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Comment by vishal0123 | Hacker News Reader

> He doesn’t have the technological capability to decrypt his customer’s data but if someone could intercept the communication between the Lavabit’s Dallas-based servers and a user, they could get the user’s password and then use that to decrypt their data.

Is it really what I understand from this or LL is trying to say something else.

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""The way we encrypt messages before storing them is relatively unique. We only know of one commercial service, and one commercial product that will secure user data using asymmetric encryption before writing it to disk. Basically we generate public and private keys for the user and then encrypt the private key using a derivative of the plain text password. We then encrypt user messages using their public key before writing them to disk. (Alas, right now this is only available to paid users.)"

http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html

Does not make sense to me. Lavabit claims that it cannot decrypt customer's data, but if someone else could read what goes through Lavabit server and a client it could decrypt the data?? So, how come Lavabit can't do tha same thing?

Because Lavabit doesn't keep passwords in the clear, presumably.

I don't know a lot about Lavabit's arch.

But my guess is he's referring to replacing the login page's Javascript code with a malicious one that phones back the plaintext password. Kinda like a keylogger.

Lavabit's original architecture only store's an encrypted version of the private key needed to decrypt the messages. The private key is encrypted with the users password, and they don't store this password in plain text.

However; if you could intercept this password, and already got a copy of the encrypted private key as well as the encrypted data from lavabit, you could then decrypt the data.

Presumably lavabit didn't want to back door their services, by either storing a copy of the session keys, the password, or the plain text -- and chose to shut down instead.

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