
Lavaboom: Zero-Access Encrypted Email Service Hosted in Germany - BillFranklin
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/15/lavaboom-is-another-zero-access-encrypted-email-service-hosted-in-germany/
======
simi_
Lavaboom dev here, I'm happy to take questions. We're open source, mostly
Angular and Go based: [https://github.com/lavab](https://github.com/lavab)

edit: just to point out, we're running a Indiegogo campaign!
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lavaboom](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lavaboom)

~~~
fiatmoney
"We use JavaScript. All encryption happens on your browser"

How do you prevent the scenario of being forced to provide a poisoned client-
side encryption payload, just like e.g. Hushmail was?

~~~
simi_
1\. Our code is public. [https://github.com/lavab](https://github.com/lavab)

2\. We'll have Chrome/Firefox extensions for something similar to "signed
binaries"

3\. We offer the option to run the web client yourself (git clone
[https://github.com/lavab/web](https://github.com/lavab/web) && cd web && npm
install && gulp && open "[http://localhost:5000"](http://localhost:5000"))

4\. We'll build native desktop and mobile clients.

Hope this answers your question.

~~~
Procrastes
Native, or client-hosted javascript sounds workable. Server hosted Javascript
cannot be secure even in theory (without a client-side plugin). I gave up on
this problem when I shuttered Harpo Mail because of this and I am a US Citizen
and realized I can't legally or ethically claim I won't turn you over to the
Feds if they hold a gun to my head. It sounds like you are addressing those
issues and more, and I wish you success.

~~~
simi_
Thank you! :) Our servers and us are also based in Germany, which is a plus.

~~~
e12e
How is it a plus that they're hosted in Germany? The German spy service are on
record spying for the NSA, and of course only German citizens are protected by
German law, so if anything, for users from the US, being hosted in Germany
should be even worse than being hosted in the US (Assuming, the current slow,
blow-back against the NSA goes anywhere).

I don't really understand this fascination with hosting things outside of the
US "for security" (from apparently, mostly US citizens). Personally I'm in
Norway, where the secret police have been spying on "dissidents" (it used to
be the "far" left, nominally the neo-nazis/fascists (although they missed the
only terror attack, despite having a tip before the fact) -- now it's the
"radical" Muslims (you know, a clearly defined threat to national security,
aka "brown scary people")).

But regardless of how one feels about using Stasi methods to help perpetuate
and sustain illegal wars on the middle east -- one thing should be abundantly
clear: Nowhere (AFAIK) does foreign citizens have any rights to not be spied
on by local intelligence services. And of course all of NATO is working
together on gathering it (along with Sweden, which Norwegian intelligence
reportedly work closely with).

All that said, while I think we should all work at taking back our respective
governments, and strive for a better (more free) political environment -- I
don't think the _only_ measure for an email service should be "am I now safe
from state-sponsored actors". In fact, I think that should actually be pretty
low on the list.

Use gpg, or give up. More significantly, if you can't do the work for a proper
web-of-trust/key distribution and verification, you can't be secure (in the
sense indicated above).

I still think services like these are miles better than you-are-the-product,
like gmail/outlook.com etc.

Good luck on your service!

~~~
higherpurpose
There's a difference between spying on something and forcing you to do
something. I think the idea is there's no "Patriot Act" and National Security
Letters in Germany to force providers to introduce backdoors.

The "NSA can spy on you argument" doesn't really apply here. You just try to
provide solid security against that. Having poor security in "America"
wouldn't save you from NSA anyway.

~~~
e12e
I don't think it's realistic to expect that a provider can't be forced to
facilitate secret wire-tapping in any jurisdiction (Nor do I think that is
really desirable). Wasn't the (relatively) recent child-porn ring bust an
operation involving lots of jurisdictions?

I also don't think Germany will be a safe haven for someone working against
the drone program if that involves leaking classified information (otherwise
known as espionage, even if it stems from altruistic motives).

I feel people are as much in denial about the likelihood of spying by European
governments, as many were about the NSA (and for no better reason -- the NSA
was documented to break the law long before Snowden, and so have various
European governments).

I don't really see this as much of a win either way. But perhaps it's good
marketing copy.

------
yc1010
What exactly does "Zero-Access" mean?

~~~
glibgil
Probably something like this
[http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/](http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/)

~~~
floody-berry
Yeah, a made-up term that was ripped off from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-
knowledge_proof](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof) because it
sounded high-tech, yet has nothing to do with ZKP and merely means "you
encrypt everything client-side and we store binary blobs on the server for
you".

~~~
yc1010
I see so this works similar to how blockchain.info site works in the browser,
with the server used for encrypted backups and to retrieve blockchain data.

Thanks for answering

~~~
pzduniak
We actually based the Lavaboom Sync functionality on blockchain.info's model -
the private keys are encrypted using user's plaintext password, while the
client only sends the password's hash to the server during authentication.

------
drdaeman
What's the point if email's still plaintext in transit?

~~~
simi_
Here's how Lavaboom works. I hope this will alleviate your worries about
emails being sent as plaintext (for PGP users).

1\. alice@lavaboom.com sends an email to bob@gmail.com

Alice already has a keypair (generated automatically at registration), and Bob
has one too. Alice adds Bob as a contact (or does nothing and is matched to
Bob's key from a public key server), and sends him an email. The email
contents + metadata is encrypted before they leave the Lavaboom email client,
and are encrypted all the way to Bob. If Bob uses an email client with PGP
support, then he can decrypt the email.

2\. alice@lavaboom.com sends and email to zulu@lavaboom.com

Same scenario as above, except that key exchange is done automatically for
Lavaboom users (and emails don't leave our servers, making the process even
more secure).

3\. alice@lavaboom.com sends and email to carla@gmail.com

Carla doesn't use PGP, so Alice's email needs to be sent as plaintext.
However, before storing the email to the database, it is encrypted with
Alice's key, and the plaintext version (residing in RAM) is deleted as soon as
the mailer reports successful delivery. This way, only Alice has access to her
data, and Lavaboom is Zero Knowledge in respect to email contents.

~~~
bradleybuda
This is a reasonable approach, but there's a weak link in public key exchange.
If Lavaboom (or any other trusted third-party) is facilitating public key
exchange, there's nothing preventing them from saying "DE:AD:BE:EF" is Bob's
public key when in fact it belongs to Eve the attacker. Not to say that
Lavaboom would do this maliciously, but they might be compelled to do so by a
state actor or law enforcement.

As a rule of thumb, a messaging system S can only be zero-knowledge if you
have exchanged a secret or key with someone else _outside of system S_. See
the HN discussion on iMessage:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7315964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7315964)

~~~
pzduniak
We plan to improve it in the nearest future. Yesterday I started work on
support for message signing, the server part should be ready next week. Later
we'll add support for fetching keys from external exchanges (such as
pgp.mit.edu).

------
brillenfux
On Firefox 37.0.2 I got "Initialization failed" quickly after the
"Authenticating" step. Also, I guess that wrecked my invitation code …

Waiting for this to mature ;)

~~~
simi_
No problem, hit us up on hello@lavaboom.com for another invite code. That
sounds bad, could you please describe your issue on
[http://web.lava.wtf](http://web.lava.wtf) ? Screenshots and console logs are
appreciated!

I can try to incentivise you to submit a bug report by promising an extra
invite code once you submit an issue. :) (Just link this comment when you
email hello@lavaboom.com)

------
unknownzero
When I enter my info to reserve a username I never actually get the email with
details the page mentions :(. Is this broken right now?

~~~
pzduniak
Oops, it seems that someone broke the reservations during a website update -
adding that to my TODO list.

~~~
unknownzero
Thanks for the reply, that it may take a while to receive the mail is probably
useful information to throw on the reservations page until it's fixed if you
expect that to take a while. Just a thought.

------
nullrouted
Why is this any better than protonmail.ch?

~~~
pzduniak
1) First of all, Lavaboom is fully opensource - ALL of our sourcecode is
published on GitHub, so with enough efford you could download every piece of
our setup and run it on your own server.

2) We support true end to end email encryption (it's not perfect, but a lot
better than encrypting emails using some password in ProtonMail). Also you can
manage all of your keys yourself if you wish, or keep your keychain encrypted
on our server, just like in ProtonMail.

3) I'm definetely biased, but our stack is far better - ProtonMail uses PHP,
which has a questionable reputation, meanwhile we use a static-typed language
in the backend (Go).

4) Lavaboom is designed with hosted installations in mind - as soon as we sort
out all the basic functionality of the "public version" (ie. hosted on
lavaboom.com), we will start work on a self-hosted version which will make
running it locally a lot easier - even on a Raspberry Pi :)

5) You can check all of our claims in the source code - we have nothing to
hide!

5) Lavaboom to other providers emails use asymetric encryption. ProtonMail on
the other hand... [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58541/how-are-
pr...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58541/how-are-protonmail-
keys-distributed) :)

I might have repeated some points, but generally Lavaboom is a far more
advanced product, which is in early stages on development. Right now I
wouldn't recommend using Lavaboom for casual emailing, but I think that we
will have all of ProtonMail's functionality during next two to three months
and by the end of the year we should have a stable product with far more
functionality for truly privacy conscious people.

~~~
fareastcoast
ProtonMail also isn't encrypting with a password, it's fully OpenPGP compliant
using full length RSA keys. Also, how do we know Lavaboom is going to be
around and stable? ProtonMail is financed by the Swiss government and
developed at CERN.

------
duaneb
How do you guys implement search?

~~~
pzduniak
Right now we don't have any search at all, but we plan to generate search
indexes locally in the background.

