I appreciate the cheekiness of calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance", but from a purely PR perspective, it would make sense to reconsider your name if you are taking the position that encrypted end-to-end email is not solely an interest of those pursuing shady or deviant activities.
Prtty much nobody would understand the connotations of Locke, Mill or Hobbes, and amongst those who do they'd be contentious.
Consider that for example Mill thought despotism could be acceptable under utilitarian principles if the end result was a better society afterwards; I don't know what you think of Marx [Marx Mail? Maybe not], but even an authoritarian reading of Marx ideological works fits within utilitarian principles to those who agree with it, while those who read Marx from a libertarian viewpoint, e.g. left communists, would generally find Mills distastefully authoritarian.
Locke was a major investor in the slave trade, and a central participant in trying to institute a feudal aristocracy in Carolina - writing about freedoms while trying to deprive others of them. Locke Mail in that respect would be fitting brand for a NSA run mail service for its hypocrisy alone.
Hobbes, while talking about individual rights, was a supporter of a strong central government an a supporter of absolute monarchy. He too would be a suitable beacon for the NSA.
That is not to say that these people were not important for the development of philosophical ideas related to freedom, but only in relation to the politics of the time. Today all three of them are archaic and authoritarian compared to a lot of more recent philosophers.
As for Liberty Mail, outside of the US at least it would be likely to leave a bad taste with a lot of people. It reads like Far-Right-Wing-US-Nationalistic-Nutjob-Mail or Lets-Pretend-It-Is-Liberty-While-We-Screw-You-Over-Mail to me, and I know a lot of people likely to have similar reactions.
"Free-Mail" is a possibility. It rolls off the tongue like "email", is not so politically charged like "Freedom-Mail", and can entice people with the word "Free" while you can educate them (not an easy problem to solve though) with the "Free as in Freedom, not as in Beer".
I suggest names that don't have limited country/cultural references if the intent is to make this a global success. Some other suggestions:
-SecMail (Secure Email)
-PrivMail (private/privacy email)
-FMail (freedom email)
-NetMail (New Internet standard email)
And thank you for taking this on, it is seriously needed. And please, no reliance on CA certs, chances are the NSA has compromised at least some of those.
Hobbes Mail makes no sense; either you're in the condition of the war of all against all (no thanks) or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign (no thanks).
Haha, a valid point! :) I wasn't thinking of Leviathan, rather some of his thoughts on liberalism[1]. The right of the individual, that political power should represent the people etc.
[1] Liberalism in it's classic and original sense (not the skewed meaning that it somehow has gotten here in the US).
His thoughts on liberalism are deeply connected with his social contract theory. He believed the strong central government was a necessity to protect the right of the individual, and that so individuals do cede power to the sovereign by acceding to a social contract.
The social contract of Hobbes is not something one can opt out of, or refuse, but an explanation and justification for individual rights within an absolute monarchy. At the same time Hobbes argued that to preserve the peace was so central that the sovereign had the power, and was indeed duty bound under the social contract, to take whatever measures necessary to ensure peace - even authoritarian measures.
His ideas on social contract theory are historically important as a pre-cursor to more expansive ideas about personal freedoms, but they are extremely authoritarian by most modern standards.
>or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign
Well, Bruce Schneier has argued that that's what security is becoming today: feudal (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...). If you wanted to, you could instead call most if not all currently existing email services "Hobbes mail".
I would go with something like 'sealed mail' and imply the imagery of how in the olden days mail was sealed with a wax stamp. A strong visual analogy can be very powerful.
Without searching I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I guess it is something related to free speech in the USA? I might remember it from school.
What I am implying is that it seems like a localized term and people elsewhere might have no connotation(?) to it. In German the word means a curl of hair.
I'd say the advantage of 'Locke Mail' is that it gives the right associations even to people who haven't heard of John Locke. Locked Mail. Mail protected by a (cryptographic) lock.
He might be fitting in relation to US history considering that while he spoke of equality and freedom, he was a major investor in the slave trade (he also was involved in trying to introduce a feudal aristocracy in Carolina).
He was very progressive for his time, and so he's one of the "icons" of classical liberalism, but he died in 1704, and we've moved on a tad from then.
Freedom \ Liberty \ Patriot \ Constitution Mail would be very effective in blocking political speeches and biased headlines from cheap attacks.
My personal favorite is Lincoln Mail... Seems highly appropriate on many levels and should be FOX News proof.
As a non-American, all of these terms remind me of irritating American flag-waving rhetoric (the kind used to justify the types of things that the NSA is doing right now, for that matter), and I would wager most of the world would feel the same.
So why not use multiple brands? I don't think the name is to be taken lightly at all, and naming it in such a way that doesn't make it such an easy target could do some real good. They just need to bring the tech, and then we can have a whole laundry list of names suitable for different languages/cultures.
Some of those suggestions lose their punch when moved to a non-American context.
I'd argue that the name should work on the assumption that it is the defacto standard, and so there is no need to distinguish between "normal mail" and "new mail". It should also contain a possessive pronoun. (Something like "YourMail", if not already taken?).
With such a name, when someone attacks the mail service it will be difficult to avoid attacking the person, as an attacker will have to attack "YourMail". Attack the person and the person will react.
Not distinguishing between normal and new will have two effects:
1) It will seem a normal thing for the uninitiated to use it.
2) In the case of an attack, it will be easier for people to say the attack is directed at themselves, since the generic name will draw people in, rather than letting them dismiss it as an exclusive club.
Not only lose their punch, most of them sounds untrustworthy and cheesy in a non-American context, as we are very much used to Americans tacking on "freedom" or "liberty" to disguise the opposite.
As a counterpoint, who could possibly argue against passing something called the 'Patriot Act'? To do so would almost be un-patriotic, right? DarkMail, however, is a bit different. Is that what the bad-guys are using these days?
Any philosopher, ideologist or politicians you might think of will elicit exactly the opposite reactions of what you want from a substantial percentage of people who would otherwise like the idea.
I think the "Dark" in "Dark Mail Alliance" is meant more in the sense that it's "off the grid" of NSA spying capabilities, not that it's meant to be used for nefarious purposes.
I would agree, but the word means what people think that it means, and the most likely interpretation will be "nefarious purposes". Especially when the powers that be will likely oppose this, the more braindead you can make your image, the better.
I'm sure their intention was not to be used for nefarious purposes, but that doesn't mean NSA/FBI/Congress won't try to portray it as such.
But anyway, I'm starting to get the feeling this issue is taking too much attention from the protocol itself, which is the big news here. If they want to change it, great, if not that's fine, too. They just need to make sure the protocol is great, and can get other big e-mail providers to support it, or at least a ton of smaller ones.
There was a talk show on the radio yesterday about Tor, the illegal trade of drugs and other bad things on the Internet. They referred to it as "The dark web".
I bet they called it the 'deep' web, which is what it has been called for years.
Otherwise they were just wrong.
That being said, caring that the name might 'sound negative' seems ridiculous. Anyone who wants to rely on a form of secure communication wouldn't base their judgement solely on a name and ignore the context like who founded it. People who are willing to make those snap judgements aren't interested in the service.
The “dark” part is not so much the issue: why not leave out “mail” altogether? E-mail 3.0 won’t be e-mail as people know it (and will continue to associate with the very concepts 3.0 seeks to avoid). It shall be something different enough to give it another name — at least to avoid confusion, or to prevent spin doctors from taking advantage of the associations and mental model people have on the concept of e-mail. Nobody thinks of “e-mail” when you mention Snapchat, Facebook messages, Twitter… That would be different if these services had names like Snapmail, Facemail, Tweetmail, or Darkmail.
1. I'd give the alliance a generic name that won't come off as threatening or malevolent when used out of context in news articles. Make it boring to talk about the alliance so it can operate larger and and with less scrutiny.
2. If you really really want to politicize the products, launch several regionally branded services, that can use the same architectural design, but leverage the cultural mores of individual freedom for those areas. What catches on in Germany may not be what sells in Spain/Italy/Greece today, for example.
However,
The "FMail" suggestion, or something similarly benign, is a strong choice, in that it diminishes the effect of partisan rhetoric and allows the tool to be sold on its actual merits.
3. Then you can gin up radical "Free the email!" action groups to run around and be obnoxious for you, take the heat and phoenix themselves into new groups every so often.
I agree. I would prefer something like the "MyMail" alliance, because that's really what this is about. It's about making mail mine again. Mainly has been totally owned by people who are not us, whether it is the NSA owning it via dragnet surveillance or Google using it to serve ads. It's not just our mail, but their mail as well.
This name also appeals to ego. Ego matters. Talking about freedom and ideals will appeal to a minority, but you need a name that appeals to people's ego if you want to succeed.
This is not the same but is related to the ideas that Seth Godin expoused in his TED talk about being remarkable. Nobody likes receiving email, but they like receiving MeMail. Me. Me. Me. Me. I want my email to be about me. If it is not, it is noise and tedium. Never underestimate an appeal to ego.
If the system they create is excessively vulnerable to political pressure, then it would be better to find that out sooner rather than later. If bad PR threatens their ability to operate, then perhaps they should not be operating.
I hope they are successful. For a long time I have wished that someone with the expertise and time would be motivated to create a new email system from the ground up, and make that system widely available and 'open' (in the sense of open protocols).
There are many challenges, but if they can pull it off there are many benefits as well. And perhaps the nicest part is that it is hard to actively oppose such efforts without revealing an intent.
I think the biggest barrier to entry of any new and secure email protocol will be GMail. GMail (and similar services) are what most people seem to use at this point.
And GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what, since they want to be able to mine the data in your email, so they will still be storing it on their servers "in the clear." Which means the next time NSA hacks their servers, they'll still be able to read all the email.
Best case is that email 3.0 will interoperate with 1.0, or GMail at least accepts 3.0, if only to unencrypt it on their servers. Short of that, it would take a compelling use case to convince people to leave GMail, so we'd be right back to where we are with email 2.0: No critical mass of adoption, meaning 98% of the email you receive and write is unencrypted.
I disagree somewhat with this, if it needs to be secure end to end, then the server just needs to support that protocol. The question is, if you don't want to leak any metadata, then how do you put it in the right mailbox? You need a pub/sub type protocol where you can go in and grab the messages meant for you, but the server must not know they're meant for you and you must be able to do so completely anonymously. How do you achieve that? Exchange certainly can't be configured for that, so you need to replace it with an entirely new (and hopefully open source) mail server that supports most of the Exchange functionality - server push etc.
I agree with the barrier. I wonder if the NSA has made surmounting that barrier possible. If the friction to getting a 'secure' email experience is low enough, people will put up with having two for a while.
As for connecting them. I could handle just being able to communicate with my security conscious friends on this platform. That might make it a niche play early on but so was email.
I think it is quite rational to be cynical about it, but before you completely write it off, consider what the cynics said about email when it was small. Basically email was characterized as a way for nerds to exchange jokes that either everyone had already heard, or nobody understood.
I recall that in 1979 exactly nobody in my family (except me) had a network email account (on USC-ECLC no less) and they didn't care. What my family had worked for them and it was just sillyness on my part to think that email added anything to the mix.
What mattered though was that enough people had email accounts that they could get more done, more efficiently, than people without email. Every year that converted more and more people to the idea that email was something they should have, by 1999 everyone thought they should have one even if they weren't sure why.
I see similar thinks with a reconstructed email system that is free from surveillance. People being able to joke about things or discuss things and not find themselves unable to board a flight because they joked about something the TSA considered suspicious. You and I may not have had that experience yet but folks have, and it is getting more common not less common. We just had a law enforcement officer drive up and shoot a kid dead because he was carrying a toy gun. He thought the gun might be real. I say that "Clubs in NYC are the bomb!" I don't want someone detaining me for four hours asking me what exactly I meant by that.
As few as 3 years ago I would not have considered a system like this something that "regular" people would want to use, and that would inhibit adoption and use. But now I am not so sure about that.
I agree that the 'outrage' is a minority, but it is coming from more people than it ever has before. At some point the minority is large enough to be a 'useful subset' and once it becomes self supporting I've seen otherwise "useless" products become part of everyday life. It is that change, that I wonder about here.
> GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what
Perhaps this problem can be addressed by having a plugin/add-on/extension that decrypts the mail within the browser. GMail, Yahoo, or other mail providers that don't adopt this new and secure email protocol won't get the plaintext of your message, and preferably not the metadata either.
This requires that the new protocol use a converter or proxy or something to be able to talk to the existing email infrastructure. I'm sure this idea has occurred to the Silent Circle and Lavabit guys.
There are two parts to e-mail security: (EDIT: To the security of the information in any particular message, there are additional issues regarding e.g. routing to prevent leaking information)
The contents. You can secure that with pgp etc. today, and gmail can do nothing about it, and there a browser plugin that "hides" the mess would be workable.
The metadata. Here gmail etc. is a problem. The best we can do are remailers that anonmize the sender. In the case of e.g. Gmail, the recipient at Gmail will obviously still be in plain text, but we can obscure the sender by encrypting forwarding information and setting the To: field to a remailer. A plugin could handle that too.
Of course any such plugins would either need the cooperation of the webmail providers (yeah, right) or would need to deal with breaking whenever they change their UI.
Maybe people could run a local app/filter that extracts keywords from our own mail and shares them with google. Leave the power completely in our hands to give to google what we feel like giving them.
This patchwork approach to attempting to solve a large broken system has visibly failed analogously to politics, in terms of preventing the threat of mass-surveillance.
I don't see how this is any different. We need new technology to solve new problems. Decentralization. Changing behavior is not easy, but sometimes necessary. Everything else being proposed seems half-assed (for lack of a better word) and easily circumventable by a resourceful adversary.
As long as Google (or whomever) holds all the cards and has a lot to lose by not complying to threat of force (for ex. shareholders and stock prices), then we won't get anywhere.
> GMail at least accepts 3.0, if only to unencrypt it on their servers.
This. I assume Google will be very eager to adopt "3.0" simply to absorb the data and make it available to the Android/AI bots that really run the place (Larry, Sergey and other googlers are clearly just physical manifestations).
Google doesn't seem to me to be the kind of organization to fear adoption of external ideas - they just co-opt them.
I am definitely no security expert, but from my feeling it seems as if unsecure protocol + secure messaging layer is much more successful in practical applications than purely secure protocols. Therefore my believe would be that improving existing secure messaging layers would help the world much more than creating another secure protocol which nobody will use because it would require to replace the whole infrastructure. Especially Email seems to be something that is unlikely to go away, because of its long history, huge infrastructure and simplicity.
The problem with e-mail is that gathering the meta-data is almost as valuable as looking inside at the message contents. Secure messaging layers aren't going to help you there - unless everyone starts using something like Tor.
Why Tor? We have had mix-nets for many years, and they do an excellent job of protecting metadata. Even old-fashioned cypherpunks remailers do a fine job at that.
Appologies for the spelling errors in this note below - it's an OCR of an old printout (I've been unable to find a current archive of cypherpunks going back this far):
Cypherpunks archive-96.02.29-96.03.06: List of reliable remailers
List of reliable remailers
Anonymous Remail Service (nobody@vegas.gateway.com) Sun, 3 Mar 199609:18:03-0500
( Messages sorted by: [date][ threa4][ subject][ author]
( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills"
( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers"
( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail"
Thought that this was worth reposting:
>1 attended last weeks "Information, National Policies; and International
>Infrastructure" Symposium at Harvard Law School, organized by the Global
>Information Infrastructure Commission, the Kennedy School and the
>Institute for Information Technology Law & Policy of Harvard Law School.
>During the presentation by Paul Strassmann, National Defense University
>and William Marlow, Science Applications International Corporation,
>entitled 'Anonymous Remailers as Risk-Free International Infoterrorists"
>the questions was raised from audience (Professor Chaarles Nesson,
>Harvard LAw School) - in a rather extended debate - whether the CIA and
>similar government agencies are involved in running anonymous remailers
>as this would be a perfect target to scan possibly illegal messages.
>Both presenters explicitly acknowledged that a number of anonymous
>remailers in the US are run by government agencies scanning traffic.
>Marlow said that the government runs at least a dozen remailers and that
>the most popular remailers in France and Germany are run by the
>respective government agencies in these countries In addition they
>mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed Systems to break
>encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested
>to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they themselves use 1024
>bit keys.
>J ask Marlos afterwards if these comments were off or on record, he
>paused then said that he can be quoted.
>So I thought I pass that on. ft seems interesting enough, don 't you
> think?
>Best
> Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger
>Information Law Project
>Austrian Institute for Legal Policy
Groundfog@alpha.c2.org
( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills"
( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers"
( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail"
My Fucking Mail would be a better name. As in, it's mine, do fucking not read it. Sorry for the profanity but I think it fits how many people feel about this.
I do share your sentiment! The shorter "MyMail" makes the same point without needing the profanity, and your more emphatic name would then be available for the most desirable MyMail client...
I did think of that while posting, but edited it out of my comment as 1) too cheesy and 2) it doesn't really make the point, because it just sounds like your typical big-corp lame name.
It's a bit late for the HN thread now, but how about MFM protocol, but pronounced as "My Mail" just as RTFM is sometimes pronounced as "Read The Manual."
To everyone complaining about the name: it is just the name of the advocacy/development group. You don't call SMTP mail 'IETF mail', nor should you call call whatever they come up "dark mail alliance mail".
"Well, Bob, as your viewers may know, 'Smith Mail' came out of a group that calls themselves 'The Dark Mail Alliance'. This is a group of anti-government hackers that..."
"... it's worse than that. They used git. They can git your kids, git your job, git your family; all with one command. They can even clone you. These hackers will be pulling and pushing this country apart!"
When you go through the trouble of reinventing email to provide proper security, you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol.
It would be great if the recipient could specify the amount of proof of work required for example. Or ask for a certain amount of bitcoin in exchange for accepting promotional material. Or a mail attribute that indicates it's a newsletter. Lots of interesting possibilities.
> you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol.
I disagree. Different problems sometimes require mutually exclusive solutions.
In fact, receiving lots of unsolicited mail provides some plausible deniability. So a spam free-for-all might actually be a useful part of the new network.
Or you know, renders the system completely worthless because no one can sort through that much spam.
Which also makes it completely trivial to DDoS into oblivion. And the problem gets worse then that: the more anonymous it is, the less it's possible to stop someone from spamming.
Though I suppose you could attack this problem from the email address side: make it computationally expensive to general an email address, to make address-hopping as a spammer more difficult.
Maybe a new system could instigate whitelisting from the ground up, with a built in "contact request" protocol (which may be required anyway to exchange keys).
We've got very used to email's totally open mailboxes, and it seems to me that the cost may well outweigh the benefit.
This is very good news. An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost. Post means mail, so DigiMail. This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information. So you can ask to get your sensitive government stuff through DigiPost.
My point being: There is already a big market for sending secure emails. If this Dark Mail, or whatever it is called, is secure enough for a government to use then the adoption will be huge.
This probably means that it should be called something else than dark. "Normal people" don't know what encryption is, what NSA is or even why it is bad that companies like Google read and use their email. They won't know why or even that their email is insecure. They might have ssl in their Web browser showing a small lock, so they think they are already secure and don't need this "SecureMail". It is absolutely critical that the name of this thing is something that a normal person will feel that he/she needs. Something as simple as "New Email". Yes, the nerds will rage, but the nerds already knows why this is a big deal. The name does not need to cater to them. What is important is to get adoption of this new email platform. And naming it secure mail will probably not help. And having a dark alliance behind it all is the worst idea so far. Both words have negative annotations and sounds like a untrustworthy hacker group or even a terrorist organization. Needless to say, they need some serious re-branding, and fast.
"An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost." "This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information."
"There is already a big market for sending secure emails."
So there are already working solutions for the problem. I wonder - does it really have to be created some new group of "privacy innovators [that] have [to be] partnered to lead the charge to replace email as we know it today"? A descriptive alliance to measure the adherence to a new solution may be a useful thing, but some new group to reinvent some existing solution is just political in my view.
And this is how committees fail to achieve results ;)
The top 20 (?) comments (or at least the most voted comment thread) is a discussion/argument on just the name...
One of the biggest issues with security-conscious systems is that people don't want to be seen as using something that only "people with something to hide" would be using.
The average American watches a show like SVU and learns that TOR is how kiddie porn is traded, not that it is how dissidents in Iran or Russia communicate with Journalists. They hear about the "darknet" and assume that that is where illegal activity goes on.
So "dark mail" gives the complete wrong connotation and basically means this is DOA unless they completely rebrand.
Like everyone else (with any common marketing sense), it seems like something like "security" or "privacy" would be much more positive connotations than "dark."
A quick search shows SecureMail and PrivateMail are commercially used, but LockedMail and SignedMail aren't.
I don't think it'd be too late to (eventually?) do a rebrand/cobrand for the product, especially if someone comes up w/ something particularly good. I think something that even a slight bit of spitballing would turn up something much better.
Some thoughts on naming:
* If the first word ends in e like securemail/privatemail you actually get email in the word
* something that could be shortened like email, but will connote secure sending - "send me that via pmail/smail"
* something that has familiar connotations of privacy/sealed delivery (registered mail?) or something might work as well
I'd posit that the French already have our backs. A few years ago, the official body that governs standardized French attempted to wean French-speaking people from the borrowed English terminology. Et voila! "Courriel," a portmanteau of courrier and electronique was pilfered from the Quebecois for the benefit of francophones everywhere. Sadly however, if Google Translate is any indicator, then "courriel" never made the leap from official to commonplace.
Now, the electronic part is a given. But what about the courier part? Here's what Wikipedia says:
> Couriers are distinguished from ordinary mail services by features such as speed, security, tracking, signature, specialization and individualization of express services, and swift delivery times, which are optional for most everyday mail services. As a premium service, couriers are usually more expensive than standard mail services, and their use is typically restricted to packages where one or more of these features are considered important enough to warrant the cost.
Speed, security, individualization, premium? Those all sound like adjectives that I like!
Let's do the L'Académie française a solid. Let's adopt Courriel and apply the label only to our fast, secure, individualized, premium electronic communiques.
If you're curious: courriel has become the standard term in Quebec, where adopting English terminology is a little bit more culturally / politically sensitive.
the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States
Also agreed. It's for the same reason I don't like the name darknet. The FBI was already lobbying Congress and saying the Internet is "going dark", implying that they thought that will scare congress into acting, and giving them more powers.
It should be named the Private Mail Protocol, or something. If it stands up to scrutiny, as soon as there is a nice looking e-mail client for it, I'll start using it, and try to use Gmail as little as possible, or not at all. I know Google won't adopt it, so I won't even bother to ask them to adopt it. I'll just switch.
I think Google might adopt it. If it's decrypted in the client (i.e. the Gmail web interface) Google would still be able to inject ads based on your email. That allows them to maintain monetization while having the ability to claim end-to-end security.
I agree. This is a case where some marketing thinking would probably help.
Lots of large businesses would probably like something like this (the ones that buy rsa keyfobs and use VPNs). My old company would strongly discourage email from the company system to non company email address for security reasons.
Having said that, many businesses have requirements for employee email that are startlingly close to what the NSA wants. We need info@, accounts@, support@ email addresses that can be read by many people. There also needs to be a way for someone other than Firstname Lastname to read the firstname.lastname@company.tld mail - either for oversight, vacation/illness covering, or hit-by-a-bus scenarios. There are probably certain businesses that have legal requirements about access to employee email. A shortsighted "secure/dark" email approach could easily be dead in the water in terms of corporate adoption if those requirements are not catered for.
(I dont use my personal GPG key for any work related or firstname.lastname@company.tld mail, but have a separate GPG key – who's passphrase is in a sealed envelope in the company safe so it can be made available to the company if required without needing to reveal my personal private key. If I'm hit by a bus, or if lawyers/law-enforcemet come knocking on company business - they can have the keys to the encrypted mail in my company account. Mail encrypted to _me_ at nickname@company.tld or me@mydomain.tld is useless if I'm hit by a bus, and would require lawyers/leo/courts to convince me to reveal a passphrase stored only in my head if they wanted it. (Or, you know, for the NSA to rootkit any of my devices I type my personal passphrase into…))
From the talk that just finished at Inboxlove, it appears they will use XMPP for transport, some JSON and encrypted cloud storage.
You receive a message via XMPP that an email is waiting for you on the cloud storage (similar to MMS). This is also a good solution for the spam problem, I think.
They have a working prototype, a whitepaper is forthcoming and the community is welcome to improve the new standard.
Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).
Remember what happened with "Anarchist's cookbook" and recipes for thermite and such that used to be readily available on the net, and relatively uncontroversial. It was just "information" after all. These days it seems knowing how to do some basic chemistry is considered intent to do harm or something.
I hope to see this magic new mystery protocol as something similar to TextSecure, where we have forward secrecy from the OTR protocol.
The current e-mail protocols are far too centralized, which doesn't make sense. Mail is delivered, and after that, it is no longer in possession of USPS. This is unlike how E-mail works (even though it kind of seems like that's what happens).
I hope to see some kind of client being required to run on my computer to decrypt e-mails at rest and receive e-mails that are delivered to me from the central server.
I'm really interested in their solution for solving metadata leakage. I just looked over the SCIMP white paper, and it didn't mention anything about metadata.
It appears they will use XMPP which offers encryption.. so the metadata that appears is encrypted XMPP messages being transmitted between servers to notify users about new messages.
Then you'll see the (encrypted) access to the cloud storage.
I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings: Metadata includes such interesting things as "who has been sending messages to whom at what time" and potentially also from where (ip address). This is an avenue to reconstruct social networks and behavioral patterns, especially if you can crosslink the data with other public sources. I recommend this visualization of the movement profile only derived from the collected data of one german politician (sorry, german only but fairly easy to understand) http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
The site http://www.darkmail.info/ is served over http and not https. If someone has access to the pipe, it would be easy get the email addresses of people who submit their email addresses at that site.
The marketing system they're using is Mailchimp which I'm sure is also easy to access for anyone who might've been able to snoop emails off the HTTPS version of DarkMail.info
Not sure I understand. Both SilentCircle and Lavabit have ceased offering their services. Are they now combined in an advocacy group to design a new email protocol and get it adopted by the IETF?
IETF adoption is a red herring. The IETF does not matter. What matters is market uptake. Reputable providers will need to offer the protocol as a service, and popular client software will need to integrate it into their applications.
As much as I hate promotion emails, I do hope they make sure that companies can still send mass "dark mails" securely, rather than sending the one by one...
See Bitmessage. It has two options. Either senders can spend a significant amount of time (~30 seconds) doing a proof-of-work calculation and send a message to a single person, or they can spend the same amount of time and send a message to an arbitrary number of people, but only if those people are subscribed to the person sending the message.
Nope, doesn't work. Most of spam today is sent trough compromised computers (botnets), so requiring more CPU work doesn't do anything (other than increase the world power consumption a tiny bit).
They mentioned having a "web of trust" to help fight spam. But if you use that, doesn't it mean someone like NSA, who can get everyone's public keys (which I assume is what they're going to use for this, just like for PGP), could then identify who are the people talking to each other, and essentially invalidate all their metadata gather protections? Or would that key be ephemeral, too?
Can we stop with 'the name sucks' meta discussion and focus on the topic? I for one would love to see this work out. It'd be goddamntime someone clever did something about it and I could not imagine two better parties starting this.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, OS X and iOS already support S/MIME encrypted email, and having the private keys live on users' devices and doing encryption of outgoing messages on users' devices is probably the safest setup.
Hmmm, I don't know if I'm being outrageously paranoid, but I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone - because it'd be _way_ too easy for Apple to extract the key/passphrase if they were coerced by someone powerful enough, and those "powerful enough" have shown that they consider a court order granting them the private key used to secure 400,000 people's email is an appropriate tool when targeting a single individual.
Once that's known, is it really such a stretch to assume that an already complicit PRISM partner might be convinced/coerced to monitor downloads of crypto-capablea app from their respective app-stores, and provide or allow backdoors to their OS that leak private keys?
Maybe that's being overly paranoid, but in the "post Snowden" era, it might just be a sensible and pragmatic view…
It's good to be paranoid - but if you don't trust Apple -- you'll have to be quite paranoid with your (and every other) iPhone you encounter. After all they might be recording all sound within range of the mic, for example. Or all text typed. Or both.
AFAIK Apple is close to best in class when it comes to handling secure information (keys, pins etc) -- even if they're not perfect.
My assumption is that if the NSA takes a specific interest in _me_ - then Apple and/or Google could be requested/coerced into making any iOS or Android device I was suspected of carrying do that.
If I held a top security clearance in a country the US was interested in, or was a politician, diplomat, drug-dealer, or Occupy Movement organiser - I wouldn't be happy using a modern smart phone.
As a "nobody", I doubt the NSA would burn those resources on monitoring me.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised to find the NSA take special interest in anybody who's downloaded a PGP/GPG app from the App Store or Google Play - and if I worked for the NSA I'd certainly have entertained the idea of working out how to subvert iOS/Android to expose private keys and passphrases using privileged vendor-provided OS access.
And I doubt I'm anything like as smart/creative/evil as the best people working at the NSA…
(And Apple definitely talk best-in-class talk about secure data handling, but there are some interesting questions about how your old passwords/iMessages/keys re-appear on a new iOS device when you replace them…)
> I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone
S/MIME doesn't use PGP keys, it uses X509 certificates. You can quite easily deploy multiple certificates, one for each communication partner or channel.
So for example your mail sent to / from your iPhone would be encrypted with one cert, whereas from your desktop for Super Secret Stuff you'd use another.
FYI, RetroShare has a solid and solidly growing community.
Of course, if you want to talk about "taken the world by storm" as in "Microsoft Windows 95": You're right, no encryption software has ever taken the world by storm. And that has to do with the fact that the general public doesn't care about privacy, b/c they have no clue how it works and most of all what the mid- and long-term consequences of losing privacy will be for their lives.
Email is so broken from a security standpoint I doubt that email 3.0 would even make it off the ground. You would be better off taking something like IM which silent circl allready has a secure solution for and adding the store and forward capabilities that make email email. Then u could have email clients use that protocol. But asking the entire world to change / upgrade it's email servers and clients with a fundamentally different protocol. I don't see that being successful.
Bitmessage doesn't scale, it's POW doesn't solve any spam problems, and it's largely insecure. There's been quite a lot of public discussion about just how hilariously insecure it is.
There's room for improvement, but there's a lot of core issues that just can't be flushed out.
The concept of the POW is to stop spam, as all addresses are inevitably public, it doesn't really work though, as spammers typically have access to botnets which can spam all day long. Normal users just have to wait minutes to send a message.
The scale issue is a weird one, they plan to split the network into different "streams" with different address types, which just sort of muddles the entire setup. Ultimately the limit is how much CPU and bandwidth the network can survive with while mirroring the entire content of the entire network.
There's lots of problems with timing attacks that have been "resolved" with random sleeps, though nobody is really convinced of that too much.
Your other points are good, but this one is wrong. Bitmessage is currently bundled with a client because that makes adoption easier, but ultimately, Bitmessage is first and foremost a protocol. POW increases the cost of flooding attacks on the network. Clients like Thunderbird (it was easier for me to integrate Bitmessage with Thunderbird than my regular email provider) stop spam.
The scaling is a rather hard problem, since, for anonymity, "everyone gets everything." If you have any ideas about how to scale a network like that, OR have any comparable methods for hindering traffic analysis, you should publicize them.
The timing attack mitigation via sleeps /is/ a rather ineffective substitute for constant-time decryption.
In summary:
1. POW is a non-issue, and part of the design at least the way you've put it.
2. Scaling is inevitable given the tradeoffs being made, unless you have a better idea, for which I will pay money
3. Timing attacks are a temporary problem, but they can certainly be "flushed out."
The biggest issue is missing messages. You essentially have to have it running all the time to get your "mail", otherwise you miss out on all of the resend windows.
I love the idea of bitmessage, but this issue is a major problem.
I don't understand how anyone of you can say "it's never going to take over email 1.0". Success is a lot about realisation. We have to start somewhere and this is a good start as any.
Having a standard is certainly a necessity. I definitely see secure email starting as a niche and if the user experience is at least as good as gmail I don't see any reason why a new email system would not take over.
It's not going to happen overnight but there definitely is a need for it. Lavabit and Silent Circle are proofs that this need is real.
There are major issues with replacing the current email:
1) there is no good open source email interface (if I'm wrong, please point me to this gem). Roundcube is good but not good enough when you come from gmail. I don't know of anything better than roundcube.
2) the threshold for a company to implement secure email is too high. Having a secure standard with secure libraries certainly lower that threshold
3) the current open source mails are GPL like licenses. This sucks for companies and individuals. Give them the ability to do what they want, including money. Replacing email is not going to happen without investment. Technology investments are mainly done by companies, only exceptionally by individuals.
Anyway, if anyone wants to take a shot as implementing an easy to use & opinionated (ie standardisation vs customization) webmail, chime in: https://github.com/nherment/dolphyn
"dark mail alliance" group, here is what you need to do...
1. get a new website, terrible design even from a 1995 point of view it is bad. Drop shadows on tag-lines are tacky. Not that tech people care, but if you want to take over the world. Try starting by having a decent designer on your team.
2. the only way to "truely" fix this for good is to not use email. instead, use a different form of communication (im thinking of...)
3. work with a few "enterprise companies"
4. get some capital
5. lastly, email is really still on 1.0, there was really no 2.0... unless you consider the time before the internet as 1.0 when the government used internal mail. But as we know mail today technically its still 1.0
The name "Dark Mail" is going to automatically be associated with the "Dark Net" which brings up thoughts of drug dealing and child pornography. This is their first problem.
The second is their approach. Overcoming the install base of current email, no matter how much better your new offering, is practically impossible. So instead secure layers on top of existing email is your only feasible option.
