EFF Announces STARTTLS Everywhere To Help Make Email Delivery More Secure (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: When it comes to messaging tools, people have started to show greater interest in whether encryption is used for security, and the same for websites -- but not so much with email. Thanks to the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, email security is being placed at the top of the agenda. The privacy group today announces STARTTLS Everywhere, its new initiative to improve the security of the email ecosystem. STARTTLS is an addition to SMTP, and while it does not add end-to-end encryption, it does provide hop-to-hop encryption, which is very much a step in the right direction. In a blog post, EFF elaborates SMARTTLS for the uninitiated, and outlines how it worked around some of the tech's underlying challenges: There are two primary security models for email transmission: end-to-end, and hop-to-hop. Solutions like PGP and S/MIME were developed as end-to-end solutions for encrypted email, which ensure that only the intended recipient can decrypt and read a particular message. Unlike PGP and S/MIME, STARTTLS provides hop-to-hop encryption (TLS for email), not end-to-end. Without requiring configuration on the end-user's part, a mailserver with STARTTLS support can protect email from passive network eavesdroppers. For instance, network observers gobbling up worldwide information from Internet backbone access points (like the NSA or other governments) won't be able to see the contents of messages, and will need more targeted, low-volume methods. In addition, if you are using PGP or S/MIME to encrypt your emails, STARTTLS prevents metadata leakage (like the "Subject" line, which is often not encrypted by either standard) and can negotiate forward secrecy for your emails.

Comments

Re:This doesn't help man-in-the-middle attacks

[crow]

This raises the effort required from passive snooping to active interception. This is a good thing. This is an attempt to break mass surveillance.

Re:This doesn't help man-in-the-middle attacks

[KiloByte]

Solved with DNSSEC+DANE, which for SMTP actually sees some deployment, unlike HTTPS, where anyone who can control one of 400+ CAs, which includes every government and big enough organized crime organization, can produce validly signed certs. With DNSSEC, you'd need to take over either the registrar or TLD -- unlike the CA model, the specific registrar your target uses rather than any of them.

If you try to man-in-the-middle DNSSEC, all you get is a failure to deliver the mail. Which any properly configured server (ie, not Gmail) will report to the sender.