Lavabit gets new crypto key, gives users 72 hours to recover e-mails

Presuming they've imaged the drives with their encrypted mail, all they'd have to do is a half-dozen line patch to the code to log the passwords to disk as they come in.

Then they can decrypt everyone's private keys, and decrypt everyone's mail, PFS or no.

Anyone sending their Lavabit password outside of their own home is simply asking for someone else to decrypt and read their email.

If I had been a Lavabit customer, I would see this cipher suite as him saying-without-saying that this service is suspect and is to be avoided at all costs.

At least this option gives the users that choice.

EDIT: And hope the relevant courts are not running during those 72 hours?

I believe it now implements Forward Secrecy...

It's far more likely that Levison has been bullied into 72 hours of snooping to avoid contempt than that he's suddenly decided, months after shutting down, for no reason at all, to open up a window for users to grab their emails.

Maybe if he destroyed everything apart from the one user account they claim they want access to?

Either that or there's an amount of incompetence here that should might as well amount to the same degree of stay away.

However, the server is probably not actively compromised, because if it was they could use PFS and still listen in. It is still required, however, that they'll need either to own this key pair being used at some point to listen in to the traffic.

But that would mean that they can likely change the key pair on the server but for some reason they can't enable PFS, even though once they have access to the server in production, PFS is useless... so... who knows on that part.

tl;dr: If they get the key pair later (even if years later through brute forcing or whatnot) and don't have access to the server, then PFS disabled is a bad thing. If they have control over the server or the server logs all the session keys and they receive these at some point in time, then PFS enabled is, of course, a useless thing. If they don't get the key pair at any point, then it's fine, but I'd consider that unlikely.

Edit: The proper way forward is to estimate the chance they will get the key, which might as well call at 50-50, multiply that by the losses you would incur where they to gain access to these emails (and that's likely to amount to $0 for the vast majority, sorry if I'm being presumptuous and devaluing privacy) and compare that to the losses incurred if you didn't have access to these emails. Counter-intuitively arising from that, for some it might even make sense to connect assuming that traffic is intercepted, to show that they are boring and are using Lavabit for very mundane reasons.

SSL protects an adversary from seeing what you're talking about, not who you're talking to.

Tor will prevent an adversary from seeing who you're talking to, but not (in itself) what you're talking about[0].

Here, the topic of concern is an adversary (in this case, the government) finding out what you're talking about, so Tor isn't relevant.

[0]Because the last step is unencrypted and sent in plain text, even though intermediate steps are encrypted.