Is Hushmail Still Safe? 264
Ringo Kamens writes to ask if the use of Hushmail can still be considered a secure method of communication:
"For a long time, Hushmail was considered a very secure email provider until an affidavit (PDF) from a DEA agent in 2007 showed that they had handed over 12 CDs of possibly decrypted data to law enforcement. Now, Cryptome has posted that the Hushmail encryption program is no longer the same program for which Hushmail releases their source. Is Hushmail even safe to use anymore?"
Is Hushmail still safe? (Score:5, Funny)
For the kind of low-level crimes I like to commit, Hushmail is safe as milk.
If you like to blow up American stuff, it's not so safe anymore.
Re:Is Hushmail still safe? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is Hushmail still safe? (Score:5, Funny)
exactly
this has been the case all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Informative)
Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally. What came out during the earlier revelations was the company handed over email that they decrypted on their servers, but couldn't do so for the applet based encryption. They said up front that the applet was far more secure.
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:4, Interesting)
What came out during the earlier revelations was the company handed over email that they decrypted on their servers, but couldn't do so for the applet based encryption. They said up front that the applet was far more secure.
IIRC, Hushmail started passing out 'bad' java applets so that they could grab encryption keys.
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:4, Informative)
No, this is not what they did. If they had changed their applet in order to achieve this, myself and lots of other regular hushmail users would have noticed when we were prompted to approve a new version to execute in our browsers.
What they did do was introduce a javascript-only version which sends the keys to their servers, and make it an insecure-by-default choice. Anyone not paying attention could have easily uploaded their keys.
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Informative)
If you're encrypting email yourself then hushmail is just unnecessary. Use fireGPG with gmail and you've already got better privacy than hushmail (i.e. no need to trust their java applications)
plus you get the entertainment of watching google struggle to choose adverts for your "----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----" email
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:4, Informative)
Except for the fact that every character you type into the gmail compose field gets sent over the network in clear text, as does your session key. Google does it so they can provide on the fly features like spellcheck and suggestions etc, but it is a huge risk.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9755575-7.html [cnet.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You would think so, but check again.
It will post your password to an HTTPS action, but then it reverts back to clear text. Also try firing up wireshark sometime and notice that every single keypress (last time I checked) in the compose mail field sends out an xmlhttprequest. Web 2.0 is awesome.
There is a firefox plugin http://www.customizegoogle.com/ [customizegoogle.com] that will force https if you want, but even if you type https into the bar, gmail will attempt to downgrade your session back to http.
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Informative)
Not if you use https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] as your login page. Handy trick, but it should be the default.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem always arises when another human is involved.
Don't humans write the software?
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Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally.
The problem is that the applet can't be verified. And, honestly, this should never have been the first indication of that.
Or rather, the applet could be verified -- you'd just have to verify it every time. The only way I know of to make this easy would be with a Firefox extension -- but at that point, to borrow the other poster's idea, why use Hushmail in the first place? [getfiregpg.org]
Hushmail is really a way of making GPG easy for people who don't understand how it works. The flaw in this is that to use GPG at all secur
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Interesting)
From my own admittedly anecdotal experience, I'd say Hushmail is just a way to make money. Not only do they constantly bombard you with pleas to upgrade to their paid service, but they are supposed to delete your account if you don't check it every 3 weeks. But my account was deleted under this claim when it had been only 1 week since I checked it. Yes, I'm sure. Not only that, but when I tried to create an account with the same name, whenever I pressed okay I got an error message that I couldn't use that name without upgrading. After that I'd started using GPG with Gmail. Both are free.
I guess I'm old-fashioned, or just learned better because I was raised in a poor rural area, but it's better to learn how to do something yourself if it's easy anyway than to pay someone too much to do it for you.
Encryption + web-based don't mix well (Score:5, Insightful)
Anytime your private encryption key is "over there" you are at risk. If your private key is stored on *their* servers in such a manner that *they* can get to it, your privacy is at risk.
As a software developer, I'm in a pilot program to use encryption for digital signatures. Despite the relative simplicity of using openSSL functionality, it's been surprisingly painstaking and laborious to put everything together.
See, real security requires outright paranoia. How do you prevent your CA key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all-but guarantee that it hasn't been? To do this, you have to make it not only unlikely, but impossible to be compromised in every conceivable way. How do you prevent your client's private key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all but guarantee it? How do you prevent a malicious client from obtaining a signed certificate? How do you prevent 3rd parties from MITM attacks? How do you provide high-level security for all the above, while still providing redundancy for disaster recovery? How do you prevent compromises stemming from a social engineering attack?
Not including implementation and ongoing maintenance of these procedures, the cost of just proving that you have all these measures in place runs to many thousands of dollars!
A solution that answers all these and every conceivable related question is surprisingly difficult, and many, if not most, of the problems are not technical, but social.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For email that was decrypted on their servers using the Outlook plugin, they were pretty much forced to hand it over or be shut down bu the Powers that Be in their country.
Hushmail offers one service that no other E-mail company provides -- decryption of E-mails on the local client. I can sit at any machine that has a JVM and that is trusted to not have a keylogger, log onto Hushmail, and decrypt any new mail locally. The mail remains encrypted on Hushmail's servers.
Another advantage of Hushmail is their
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Informative)
you're probably better off encrypting your emails yourself instead of allowing a third party to convince you that they have encrypted it.
RTFAs much? Hushmail provide you with an optional, open app to encrypt things before they leave your computer. But now it seems that (based on differing hashes) the code used 'in the field' is not the same as the reference source code they show on their site.
I'd be inclined, given Hushmail's excellent track record on openness, to believe that this is more an oversight, i.e. something not updated, than a turn to the dark side.
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If only popular email clients would ship with encryption built in, set up by the account creation wizard and turned on by default...
Once everyone had the ability to check signatures and decrypt encrypted mail, and the client defaulted to encrypted if a key was available we would be half way there. Unfortunately there is no good system at the moment for hiding the address of who the mail is being sent to, and at least in the UK ISPs are required to log that data.
I'm somewhat surprised that Thunderbird hasn't
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Apple has PGP keys [apple.com] that you can use for submitting encrypted email to them; they tell you to use it for sending in proof of security issues. While they don't include the functionality in Mail, there's always MacGPG [sente.ch] (command-line tools, plus a nice Aqua-fied port) and the GPGMail [sente.ch] plugin.
Why Apple and Mozilla make no official inclusion, I have no idea. Probably due to licensing, no doubt. (It goes without saying that Microsoft doesn't include it because they're Microsoft.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
GPG is open source, GPL licenced and patent free, so really there is no excuse for not including it.
Even GPG doesn't solve the recipient-in-plain-text problem. It's the same with SSL - the encryption is encrypted by your ISP can still see the address of the site you are visiting.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
with SSL - the encryption is encrypted by your ISP can still see the address of the site you are visiting.
Well, they can see the server/domain name, although not the URL surely (the URL being sent inside HTTP, which is encrypted...)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can send a signed or encrypted email anytime I want from mail, with no extensions. I just have to have my public and private key loaded into it (which I do) and have to have a copy of your public key. Then I just click the padalock. Oh, thank you for the reminder, my key was expired last week, heh.. got another one just now for free. Anyway, now I can click the "sign" badge and sign my email to you even if you don't have any keys. If I have your public key and I receive an email from you, it will s
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If only popular email clients would ship with encryption built in, set up by the account creation wizard and turned on by default...
But how do you swap keys?
At this point, it would be nice for some organisation to just start signing PGP keys when you fax them a driving license or something, the equivalent to a CA but for PGP keys which traditionally needed huge effort to figure-out if the key matches the person.
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No, they don't have that capability. Please read any beginners book on crypto.
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Think our Government doesn't have the capability of decrypting them all,
No.
or more to the point the capability of demanding unencrypted data be handed over?
Well, if you mean by actually torturing you? Well, depends on whether you believe your government does that to americans or not.
If you refuse, you refuse. They then can't get to your data.
Unless you use debian, of course. :-P
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis (Score:5, Funny)
...the rubber-hose technique of cryptanalysis. (in which a rubber hose is applied forcefully and frequently to the soles of the feet until the key to the cryptosystem is discovered, a process that can take a surprisingly short time and is quite computationally inexpensive)
Re:Rubber-hose cryptanalysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you mean by actually torturing you? Well, depends on whether you believe your government does that to americans or not.
Torture isn't the only way of getting data out of people, which is fortunate because as Bush said, "We don't torture." What we do is called using "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", which aren't torture because they don't cause organ failure, except when they do and the organ was in a guy who wasn't going to live forever anyway.
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If you refuse, you refuse. They then can't get to your data.
This really cuts to the core of why encrypting yourself is better than trusting someone to do it for you (or worse, trusting someone to store plaintext data for you) -- someone may be able to get the data (by using fascist tools like the UK's RIP act, or the US' torture methods) but they will never be able to do so without your knowledge and once it's broken you will no longer trust that key.
well, unless your PC is insecure...
Re:this has been the case all along (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, seriously? You must be uber-leet to spout off 20-year-old propaganda about how the NSA can break anything ever -- the easiest way for them to break you crypto is to convince you it's not worthwhile to do in the first place.
Now, it's possible that there is some algorithmic flaw in AES or RSA that the NSA has discovered and no one else has noticed. But neither algorithm is something that some no-name math student slapped together and got published, nor was the NSA even vaguely involved in their development, which is where many of the concerns (and FUD) about DES originated.
And I actually have studied the GPG implementations of both AES and RSA, and verified by hand that their binaries produce the same output as my calculations. I've also studied the primes and nonce selection and padding algorithms and have likewise convinced myself that they are valid. There may be other bugs in the program, but I have satisfied myself that they are not broken in any way that produces known exploits.
Do you have any specific reason to doubt the algorithmic soundness of RSA or AES, to believe that GPG doesn't have valid implementations, or to believe that the NSA or anyone else has the ability to crack either algorithm in a reasonable amount of time without a flaw in the algorithm or implementation?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People's perceptions of the NSA tend to be somewhat behind the times.
Used to be that this idea that they could crack all of your crypto was based somewhat in fact. Back when DES was being developed, the NSA had design input on it but people didn't really understand what their changes did. Decades later, a whole new field of cryptanalysis was discovered (differential cryptanalysis) and, lo and behold, turns out the changes that the NSA made to DES made it resistant to this technique, decades before anybody i
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Really?
Yes.
Seriously?
Yes.
Really think you're all that l33t using published crypto?
No, I consider it to be just a regular part of my day.
Zenlike ignorance. Must be a fucking rush.
No.
As another poster skillfully pointed out, unless you write your own encryption and know your OWN code, open/published standards should be considered compromised, especially when talking about our Government (or any other one for that matter).
Heh. If you write your own encryption, there is a huge possibility that you're pretty *dumb*. Unless you open it so that others, not just your friends, can verify what you've just done. You don't necessarily need to open it to the general public, but you need to open it for review by a bunch of equally good or better cryptanalysts.
Open/published standards should by no means be considered compromised. Encryption methods NOT opened, which ar
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some other freeware encryption that still uses a published algorithm?
If this made any difference, the algorithm would suck anyway. [wikipedia.org]
Simple Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
...one can't trust encryptinon if it is done off site. Point.
If you want your communication secure encrypt it on your computer which you trust. This is the only way to keep it secure...
Re:Simple Answer (Score:5, Informative)
The problem here is that the program doing the encrypting on your computer, which comes from Hushmail, is not the same program that they provide the (trustable) source code for.
Re:Simple Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is that the program doing the encrypting on your computer, which comes from Hushmail, is not the same program that they provide the (trustable) source code for.
The other problem is that it's not GPG. Honestly, there is no way I'd trust any other file crypto software today. Why should I? GPG is there and works and people use it. Anything else is just rolling dice.
This is maybe the one area where I don't think there's a lot of room for options. Crypto is almost unbelievably hard to get right, and the odds of more than a tiny handful of programs pulling it off is slim. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is risky, but I'd rather trust one titanium roll cage of a basket than 100 made out of tin foil and rusty nails.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cryptographic algorithms are difficult to design, but they are documented, implemented, and made publicly available. GPG is not the only secure encryption program out there, it is simply a common and well designed one. RSA and AES encryption libraries are widely available. They are even embedded in the Linux kernel for use by programs that call the openssl library so that the kern
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For a good primer on encryption pick up Bruce Scheiner's Applied Cryptography. You can also find a lot of resources online, like wikipeida, though those articles can get a bit technical. I hope that you can learn that encryption can be utilized by almost any competent programmer, and that it is not the program you should distrust, but rather third parties. That is, after all, the heart of encryption, knowing who and what to trust and giving everyone else hell.
I think you need to re-read it. What I took away from the book is that even if the crypto library is perfect, even good programmers are likely to screw up its usage. For example, see the recent Debian SSH mixup. That guy wasn't an idiot, but made a subtle yet completely fatal mistake.
No, I don't trust the program. Unless it's been heavily vetted like GPG (or OpenSSL as you mentioned), I assume that it has a subtle vulnerability that makes it worthless. If you don't feel the same, then I doubt whether y
no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Insightful)
its just that simple.
unless you can review (and understand) what's going on, line by line, you can't REALLY trust it.
what is at stake, here? the gov's are at an all-time power-grabbing frenzy for violating your personal privacy. corporate, too, for that matter.
it was once said that no one would be allowed to sell or market encryption tech that 'the big guys' would not be able to break; meaning our government. I once worked at a picture phone company (mid 80's) that was starting to go down the 'encrypt your video phone call' path (using old switched56 tech) and we were told we could NOT do our own encryption unless it was 'breakable' by, well, certain agencies.
believe what you want, but no commercial (or even freeware) encryption that is avaiable to YOU AND I will be worth anything other than 'for show'.
I fully believe that. you would do well to mistrust your government, too, given how greedy they have become on the rights-grab thing.
locks only keep honest people out. there is NO WAY to keep the gov out, anymore. and that means that others, too, have backdoors (you think the gov is the only entity that can 'get to' this kind of stuff?)
anyone who trusts encryption for their life, in this day and age, is deluded.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And unless you're Bruce Scheiner, encryption that you do write probably isn't safe either.
Necessary but not sufficient- You'd also need to be a black-belt in Silicon whittling.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean like that incident with Debian recently where some genius commented some lines that were spouting a warning in GnuPG, and it turns out that the keys generated for SSH were MUCH weaker to brute force crack than the usual ones? Yeah, most brilliant minds tend to miss things. Expert worship is a way to get one's self killed or maimed while waiting for the experts to verify that said incident actually COULD cause the maiming or killing to occur.
Be real... nothing is 100% safe. Your only real safety
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsletter Time (Score:5, Funny)
1 Your high-school girlfriend cheated on you
2 The Government can't be trusted
3 Peer review of published encryption standards is worthless
Fascinating. Are you asserting "1 AND 2 ERGO 3" or "1 ERGO 2 ERGO 3"?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep enjoying the fact that some quote the bible to me on this issue... you didn't, and that's good... but they often quote "and the weak shall inherit the earth"... anyone notice it says "the meek" and not "the weak" in the actual texts (English ones)? There is a difference. Meek means more to the tune of, you can be strong as hell, you just don't go and kick the neighbor's door in for no reason at all except that you can. The weak inheriting the earth makes sense... because that's where the weak majo
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Funny)
If the brilliant minds missed it, how is it you know about it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Brilliant minds hear so much praise that they forget they fuck up just like anyone else.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Informative)
Point 1:
No-one changed anything in GnuPG. Valgrind issued warnings regarding OpenSSL which resulted in some unfortunate changes in one distro of one OS.
GnuPG and OpenSSL are entirely discrete projects, please don't confuse people with supposition and half-truths.
Point 2:
Neither you nor I can write a robust encryption algorithm. On the contrary, Rindjael and Twofish have been published in the wild now for eight years and no-one has demonstrated a weakness. If the former is acceptable as AES for US Government crypto then it is secure enough for the rest of us. Even if we assume that the NSA is 20 years ahead of the field in mathematics, if you're not dealing with the NSA then you've got 20 years lead time before Company-X can crack your files.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, a rising ocean drowns all seacoasts.
You may not care what happens to the world, but what happens to the world WILL affect YOU.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
that incident with Debian recently [...] most brilliant minds tend to miss things.
Sorry, but the person who did that was *not* brilliant, by any stretch of the imagination.
Unless you're trying to tell us that Whitfield Diffie, Adi Shamir, or Leonard Adelman personally signed-off on the Debian packages, in which case I'd challenge you to provide a link.
Attempting to draw parallels between actual crypotgraphers who have created state-of-the-art cryptography, and some numbnuts who doesn't actually understand what he's doing is really, really poor logic.
If the Debian fiasco is the best examp
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Informative)
>3des is not vulnerable but computer power has
>passed the point on which an individual could
>mount an actual attack.
I believe that would likely be DES you're referring to, not 3DES.
Whether the NSA can attack 3DES or not is an entirely different matter. But an individual? Not yet. 3DES is about 112 bits of key if you account for meet in the middle.
DES is ~56 bits and can be cracked in hours with special purpose hardware.
n Hours * 2^(112-56) = 72057594037927936n hours.
So... I think it's out of reach for an individual at the moment. Even if we could break DES in minutes...
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. If you even glanced at the size of the integer involved you'd quickly see the answer is "too large." This isn't even in the range of "throw more hardware at it."
Which I think, was my point. :)
Brute forcing 3DES is not effective at this point in time.
Unless you're talking about DES, in which case you can get your own little box to do it for under 10,000 and it's entirely trivial.
Neither DES or 3DES are at a point where the problem of brute forcing them is interesting at the present time. DES b
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks the government is a magical entity that can automatically undo the work of independent researchers and mathematicians is deluded.
I'm sure any major government's capabilities to obtain information are beyond what they are commonly percieved to be, but that does not mean that every encryption scheme is instantly rendered null and void. No one government has control over everyone, so if you think the US government is stifling innovation in America do you also think they're doing the same in Japan, Europe, China, and anywhere else? Or do you think that those governments are all collaborating on this - now that really would be deluded.
If all available encryption mechanisms were crackable then why would governments have gone to to such lengths to try and hinder their development in years gone by - and why would many governments now be trying to attack encryption methods via other means, eg. the recent British law that makes refusal to give up keys to encrypted material punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Why be the bad guy and make those laws if they're unnecessary anyway? I suppose you could claim it's to try and mask their true abilities, or to play up to the anti-terror idiots, but I don't see that as likely.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't have to be anywhere near that elaborate: just assume lawmakers have about the same level of information as us, so they think (rightfully I believe) that encryption is sound, and therefore they need that law.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Insightful)
...and those who think they're the top in their field, are regularly and quickly shown up by those who are smarter than themselves. Just remember that for every person you're beating in any field (math, basketball, chess, whatever), there are people out there MUCH smarter, faster, better than you are.
Just because one brilliant researcher publicly puts his stamp of approval on an algorithm, does not mean that any government doesn't have a team of similarly-brilliant researchers poking holes in that algorithm that are never made public.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but that goes both ways. For every brilliant person who chooses to work for the government there is another that chooses to work commercially or academically. Which is why I believe it's highly unlikely that the government could be so far ahead of the curve as the GP suggests. That is unless they were actively hindering those who work outside of the government, in which case I'd find it very difficult to believe that such efforts would be unknown.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Informative)
It's also NOT necessarily true that for every brilliant person in the government, there's another who works elsewhere, at least specifically on cryptography. In particular, the NSA is one the largest employers of mathematicians on earth. Most other employers who hire mathematicians have other jobs for them to do, so most of their time is occupied with other problems. By contrast, the NSA can (apparently) afford to hire quite a few who are allowed to concentrate entirely on cryptology.
Given the secrecy of the NSA in general, it's essentially impossible to come up with numbers that are either exact or concrete, but it certainly seems possible and reasonable that government agencies (in general) could have considerably more time and effort to devote to this subject than the entire rest of the world.
My feeling, however, is that the gap has been narrowing for quite a while now. From the design of DES, it appears that the NSA was aware of differential cryptanalysis (but not linear cryptanalysis) at that time; it became publicly known quite a bit later. As for AES, however, the rest of the world has caught up to the point that AES can be used on DOD Secret data, and the variants with 192- and 256-bit keys are cartified for DOD Top Secret data.
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If this is the fruit we see and share what type of fruit do they eat?
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously you've never seen 24 and that room full of awesome computer at CTU HQ,
and Jack Bauer's cell phone that works EVERYWHERE.
I mean all that stuff is real, its basically a documentary.
All it takes is one determined tow headed ex special forces DUDE with a license to ill,
and your whole encryption thingy comes tumbling down.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
We got past this in the 90s; initially they said that all encryption would have to be weak (e.g. 40 bit) or go through their chips (Clipper, etc.). But they found that this didn't stand up to the reality of WWW era. What worked in the 80s for the few users of encryption at that time simply couldn't scale up for web commerce. Strong encryption was a commercial necessity, so the attempts to control the industry had to be dropped. The export restrictions disappeared, and because DES was now too weak to be useful, the new AES standard was introduced.
Is AES full of back doors for the NSA? Almost certainly not, since these could also be used by any resourceful group of cryptographers, including the Chinese version of the NSA.
Is quantum computing already being used to crack AES? No. Quantum computing is the cold fusion of our industry.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
if I may:
"Is AES full of back doors for the NSA? Almost certainly not, since these could also be used by any resourceful group of cryptographers, including the Boogey Man [wikipedia.org]."
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Insightful)
I assume you are implying that Quantum Computing does not have any sound physical validity, will never work, and is only backed by scientists with questionable track records.
I disagree. Quantum Computing is the hot Fusion Energy of your industry: It is much more complex than most people understand, it takes much longer to pull off than most people think, and it will take much longer to arrive than most people expect. But it has a sound theoretical foundation and is, at this point, purely a (very hard) engineering challenge, rather than pure conjecture, mixed with a few highly questionable experimental results.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Truecrypt is freeware (open source) and is secure. In fact, it's more secure than any commercial offering I know of, due to its plausible deniability features. The source is there, it has been examined by experts and you can take a look yourself. Encryption options include both AES and Twofish, both known to be secure.
Encryption is well understood and researched by academics working in public. Sure, governments have their own secret research, but a lot of very clever people all around the world have been testing AES and Twofish for weaknesses for years and so far have found none. Governments don't have any magical ability to find flaws in encryption that ordinary academics don't.
Having said that, perhaps if you are Osama Bin Laden you might want to be a little bit paranoid. In theory, with a few billion dollars you could build a machine capable of cracking AES in months. So far there is no evidence such a machine exists, but... Most people don't have to worry about that though, even if they are doing something that could get them in serious trouble - certainly the national police, Interpol or even secret services (MI6/CIA) don't have any chance of breaking AES by brute force. Of course they could torture you now but even that isn't much of a threat to anyone not labelled a terrorist by the US.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
...Of course they could torture you now but even that isn't much of a threat to anyone not labelled a terrorist by the US.
But people who don't hand over their laptops and their encryption keys to DHS are terrorists! Right?
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Governments don't have any magical ability to find flaws in encryption that ordinary academics don't
But they do have lots of academics, and often some of the very best. Case in point: the NSA discovered differential cryptanalysis years before anyone else (that we know of) and was aware that several commercially important algorithms were susceptible.
You've seen the list, then? (Score:3, Interesting)
You make it sound like not just anyone can be (of those who haven't already been) declared a terrah-ist. It doesn't take much - and as with so many [google.com] things these days, they don't even need a warrant [usdoj.gov] to get you into "the club". All they need is for you to have a laptop and you're fair game. If you have a laptop and they haven't picked you at the airport, don't get high and mighty - remember there's literally nothing to stop them from doing it when you're 100% legal or not. Habeus Corpus and all that jazz
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They're not"known to be secure". They're simply not known to be insecure.
One of the basic problems in cryptography is that security is essentially impossible to prove -- about the best
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Rules for dealing with government are simple. Do not get involved in their business, do not play their games, do not volunteer anything, do not agree to anything, do not play with them, or for them. Once you do, your ass is theirs. They own you, with your consent at that.
By the same principle, don't fuck around, don't trespass, don't steal, and don't be a crook. Learn the law VERY carefully, keep a copy of Black's Law Dictionary (I think 6th edition is out now) in several different versions. Look up innocent looking terms and verbs in forms. DO NOT consent to anything period. Sign nothing. Be sure you know what is "your name" and what is what someone may call you. Practice your rights. Yes... all of them. A right practiced doesn't need to be infringed, because you already don't have it.
Be very suspicious not of your neighbors but of men in "special" uniforms or funny hats that supposedly give them power over you. Don't let strangers into the house. Homeschool your kids and do a god job, history, law and the local mythology are especially important subjects. Several languages and a good grasp of self defense, tactics and strategy are also quite important. Those with kids who choose to be politically active are extra vulnerable, since kids are the ultimate Achilles Heel.
Never ever trust strangers. Trust people in uniforms even less. Never ever get into a stranger's car, despite what you see in the movies. If they want to talk to you, they can get into yours. If you are confronted by a "friend from high school" and like most average people you can't remember who you met yesterday, nevermind back then, look behind you, you're probably about to get cattle prodded in the back and shoved into a van.
These were simple coping strategies for those who were not average plebeians and who survived the cullings of communism. I lost relatives who were educated, men I could've learned much from. I never met them because they were taught that self defense was for cops and soldiers. And when the king's men were gone, and the cops were coopted to communism... there was nobody to protect the smart, educated, "civilized" (i.e. willingly helpless) men from the cleansings. The ones who weren't "lifted" and sent off to Siberia, were enrolled into a front line regiment and given crap gear and no real training. Very few returned, most scarred for life. All I saw of them while growing up were pictures over mantelpieces. Grandmothers mourning long lost brothers or maimed cousins. That is the fate of the helpless of those who depend on others for their protection...
And what governments are preparing today, the police states being built now, they are so much more insidious, in that they're so much better concealed behind "feel good" intentions and bullshit propaganda about "the good of man". Oh well, fools get what they deserve. There's no stopping it at this point, fools gave up that chance a long time ago. All one can do now is get out of the way and let the Leviathan leap off the cliff with all the fools aboard. Watch the splatter and feel not sorry... they laid their own beds. Trying to save the stupid from their stupidity is what got the world into its sorry state in the first place. The stupid should have been permitted to perish, and Darwin should've been allowed to have his laugh. Instead the stupid were forced to live against their best attempts, so they outbred those who merited survival and to thrive.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Funny)
Sarah Connor? Is that you?
My guess (Score:3, Insightful)
Was either Thomas Jefferson or Lazarus Long. Both of them were well worth listening to.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Holy freaking tinfoil hat! Or maybe the poster above me has an entire tinfoil raydome surrounding the immediate 10 feet around him?
There are plenty of countries in Eastern Europe and Western Asia full of people who haven't forgotten a repressive government and what it can do when it's sufficiently organised.
For all we know, DaedalusHKX may come from one such country - and history tends to repeat itself partly because humans as a race are very bad at learning from it.
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe (Score:4, Interesting)
*chuckle*
Yep, check some of my past posts. I actually do. I got to spend a dozen or so of my formative years in such a lovely "democracy" as it was. Very easy to spot this stuff growing here. Most Americans I talk to say "it'd never happen here, we'd vote them out of office long before that."
Hah... kinda how they voted Lincoln out of office for violating his oath (regardless his views on slavery or the independence of the southern states, he violated an oath he took that had his life as remedy for violation, execution was the price of treason to that oath)... or how they voted Wilson out for taking them into the war despite having gotten elected solely on his promise to "keep us out of the war" ?
My folks came here with me and built a business from scratch, amidst "go back where you came from" idiocies and "they came to take jobs away from Americans" stupidity. Hell we all built businesses as time went on and GAVE jobs to Americans. Many of whom were proven to not deserve them. Some of whom even cost us in the price of citations for their own negligence or laziness. Finding good people was very hard. Eventually we all retired... and I can tell you it wasn't soon enough, IMHO.
Some of the stupidest people I've ever met were here. Provide them with a good job and high pay, and they make fun of your origins or slack off when you're not around. None of them think... "hey, if this foreigner goes out of business, my 17 bucks an hour are out and I go back to the regular payscale of 15 tops! and no chance at a raise!"
So yes, I reserve the right to be quite pissed looking at Americans, as some of the most materially blessed people in history, and some of the stupidest fools to ever have lived. I view the immigrants the same way. All of them were given a nation like no other, codified protection for quite a few important rights. And what do they do? They bring that nanny state shit with them from abroad, and as if they couldn't get it, raise it on a pedestal as if it was not the same damn thing they had fled from just a few years before. Mine were different, but only because they built businesses and learned that government was nobody's friend. Not even the handout seekers. It won't be too long now... one good economical crash, and one loud cry for help from the stupid ones... and down the drain it all goes... clampdown and all. Man it'll be worth watching the stupid finally get theirs, just like I'm sure the Titanic was worth watching sink.
Never was and never will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on how you define secure then no, Hushmail is not.
Personally if I want to send encrypted mail I will do so on a PC I have direct control over, I will carry out the encryption before the email goes anywhere. And depending on the type of encryption used, I might even carry out the encryption on a terminal which has no network connections etc and after encrypting the mail will shutdown the PC and leave it shutdown for a while - this setup would have no swap partition etc, or if it did it would be a minimum of baseline encrypted.
As for Hushmail - its secure if you trust them to use suitable encryption algorithm, key material, psuedo random number generator, secure processes (not the program kind, the how to do the job kind), secure network, no shady or otherwise agreements with third parties (inc. governments) to provide decrypted data, not to store your orginal plain-text mail for any longer than the time it takes to encrypt it, securely erase the plain-text version etc etc etc. Probably enough holes to drive a bus through...
Re: (Score:2)
Of course you also bring your
Re:Never was and never will be... (Score:4, Funny)
OK, I'll bite (and I know the you are being a bit sarcastic) but:
What are you all doing on your computers? If you read these posts you would think that the average slashdotter was planning to overthrow one (or more likely all) governments on a regular basis. Really now. From your respective basements?
Re:Never was and never will be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the point? Shouldn't we be portraying that EXACT image to the respective governments who are trying to overthrow us? Seriously, isn't that EXACTLY what they're trying to do with the false security theater that is being thrust upon us with each new day of news reports from the Middle East and domestic?
You might find the article "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps [guardian.co.uk]" interesting in this context.
In short, the government SHOULD be afraid of the power of the people, because it is exactly those people, who gives the government their power, not the reverse. We all COULD be harboring plans to overthrow the government, and we should anyway, if they cease to support our rights and needs as a populace. In other words, do what we're expecting of you, or expect to get overthrown. Period.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
" What are you all doing on your computers?"
What's this? Another turn of the old argument "but if you have nothing to hide...?" or what?
I don't need to give *any* explanation to protect my intimacy.
Old News? (Score:4, Informative)
It appears that this was reported back in 2007 on The Register [theregister.co.uk].
There is indeed a clause in the clarified terms of service mentioned by the above article that states that your data is not safe from law enforcement authorities with a court order [hushmail.com] from Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada:
We are committed to the privacy of our users, and will absolutely not release user data without a court order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, which is the jurisdiction where our servers are located. In addition, we require that any such court order refer specifically by email address to any account for which data is required. However, if we do receive such a court order, we are required to do everything in our power to comply with the law. Hushmail will not accept a court order issued by any authority or investigative agency other than the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada. Other authorities must apply to the Canadian government through an appropriate Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty and request that a court order be issued by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada.
Decentralize Aggregated Services (Score:2)
One way to help mitigate this risk is to decentralize aggregated services. If there were five hundred different equivalents to Hushmail, one of them going down would be less of a threat, and many of them going down would be impossible to keep quiet.
The main problem I can come up with is market differentiation; Mom & Pops work in meatspace because physical proximity matters. With the Internet, when a product (like encrypted email) is difficult to differentiate, it is hard for more than a handful of compe
Jars embed date of creation - More Info Needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Any developer that has worked closely with jar (zip) files should have immediately notice a possible issue with this announcement. If you use the jar tool to create a jar archive with its default options, it embeds a new MANIFEST.MF file which has a new creation time; therefore, you will get a different jar checksum even if you are archiving the same exact contents. It would have been simply possible that the Hushmail build process created a new jar file (with identical files) for each type of software distribution that they use. The only way we can be sure is to compare the file list and checksum for each file inside of the jar archives.
The file is obfuscated (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't done this verification, but neither has the cryptome author, so I suspect this is a non-story.
Re:The file is obfuscated (Score:5, Interesting)
They've always stated openly that it's not secure (Score:2)
...when you encrypt via the web interface.
The only secure way is to download the encryptor (source code available) and encrypt before it leaves your machine.
Or you could do what the terrorists do and encrypt a file with one of the bazillion encryption utilities and openly send it as an attachment via hotmail. Duh!
Mixmaster (Score:5, Informative)
If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad. Even then you've got to worry about Van Eck Phreaking or FPGA eavesdropping.
In general it's a bad idea to be confident in your encryption - if the Germans hadn't been so confident in Engima they might have done much better militarily.
Any provider like this can ultimately be compelled to cooperate with security services and you've therefore got to assume they are working with major governments to compromise your communications. Common sense really.
That said, something like Mixmaster [sourceforge.net] is a good place to start. Makes it very difficult to be located by any legal process although (of course) it won't help if the NSA takes an interest.
Hushmail? Compromised almost as soon as it was set up I'd wager.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Mixmaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, please. You've done a good job of using impressive terms to sound like you know what you're talking about. If you want to talk about the real-world risks of having your crypto broken, then you need to consider all the real-world methods by which your crypto could be broken. It doesn't matter that a one-time pad can be theoretically proved to be invulnerable to certain kinds of attacks, to which various symmetric and asymmetric ciphers are theoretically vulnerable. What matters is the actual types of attacks that are practical and likely, and the actual problems you'll have in the practical implementation of a particular method. If you're using a one-time pad, then there are several obvious, well-known things that can go wrong: (1) you have to physically exchange the one-time pads, which may be difficult to do (and do securely) if the NSA is really following you everywhere, opening your mail, etc.; (2) both parties have to maintain the security of their own copies of the one-time pads, which may be difficult to do if the NSA is really determined to get them; (3) there is a tendency for users to get lazy and reuse a one-time pad, which then makes you vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks. Standard symmetric and asymmetric ciphers are more or less immune to these problems (#1: swapping passwords securely is a lot easier than swapping large amounts of binary data securely; #2: you can keep the password in your head instead of stuffing a keychain drive under your mattress; #3: no such issue). Yes, there are also certain kinds of attacks to which standard ciphers are vulnerable and one-time pads invulnerable (e.g., dictionary attacks on your password, shoulder-surfing,...) One-time pads are not magic pixie dust for cryptography. There is no magic pixie dust for cryptography. The good news is that we're living in a golden age of privacy, in the sense that you can legally, publicly get software to do encryption so good that essentially your main worry is no longer the encryption, it's the social/personal/legal issues surrounding its implementation.
Re: (Score:2)
Learn something about elementary encryption before shooting your mouth off.
is Hushmail still safe? - NO !!! (Score:2)
No, it's most probably controlled by one of the brancges of the security services
"Still safe" (Score:2)
It is a matter of convenience trumping security.
Probably not ... (Score:2)
I think the submitter answered his own question.
Article is misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
Hushmail only stores your private key in encrypted form, encrypted with your passphrase. It gets decrypted only on your machine, by the Java applet. Yes, this does mean your security depends entirely on the strength of your passphrase. Use http://www.diceware.com./ [www.diceware.com]
As for hashes being easy to crack, please. A dictionary attack isn't a crack of a hash, and reversing a hash algorithm is still beyond the state of the published art. Making collisions, yes, but recovering original text, no.
If it's a company based in the US, forget it (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously if it's a commercial company based in the US, forget about security. They can easily be pressured to do everything the government wants.
If you want security you have to do it yourself. Install Gnu Privacy Guard and encrypt all your e-mails. Then use TOR hidden services to set up your own e-mail servers to be sure your traffic information will stay private.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
rely on face to face contact if you want your communications to be secure.
Are you smoking?
Meeting face to face is the worst possible way for secure communications. It allows for easy snooping by anyone on you and the person you're meeting, and even the fact that you are meeting with a person can taint you if they are on the terrorist list or "watch list".
Public email such as thepiratebay's slopsbox is way better. Be sure to post and read from a public library or similar, with no cameras.
Re:Huh?? (Score:5, Funny)
Shhhh!... keep your voice down.
First rule of Hushmail... (Score:5, Funny)
...is that nobody talks about Hushmail.
Re:Snail mail FTW. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice try, but generally trivial to break. For starters, there's the always popular method of steaming envelopes open.
Of course, that's pretty easy to prevent -- for example, people who cared have used wax seals for centuries.
That's still a long ways from secure though. For example, one trick (also known for a long time) uses a thin metal rod, split along its length. You insert the rod under the end of the envelope flap, where there's no seal. You catch the letter where it's folded, with one side of the fold on each side of the split, then twist the rod to roll the letter up, and remove it back out the end. When you're finished reading it, you reverse the process to re-insert the letter into the envelope.
It's no accident that, historically, most countries' code-breaking agencies have been attached to their postal services...