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What Gmail's New TLS Icon Really Means: Email Encryption Is Still Broken
An anonymous reader writes: On Safer Internet Day Google announced that Gmail will display warning signs for missing encryption and authentication, a great initiative indeed! Now that it's live we've taken it for a spin, only to find that the warning when composing email is quite slow (for new domains), and that they fail to mention that the non-authenticated TLS encryption that the currently sad state of SMTP encryption leaves us with is really poor, and vulnerable to almost anything (except passive wiretapping). I rather wish they took a stance on how we could move on to proper email encryption.
The problem here is that crypto infrastructure in general is too fucking hard for anyone but dedicated security professionals to work with. Hell, even they have a shitload of trouble with it, as we've seen from the many OpenSSL bug debacles lately! This technology is way beyond what average, or even above-average, computer users are capable of dealing with. Some people will probably reply saying, "But it's not that hard! I can understand it!", yet those are the kind of people who understand this technology the least. At least average computer users know crypto technology is way beyond their capabilities. These self-proclaimed "experts", on the other hand, don't realize how much they don't know! Until crypto becomes far more simpler for average folks to use then we just won't see it used.
Use S/MIME, PGP, etc...
All the transport level stuff isn't going to protect your email or ensure it's not modified in transit (or at the destination or origin).
Gmail's help on their new icon:
If you see the red padlock while composing a message
Don’t send confidential material, like tax forms or contracts, to that email address.
Fuck that... if you're sending confidential email without encrypting the content, you're already screwed.
For semi-important information, one should at least digitally sign the content to prove it wasn't modified in transit (ex. this should be used for any contracts, and if it's very sensitive, it should also be encrypted, and not just on the transport layer).
Bill Gates said they would solve the spam problem a few years back. Yet my inbox under office365 that my employer uses is a chum bucket of spam, while good cron and batch job emails end up in "junk" half the time. wtf, Gates. billions and you couldn't at least have pushed domain a authentication/verification system?
I consider gmail to by my biggest threat to the privacy of my email.
If I want end to end security, well there is a standard for that. I use it. It works.
But gmail is close to having a monopoly on email. It isn't quite yet, but almost everyone I know uses exclusively gmail now. That means if I want to email them, Google IS the man in the middle. I can't easily email my friends without giving Google the contents of my email, which they will use to build a profile of me - and I've never signed up for any of their services or estasblished any kind of business relationship with them.
Furthermore, most small to medium businesses are using gmail.
Think about this: we used to have a decentralized, non-censorable, email standard that no one entity could control or pervert for their own ends. But the whole world said, "Fuck that, we want one advertising company to see everybody's email!.
Google is the main threat to the privacy of email today. Like Bruce Schneier observed, they want you to have email privacy from everyone except them.
Some of you will have a hard time with this, but... why is the problem here with SMTP? Is it really that hard to understand that MAIL TRANSPORT is not compatible with HIDE MY STUFF? Good grief people, you can't truly be that ignorant.
Do you trust that anything you mail through the Post office, FedEX, UPS, or any other mail service is "Secure"? Do you believe it's impossible for people to know what's in your boxes because you use those services? I can provide you a list of drug dealers who thought so too, but they are jailed for that thought.
Want secure, use secure. Lotus Notes was friggin awesome for securing content. Nobody wanted to pay for it though, and all the cool kids were using Outlook because you could drag-n-drop audio files right into your email (also read fart noises). Many Writing applications have encrypt/decrypt features. Zip has it too, but generic standard email? Come on now.. it's a MAIL TRANSPORT and works very well as a mail transport.
If you somehow believe "Generic Transport" can also be "Secure", I got some ocean side property you may be interested in buying.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How are you going to implement that for web mail exactly? Will you let the sever do it? That means Google gets to assert your identity, and if they ever get compromised we have a whole mess of people sending signed mail with signatures that may or may not be valid and we are back to a more or less unauthenticated situation.
You could have the client do with JavaScript but that still leaves the door open, if the server is compromised and sends an altered script how can you know?
You go the traditional install plugin route, but then web mail is no more portable than a fat client.
There just isn't actually a good answer for this. You can have secure E-mail or portable E-mail but not both.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Google is trying to force servers to use STARTTLS encryption for port 25 MX traffic, this is all commendable, but they are giving their users a false sense of security. When gmail does not display the broken padlock it simply means that the first hop to the recipient's MX server supports STARTTLS, but mail is routinely stored in plain text queues on multiple servers, transmitted on in additional hops that are not necessarily encrypted, and even the first hop encryption often times uses self-signed certs or certs signed by non-authoritative CAs, so the message being sent, while being encrypted is still vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.
But Google is giving the impression that if that first hop offers STARTTLS, then the message will be sent securely and encrypted. This will result in people putting all sorts of credit card details and other information in their emails thinking (because Google said so) that the message is secure, when nothing could be farther from the truth.
Google needs to stop this right away, it's going to do way more damage than good. There is only one way to hide the content of an email from prying eyes and that is with properly implemented PGP encryption. There is no way to hide the meta (envelope) data from prying eyes. It is really important that people not be misled on this account.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Second, Google is unwilling to provide such a plugin because it would interfere with the company's ability to scan e-mail and build advertising profiles.
Actually they were working on a PGP plugin for Chrome, though it's moving very slowly, possibly dead.
nobody should be using web based email.
At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then realized that sarcasm makes no sense here. So you must be serious.
It's quite simple - use email for the 99.9% of your communications that does not need to be secure. Send your tax forms through a secure web site. Problem solved. Web email is still useful.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How are you going to implement that for web mail exactly?
End to End with something like Mailvelope?
You go the traditional install plugin route, but then web mail is no more portable than a fat client. There just isn't actually a good answer for this. You can have secure E-mail or portable E-mail but not both.
People SHOULD be using "webmail" via IMAP with proper e-mail clients Then it's portable because there are mobile mail clients that can support PGP. So yes you can have portable secure e-mail, even on a phone or tablet.
You are calling for link-encryption. That is obvious nonsense for email. Proper email encryption is end-to-end and does not trust the transport at all.
Incidentally, this problem has been solved since 1991 with PGP.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This company lives off of mining your data and violating your privacy. You expect them to allow you to fully protect your communications to the point where they can't figure out how to advertise to you?
Give me a fucking break.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The reason people don't use PGP is because of the name Pretty Good Privacy makes it sound amateurish (that and the initialism PGP is too similar to PHP). Maybe they could get more users if they called it Good Privacy or Very Good Privacy, but I know there's a local-maximum trust in there somewhere because I think trust would go down if they called it Excellent Privacy or Perfect Privacy.
IMO, more people would consider using it if it used an animal name or some name from mythology.
Imagine if you could actually write good clean documented code!
Good example of how not to code.
- no useful comments
- the only two comments conflict with each other
- no line breaks before "if" constructs or after "else" constructs
- assumes existence of files for which it doesn't check existence
- doesn't check status for execution of openssl commands
Not bad for a six-year old.
M
As someone who just inherited a huge repo full of uncommented code with nondescript variable names (A, B, C...) and no error handling, I have to say that the parent comment isn't scored high enough. Posting crap like that on the internet does nobody any good. Even if it is short enough to understand, poorly written code is especially intolerable if the subject is cryptography.
(Anyone who says that their code documents itself hasn't tried waiting a year and then trying to figure out why their undocumented code doesn't handle some edge case.)
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.