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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

At least Poulsen is sticking with the facts:

> A U.S. email provider can promise its users all the security and privacy it wants; it still has to do whatever it takes to give the government access.

Correct.

Again: Just because Lavabit designed its security in a shitty manner to make it easier for end users, doesn't mean he can somehow wave his hands and claim "but but but but, I've designed this system such that you will be able to also read other peoples emails whom you've not subpoenaed. That is against my mission statement!".

Sorry bud.

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doesn't mean he can somehow wave his hands and claim "but but but but, I've designed this system such that you will be able to also read other peoples emails whom you've not subpoenaed. That is against my mission statement!".

Sure it does. If the police want to do something that impacts a very large number of innocent bystanders they need to have a higher level of accountability than if they just want to target one specific individual. For example it is unreasonable to search every house in a neighborhood in order to arrest one guy who owns a house there.

Yes, but the problem in this case is that the housing developer used one master key for all of the houses in the neighborhood. And now he is being asked to give over the master key to the police, so that they can search the house.

Will they copy it? Who knows... this is a question related to how much you trust the government and all of it's actors, policies, and procedures.

Or you can just not have master keys for all of the houses you build, or buy houses with unchangeable master keys.

Yeah except that's not how it works. The police/law enforcement/courts can simply get a warrant which says they're allowed to look at exactly 1 guys email, and you are to provide decryption keys.

You don't get to play "well I don't trust the government so I'm not going to let you" against the courts if the relevant parties promise they're not going to look at anything else - since amongst other things that would actually be breaking the law, and whatever they get would be inadmissible under various umbrellas - they certainly couldn't build a case off of it.

You might want to look into parallel construction.

"Parallel construction is a police process of building a parallel - or separate - evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation which otherwise would rely upon evidence or tips received either from a confidential source or that might fall under the category of fruit of the poisonous tree. By building a separate evidentiary basis for an investigation, such as corroborating evidence using other resources or finding other valid reasons to investigate, prosecutors are able to avoid disclosing confidential or otherwise unusable evidence." (From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

Yes. Note the important point though: it's based on the fact that a crime has other sources of evidence which would independently confirm a crime if they are found, which would be legal to pursue if they were discovered by other means.

i.e. the murder victim, the weapon and the security tape you buried in the local national park. The police might not find them, but they also don't need a search warrant to go looking.

Claiming you should for some reason be above the law entirely is absurd - the general point is to provide protection from stuff like "thought-crime" prosecutions, or at least a warning sign if that would otherwise be a thing.

He never said "I'm not going to let you", he offered to give them the snowden document dumps but the emails could not be decrypted without snowdens personal password. They demanded his SSL keys (something completely unprecedented) and Ladar refused on the grounds that it would compromise the security of all Lavabit users, not just Snowden.

And that's where he screwed up. Again just because your crypto sucks and has a weak spot doesn't mean the government is going to feel sorry for you and stop their investigation.

Imagine a system similar to Lavabit's, but with PFS.

The FBI demands the key so they can spy on one user. I'll give them the key, ban the user, and continue with a new key. The government then will have no plaintext of anyone's comms on my server.

If they demand the new key, they'll have to have a warrant for another user, and we'll repeat the above process.

If they object to the particular users being banned, or order me not to ban them, I'll shut down the server, and object in public based on the 13th Amendment [1]. They're entitled to take over the server if they want, but they're less likely to get away with compelling innocent citizens to actively perform services to help them deceive third parties.

1. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

AFAIK, Lavabit might very well be able to do just that.

If Lavabit can convince the appeals court that providing the keystone to the entire security model of the whole company imposes an unreasonable burden (in my mind, a quite convincing argument), they can vacate the decision and thereby set some precedent that compelled key disclosure by subpoena is, at least in these circumstances, inconsistent with US law.

The "shitty security" you are referring to is the defacto SSL standard implementation. The same implementation used by your bank, fortune 500 corporations, and the federal government.

I'm guessing the GP was referring to the fact that Levison didn't update Lavabit to prefer ciphers that provide perfect forward security. Here is his own admission on the subject:-

" When I was designing the Lavabit encrypted storage feature in 2004, it simply wasn’t possible for an attacker to intercept and decipher a large number of SSL connections in real time. This assumption was presumed true even if an attacker managed to gain access to the SSL private key. The situation has obviously changed. Network tools now decipher SSL connections efficiently, and servers are fast enough to make this attack a reality. A theoretical weakness became practical. I missed that development. More importantly, I failed to update the Lavabit SSL configuration to prefer ciphers that provided perfect forward secrecy. "

Source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/op-ed-lavabits-found...

He misspoke: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qetvk/i_am_ladar_levi...

I agree that he should have been more pro-active with PFS, but he did not consider a national security request to surrender his SSL keys as a legitimate threat. He's somewhat paranoid but he doesn't wear a tinfoil hat or anything.

These comments sound like the guy is getting a pass for his screwup, and the only reason why is because the government is the one doing the subpoenaing.

If the situation was reversed everyone where would be cheering at how incompetent and idiotic the government is.

It should be owned up that he designed his system with a weak spot, and that weak spot was obviously used to legally subpoena the data the government wanted access to.

My bank has never claimed anywhere that my banking records are totally secure and that they would never have a chance of being turned over to the Feds if there was an investigation.

Just because you "can" do something, doesn't mean it is or should be "legal" to do it.

Im not sure how this distinction applies in this case since in each iteration the government was trying to obtain their legally subpoenaed data in the most specific way possible.

They were given the data, as required by law.

They were not able to decrypt the data without the account password, which can only be derived using Snowdens personal password, so that poses a problem. To get the password they were forced to demand that Lavabit hand over private SSL keys (so they could potentially intercept the password in transit over the network). Now the courts have to decide whether such an act is legal or if it constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment (and possibly free speech). Should be interesting to see how this pans out.

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