:Did the NSA just kill SMTP? by mlts · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What might be a decent replacement for SMTP, but for small messages only (under 1-5 megs) would be a NNTP-like structure.

      User "A" at site foo.com wants to send a message to user "B" at bar.com. The message is encrypted with OpenPGP to b@bar.com. Then, the server at foo.com drops it into a store and forward pool similar to a newsgroup. bar.com eventually receives the latest messages, notices a message addressed to one of its users, copies it out of the "newsgroup", and into the user's mailbox.

      Of course, a blinding factor can be attached so no other machines with the NNTP-like pool can tell that the message is addressed to someone at bar.com, they can tell it is injected from foo.com and expires in a few hours, but that is that.

      Of course, the disadvantage is that a whole lot of irrelevant info goes between company servers. The advantage is that communications are protected, as one might see a server drop a message into the stream, but there is no way to detect a server fishing one out.

    2. Re:Did the NSA just kill SMTP? by dpilot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      RTFA - their intent is to make an Open Source solution. Given that these people shut down their businesses rather than compromise their principles, I'd find it hard to believe they were about to release patent-encumbered source code on the world.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  2. Another mail protocol by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This one with security/encryption built in from the ground up this time. Would be more interesting that instead of the comments of Microsoft (with deep ties with the NSA), yahoo and google (both may not be very happy with the NSA, but still must give them their users accounts info by law) the article focused on comments from people from i.e. the IETF for implementing it as an standard in a more worldwide (even personal) way.

  3. Thanks Snowden by Jakosa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I first saw the Snowden-film from Hong Kong I thought: "damn! he has forfeited his life and nobody will care. And now this! Not only has he shaken the political world-society, he has also aroused the tech-world and made it possible to make some major changes. Hope I will be running this new protocol by next year and be able to send super-secret Christmas-cards to the select few who is also using it!

  4. It already exits and is free by shellster_dude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Bitmessage: P2P, encrypted, anonymous. The project is pretty new, but other than a couple scalability issues, I think this project has major potential. http://bitmessage.org/