Hushmail Passing PGP Keys to the US Government 303
teknopurge writes "Apparently Hushmail has been providing information to law enforcement behind the backs of their clients. Billed as secure email because of their use of PGP, Hushmail has been turning over private keys of users to the authorities on request. 'DEA agents received three CDs which contained decrypted emails for the targets of the investigation that had been decrypted as part of a mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Canada. The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorities, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.'"
Re:By the authorise? (Score:3, Insightful)
First suggestion of the spell checker?
But more on topic:
What do you expect when you PRIVATE key is stored somewhere you do not control access to? kind of dumb, if you ask me.
Goodbye Market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not paranoid enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
End of Hushmail? (Score:2, Insightful)
No mater how secure (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give away your key... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what users expect. If a legitimate legal request that is clearly going to stand up to any legal challenge comes in and you give the company the ability to decrypt the messages you send, the company has no option but to comply.
If Hushmail users want privacy they need to put up with the inconvenience of using an applet to sign their messages, and should be checking the hash of the Applet each time it is downloaded too so they can ensure it hasn't had a backdoor added. ideally the applet shouldn't send anything over the network, it should just encrypt the text and pass the pgp encrypted text content to the browser compose window. Then the user can check the data doesn't include anything they didn't put there themselves.
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
GPG works fine.
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
who the hell gives away their private keys??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lesson Learned: (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong wrong wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
These comments are misguided.
The crypto is fine. It's just been applied in an obviously flawed manner. Of course if some third party obtains your private key, your should assume that your communications are no longer secure. What part of that is hard to understand?
There way asymmetric crypto is supposed to work, you generate the key pair yourself. Then you give out the public key. You never ever give out the private key.
As an exercise, think about the following scenario. You go to a website which purports to offer some kind of secure service based on asymmetric crypto, using for example PGP keys or X.509 certificates. The site asks you to supply a bunch of identity information. It then generates a key pair for you.
What part of this scenario should you trust? The answer: no part! It's not the function of another party to generate your key pair for you. You must do this yourself. You must closely guard the private key, store it securely, never give it out, and avoid transmitting it in cleartext. Got that? Then your problems are over.
Embarrassing?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Missing from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
- Hushmail was served with a court order issued by the British Columbia Supreme Court (the Feds in Bakersfield, CA had to forward their request to the Canadian government)
- Hushmail glosses over the vulnerability to private key capture in their non-Java based web client, but it is mentioned. The Java client never transmits the private key (you still must trust the client, source code is available; compare the hashes)
- No, Hushmail's TOS do not prevent them with complying with a legal court order. Their users also must not break the law, per the TOS.
- Hushmail followed Canadian law perfectly.
So what can we learn from this? First, don't do illegal things (and use Hushmail or anything else). Second, while their non-Java client is convenient for avoiding the bulk of your traffic getting sucked up by programs like Carnivore [wikipedia.org], use the Java client and not even Hushmail can hand anything over (they never received the private key, even for an instant).Re:Missing from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
The principle behind Hushmail is flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)
You never give your private key away to anyone ever. Period. Giving Hushmail a weakly encrypted private key is fishy to start with, but then entering the passphrase to decrypt it in a Hushmail controlled applet is just stupid.
And it's completely unnecessary because there are very good encryption utilities in existence and it's very trivial to set up a system that is a thousand times more secure than Hushmail. How about Debian + KMail + GnuPG? You don't trust Debian enough, because it's a binary distro and who knows what they secretly put in there? Use Gentoo.
Perhaps the tinfoil hat crowd will say things like "but there might be a backdoor in your hardware", but Hushmail wouldn't save you from that. And let's be honest here: no one really believes that anyway.
You may have thought yourself very witty when writing that penultimate paragraph, but the fact of the matter is that in today's world you can actually be as good as sure.
War on drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Web Mail (Score:5, Insightful)
FireGPG. I haven't used it, but the blurb seems to indicate that that does the trick, at least for gmail.
Re:Server-side Webmail Only! (Score:3, Insightful)
If they "strongly recommend" this, why is it off by default?
What does it mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most successful hackers have been social hackers... and will continue to be.
Re:By the authorise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missing from the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hushmail did NOTHING WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know much about Hushmail, but I looked at their website, and they seem to want about $50 per year for what is basically GPG, and therefore available free. Except that, since java applets are downloaded from the server, there's no way to be sure that what you're actually running is what they claim that you are running, so their system might have all sorts of insecurities and backdoors, even if their source code looks OK. So they might give you as much security as they can, or they might be a bunch of cowboys. How do you tell? I certainly wouldn't trust them with my secrets.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where does it say this? The only mention on the home page is at the bottom, "Hushmail without Java is now available". OK. Say I don't particularly care whether or not Java is used; I click on the "sign up for free email" button.
The text on this page is:
Do you expect people to read the entire site before signing up, in order to realise that in order to be secure they have to click "Show advanced options", and press the "Enable Java" button that's hiding in that panel?
Re:Embarrassing?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not a brach of contract because you can not add illegal stipulations on a contract.
And the company is not allowed to inform the individual that they gave up the keys.
The law overides any right to privacy we think we have. We talk all we want, but when we step up to the law, we have nothing to stand on. The only way we can win is by chaning the law. Even if I do all the encryption myself, they can come to me and ask me for my keys. We just had a news item this week where that was threatened. We cant blame the companies, we have to fix the laws.
If the company breaks the laws, then do the public hanging.
Nothing Matters But Trust (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't personally know the principle employees of Hushmail or of any other security service providers, nor do I personally know Phil Zimmerman or any other authors of the encryption software. For all I know, these companies and individuals could all be fronts for the NSA.
I also fail to see how other posters to this topic can claim that the technology is rock solid? How do they know? How do I know if they too are fronts for NSA?
So what am I left with. Nothing but trust. If I trust the provider, then their technology is irrelevant. If I don't trust them, then their technology is irrelevant. In this instance, Hushmail has proved that they are unworthy of trust.
if you read your mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The principle behind Hushmail is flawed. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same (Score:4, Insightful)
They deserve to have their activities protected unless those activities are wrong and it really isn't for Hushmail to say whether or not they are wrong. Illegal really has nothing to do with it. Many things were illegal in Nazi Germany or are illegal in China, or Russia, or the United States, or that doesn't mean they are wrong or immoral. Many laws are innately immoral.
Unfortunately many people forget that even a democratic government is an entity in itself with interests that differ from yours and from the actual citizenry. Even if the books weren't filled with preposterous laws that would make criminals of good decent and ethical individuals total law enforcement would be a bad thing.
That's been recommended to me, but I can't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same (Score:5, Insightful)
Mark my words, there's going to be an effort to make any personal encryption illegal. I know all the arguments about why this "can't happen" and why we'll all be able to get around any law regarding personal use of encryption, but that's not going to stop the government from trying to outlaw it. And it's going to happen under the guise of "fighting terrorism". Further, it doesn't really matter if Mrs Clinton or Rudy Ghouliani become president. Either one will try to outlaw personal use of encryption. I'm not one of those people who believe there's no difference between the two political parties, and I don't believe any of the other Democratic candidates would go this way, but my sense is that Mrs Clinton is as enamored with secretive authoritarianism as any Republican corporatist.
Now, to be fair, Hushmail was probably pushed pretty hard by the NSA or FBI or DOJ to give up the PGP keys. They're trying to make a go of their little business and some alphabet outfit comes and basically lays it out that they can either play ball and let go of the keys or cease to exist. They couldn't even go to court to fight it because the government just has to say that "national security" is at stake and the case is thrown out. That's how bad it's already become.
But still, any provider of online communication services who does this must be given the consumer death penalty. It may be unfair to boycott a company that is otherwise good when they come up against this type of government bullying, but if we don't make a stand, every single company we rely on is going to fold to the government. We have to let any company that is going to handle our information that giving up our stuff without a warrant means they lose their customers. We're going to have to be every bit as ruthless as the corporate power establishment that is masquerading as our government.
If any of you have Lexis/Nexis, just take a quick look at the unbelievable acceleration of the destruction of our constitutional freedoms that has happened in the last 7 years. Although there's always been a push/pull in this kind of thing (after the Nixon years, the pendulum swung the other way for a while, with many laws protecting our freedoms shored up by congress), there's never been an administration that has been so outright hostile to our Constitution, and never has there been a court system so willing to acquiesce to the "Unitary Executive". If you look at the current makeup of the Supreme Court for example, we have a majority of activist, anti-freedom, reckless justices from the Chief on down. It's chilling. If Bush gets one more appointment, it's game over for at least three generations. Even without one more appointment, the Court has never been this hostile to personal freedom and willing to lie, twist and simply ignore our Constitution.
It's time that we take privacy and our freedoms into consideration with every decision we make, especially the economic ones. My wife and kid and I have already decided to make every effort to subvert the consumerist agenda that is being forced down our throats. Instead of borrowing to spend, we save. Instead of investing in the corporations that are our adversaries, we invest in family and neighbors. No carrying balances on our credit cards. No home equity loans to take vacations or buy HDTVs. Interestingly, our standard of living has improved. And when a company is hostile to our interests, we don't do business with them, and we encourage all our friends to stop doing business with them too. We're rooting for a horrible xmas buying season. When we heard that consumer confidence fell dramatically, we cheered because it means people are waking up. Once we realize that corporations use the same FUD to keep us buying and borrowing that the government uses to get us to give up our freedoms and privacy, we learned that there are worse things than a downturn in the economy - especially since the current economic model is feeding on midd
Re:Embarrassing?? (Score:3, Insightful)
In fairness to you, both the headline and the summary not only completely failed to mention that they did this only after receiving a legitimate court order from their jurisdiction for the information they turned over, the tone of the title and summary implies that Hushmail just handed over information voluntarily in violation of agreements. The Article is poorly written, but the summary and headline are even worse. In general, I think a lot of people are a little too hard on Slashdot, but in this case, the criticism is duly warranted. The summary as written is borderline libelous.
I'm opposed to the stupid and wasteful "war on drugs"*. But that doesn't mean if I run a network service that drug runners are using I'm going to go to jail for them so they can stay in business, either. If you expect strangers to go to jail for you so you can continue to break the law then you're pretty stupid.
* - My brother-in-law got busted for toking up in September. He's in prison. It's a common story, right? Thing was, when he was toking up, HE WAS IN PRISON THEN, TOO. And he has been since 1991. Now tell me: If we can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons, how the fuck are we going to keep them out of the country?
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't meant as one of those haughty, holier-than-thou remarks that it might initially sound like: The best solution is to run your mail user agent yourself, on your own hardware. Really.
These days it's easy to find an old PC or Mac / Soekris box / Linksys router and install OpenBSD or Linux on it. Then you not only have a more powerful and secure router than you started out with, you also have a general-purpose Unix server at your disposal; set up a free dynamic DNS account from DynDNS.com [dyndns.com] or the likes (in conjunction with the ddclient update script from the OpenBSD ports tree or Debian repositories) and OpenSSH, and you have a secure and efficient way to log into this system from anywhere on the public Internet. That's one step away from a remote access mail client with far greater security than any web-based company will provide you.
A few pointers:
This approach has a number of advantages over using any third-party web based system. The most obvious one is that in this configuration, GPG runs entirely on the server, keeping your encryption keys safe from untrusted clients. Also, because you are not using a web application, this system is immune to CSRF and XSS attacks. And OpenSSH offers a wide variety of authentication options, many of them far more secure in real-world scenarios than the simple username/password schemes implemented by most web apps.
Real information security takes real work, and as Hushmail has so kindly demonstrated for us, it isn't sound to exclude your own hosting company from your threat analysis. Why not simplify things and host part of your mail system yourself - the part that matters, where your encryption keys are stored and your messages are cached. Sure, it won't protect you from every vector of attack; but if your system does get attacked, it will be much more difficult for the attacker to do so entirely behind your back.
I'm not claiming that such a setup is for everyone. But if you want better security than what Hushmail was able to provide, this is what you need to do. If this is more work than you're willing to put in, it important to realize what you're giving up, and that there are no vastly "better alternatives" in the web-based secure email cottage industry. Or in other words: if you want something done right, do it yourself.
Re:Alternatives? (Score:3, Insightful)
how ironic, a fascist government in the UK. Good thing all the WW2 veterans are dead, so they didn't have to see it...
Re:Alternatives? (Score:3, Insightful)
These are Canadian feds
Also, on a side note, prime numbers are the easiest numbers to factor
Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same (Score:3, Insightful)