After Lavabit Shut-Down, Dotcom's Mega Promises Secure Mail 158
Lavabit may no longer be an option, but recent events have driven interest in email and other ways to communicate without exposing quite so much, quite so fast, to organizations like the NSA (and DEA, and other agencies). Kim Dotcom as usual enjoys filling the spotlight, when it comes to shuttling bits around in ways that don't please the U.S. government, and Dotcom's privacy-oriented Mega has disclosed plans to serve as an email provider with an emphasis on encryption. ZDNet features an interview with Mega's CEO Vikram Kumar about the complications of keeping email relatively secure; it's not so much the encryption itself, as keeping bits encrypted while still providing the kind of features that users have come to expect from modern webmail providers like Gmail:
"'The biggest tech hurdle is providing email functionality that people expect, such as searching emails, that are trivial to provide if emails are stored in plain text (or available in plain text) on the server side,' Kumar said. 'If all the server can see is encrypted text, as is the case with true end-to-end encryption, then all the functionality has to be built client side. [That’s] not quite impossible but very, very hard. That’s why even Silent Circle didn’t go there.'"
Re: New Plan (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you need a new new plan
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-usps-takes-photos-mail-072949079.html
Go Kim! You Magnificent Slimy Bastard... (Score:2, Interesting)
I find this farcical, so the NSA is going to start playing whack-a-mole with a what will be in the near future, a plethora of alternative secure email providers. Ask the RIAA how well that works out.
AC.. because I can.
We require a new encryption scheme (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that private key, in server solution, are available on the server. Even in Mega, the private key is located server side and the password/passphrase is supplied by the end user over SSL. So, the weakpoints are SSL and the domestic machine, as well as an intercept placed on a server at Mega.
What we require is a private key that a person hold, on a smartcard type arrangement. From this we derive a personal certificate authority and a public key. We issue certificates through our personal CA for particular roles and upload them to our provider. This then acts as our transport encryption, digital signatures, email encryption and so forth. The private key never enters the network and everyone has a unique encrypted layer, rather than a common SSL certificate.
Decryption is performed by streaming the contents through the smartcard. We can add additional factors to this authentication such as biometrics, pin, etc. In fact, the user should be able to determine the amount of factors, their order, etc. The decrypted output can either be sent back into the machine (if you feel it is secure), or forwarded to a secure offline machine.
We only need to make sure that this forwarding eliminates the possibility of an exploit and that means a limited stack that only provides certain features. Such as text and/or video.
There is no reason that a standard mobile phone could not have two physical portions, one connected to the web and another for secure comms.
Eliminate mail servers (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that email is managed from a central location.
If email clients opereated as fully encrypted standalone, "peer to peer" entities, the central mail server would be eliminated, and snoops would only be able to grab the encrypted content, and perhaps the locations of sender and receiver.
Re:Warning (Score:4, Interesting)
Step 1: Kim Dotcom starts Mega Crypto, which is promptly adopted by the world's political dissidents and leakers.
Step 2: All pending government litigation against Mega suspiciously disappears and his assets are unfrozen.
The guy's accustomed to his ill-gotten gains -- even setting aside the rampant piracy of Megaupload, he's a convicted fraudster and embezzler, and has bribed public officials for protection before.
I suspect that if offered the choice between losing his $20 million house, his 12 cars, his yacht, and becoming a partner of the US government, it wouldn't take him much to crack.
Re:New Plan (Score:4, Interesting)
Only the outside of the envelope. They can't see contents unless they open the envelope, which requires a warrant. They can't retroactively open your letter once it has been delivered. If you want to encrypt the contents, you can do that too, but you can't encrypt the routing information.
With encrypted email, the header is unencrypted because it's needed for routing, so the government can record every entire message that passes through a cooperating server. With encrypted email, you could copy every message that passes through a server and decide later which ones you want to try and decrypt.
If you want to add real anonymity, you can use anonymous email accounts. But that's thin security. A government really interested in who's getting and sending anonymous emails can figure it out by tracing packet routing.
For harder-to-crack anonymity, you can upload encrypted files anonymously to a server and download all the messages periodically. Whichever ones you can decrypt with your keys are addressed to you. It's very inefficient, but there's no way to figure out who got your messages without either seizing your computer or hacking it. They can still identify who sent it and what set or receivers might have gotten it by tracing packets.