Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
I wish there was something like Let's encrypt but for email. Just make it trivial to sign and encrypt your mail. Also, mail clients should give a huge warning for unencrypted and/or unsigned mail, just like browsers do with web sites. Right now, at least on Outlook for macOS, you only get a happy green padlock on signed email, if you ever receive one.
If we care about secure communication, then we should be nudging users towards protocols that enable encryption, rather than fighting against it. For 99% of cases, that probably means Signal.
[1]: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
As the post points out: email cannot be extended into a secure position. Attempts to do so either fail to interoperate or fail outright.
Signal doesn't let you migrate chat history to your desktop.
Trying to migrate between phones while retaining your Signal history is too hard for most people.
Signal is not at all a suitable replacement, and I believe that forward secrecy is an anti-feature for an email-like usecase.
Same as it's a feature of my filing cabinet that items don't incinerate themselves whenever I move house.
Can you elaborate?
With email, because people quote when replying, you'll get the other side's messages too.
Like, the simple PGP-like system where sender encrypts message using recipient's public RSA key.
And of course it's not improved by switching from RSA to ECIES.
You need to ratchet the key, or double ratchet like Signal protocol.
My hope is it'll be something like Dark Mail, yet with a carve out for enterprise recipients to inject their controls and anti-malware before end-user delivery. (To combat spam and malware.)
In other words: without sufficient clarity, email v2 just confuses people like my parents. Who would be better served by Signal anyways.
This creates two problems: (1) is that Signal functionally operates as "trust on first use", and (2) Signal has no system by which you can communicate to "conceptual entities" - i.e. companies. There's no way in Signal to talk to say, a bank or a government agency as an entity (IMO: to turn a profit, this is the business Signal actually need to be in).
Which makes it a bit of stochastic security measure: encrypt enough communications and probably when something important does come up, the window to intercept it has failed - except of course, that those verification number messages nobody knows what to do with and so they ignore them.
This has always kind of bugged me with email as compared to physical mail: While with a physical mailbox I can write a letter "to whom it may concern" and throw it in, with email I need to find out if the special, general purpose inbox is info@, contact@, hello@, or whatever other address the company uses, assuming they use the same domain for their email as they do for their website.
On the next level, there is no first-class support for stuff like 'send this message to person X, although it is adressed to organisation Y, where X works.' Basically, acknowledging the legal and organisational reality that while (single) humans might read, process and respond to communication, it is the legal entity that is actually being adressed.
At the same time: the relevant comparison here is email. Email isn’t even TOFU between arbitrary identities; it’s trust-on-each-message. Similarly for conceptual identities (like a bank’s catch-all address).
(I also agree with your point about this needing to be one of Signal’s businesses. WhatsApp and other chats already do this, I believe.)
It's just the security story on that if you never want the content disclosed isn't great, but conversely, conceptual entity communications are always going to be a bit public by nature.
There's a whole other rant I have about this problem, where we really lack domain specific trust standards - i.e. communicating with a business, what I want to know is "is this a recognized legal business entity in it's jurisdiction, and what's it's status to mine?" which is very different to "I need to make absolutely sure me and John Smith's communication is just between us" - but they're in the same space of problem.
I have the same pain, but this seems more like a regulatory issue than a technological one. Here in Germany, (basically all) legal entities need to publish a physical adress where they are reachable, it would be easy, in theory, to extend this to a reachable domain or email adress, thereby giving a guarantee, at least in Germany, that you are interacting with the business you are expecting. As you said, DKIM already exists.
Unless I have missed your point, then rant away.
The bigger problem is trustworthy user discovery service i.e. a directory to exchange public keys. This exists at an enterprise level (active directory) but not globally.
It's because encryption is a red herring. The theory that encryption is going to stop government surveillance is ridiculous. Even a perfect technology is not going to override national politics. Any government oppressive enough to require surveillance of its citizens will not be stopped by encryption. They will just block it or require a backdoor, or find yet more exploits that they won't announce in order to take advantage silently (whether it's the government directly, or one of the many 0day-for-pay players)
Either way they will enforce their will, until the citizens reform their government. You can't tech your way out of politics. You want an end to surveillance? Then go get involved in politics! Force your government to stop surveiling its citizens! Don't wait for someone else do the heavy lifting for you.
However, tampering with mail, or opening someone else's, is a federal crime with harsh penalties attached. The message is clear: "postal secrecy" is highly valued.
...and yet the government can still do that if it truly wants to.
Skiff cannot access email content, subject, and header info. To/from/cc/bcc fields are not stored end-to-end encrypted, though.
Governments are against encryption, because it takes power away from them.
Yet on the other side, there's Big Tech who will use encryption for things like Secure Boot and continued locking-down of "devices" (they don't even want you to think it's a general-purpose computer) against users, ostensibly for "security". Thus I believe their reasons to oppose the government's opposition to encryption are not truly in the interests of the users, but because it gives them the power instead.
Encryption is classified as a munition, because that's what it fundmentally is; everyone would probably agree that it's better to have a gun yourself, instead of one pointed at you.
I don't know of a simple solution to this problem. I'm just offering a critical alternative viewpoint to the "encryption = good" and "encryption = bad" sides.
This is exactly why I use e2ee in my app. I sleep better knowing that the keys to the castle are not solely in my hands, but rather with each user. They will always have a say in how their data is used because they ultimately control access.
'Technology companies currently use encryption positively to keep your bank transactions and online purchases safe and secure. Encryption has many other uses throughout everyday life, but some social media companies such as Meta are proposing to implement or already have implemented E2EE in private messaging spaces.
E2EE overrides current controls in place that help to keep children safe and potentially poses a huge risk."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryp...
There are no controls in place.
This line is becoming quite a pattern in UK (Tory) government rhetoric. They forcefully state wishful thinking as if it were a fact.
There are no controls because there is no possibility of controls, as a matter of mathematics. But by exploiting ignorance, the tories managed to beast parliament into an intractable "just imagine if..." clause in the Online Safety Bill... a law that provisionally exists if and only if the impossible becomes possible.
And then they sit back, fold their arms and call those "controls".
Controls must be effective, otherwise they're just buttons for show, that aren't wired to anything.
The reason nation states are losing ground to BigTech is because they are using 18th century power politics to fight 21st century logic.
I do wish my government would go take some basic CS and cryptography classes.
This is kind of true because, for example, the one-time pad is information-theoretically secure, and anyone could choose to use a one-time pad with anyone else given prior arrangements. Or anyone could choose to use RSA for confidentiality with anyone else given a mutual desire to communicate confidentially and an authentic but not confidential channel.
However, there's nothing mathematically stopping a government from punishing people who are observed to follow a protocol to create a confidential channel. Although Eben Moglen has argued that the right to speak PGP is the right to speak Navajo, a government could conceivably choose to punish people for speaking a foreign language.
One might wish (I would certainly wish) that people would be extremely upset by this, but I guess it wouldn't contravene mathematics.
In fact, there are some historic cases where populations were subject to official military censorship in wartime, which included overt government review of some of their communications, and possibly a prohibition on the use of "codes", and sometimes restrictions on the use of foreign languages. One might again wish that this would be both much less acceptable and much less feasible now than in the past, but it's not completely impossible.
That's fine, and those may have been legitimate needs at the time. Overcoming the Nazis meant stilling loose lips.
But are we at war? I mean officially according to UN declarations? And if we are not at war, or in an official state of emergency and official censorship re-emerges we need a rethink.
So long as decent people acknowledge that we are under illegitimate censorship accordant with a tyrannical/fascist regime, then they must reposition with respect to resistance and toppling that regime.
What's problematic for me (and everybody else here I think) is the double-think - a widespread belief that we remain in a liberal democracy while in reality de-facto censorship has snuck in.
"Pedophiles and terrorists" on the other hand, have to do a lot of things in the physical world in order to actually be pedophiles and terrorists. And the vast majority of work taking them down is infiltration - which is to say, nobody breaks encryption, they break trust - which is much easier, and has side-benefits like "generating actual evidence".
Electronic communications are merely 'theory' to the physical world's 'reality'. It's like the phrase "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
The Internet only contains the symptoms. If you want to know where there are real problems that need solving in this arena, speak to some teachers - but no, children's services remain under-funded and under-staffed whilst we spend more and more on internet surveillance.
Social problems can not be solved by technology legislation.
Nation States love to give legal and regulatory incentives as 'guidelines'.
It's the average joe that loses. The only way out is privacy from both nations and corporations.
If another person knows your technology exists, it will be inexorably wrenched from your hands and controlled by the biggest bully in town. We see it every single day.
Encryption isn't solely beneficial to human rights, it enables considerable harm to be shielded from scrutiny. There has to be a balance with the extent to which applications of encryption are permitted in society.
Humanity's evils pre-date technology, therefore banning technology will not remove them.
I'd also go on to say that many of the examples I've listed above have more to do with the creation of both terrorists and pedophiles, by a very wide margin, than encryption.
Problems that are hard to solve inevitably have scapegoat solutions thrown at them.
Sadly, I have already observed that exact opinion strongly advocated for on here for several of the things on that list.