Encrypt and Sign Gmail messages with FireGPG 206
Linux.com (Same owners as Slashdot) has a story up about FireGPG and says "Gmail may be an excellent Web-based email application, but there is no easy way to use it with privacy tools like GnuPG. The FireGPG extension for Firefox is designed to solve this problem. It integrates nicely into Gmail's interface and allows you...
Encrypt and sign Gmail messages with FireGPG
Encrypt and sign Gmail messages with FireGPG
The Fascination with Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
Keeps the snoops on their toes.
Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
I keep them on their toes by acting completely normal, having them looking for steganography.
Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:4, Funny)
1. You noted that you use encryption when acting normal.
2. However, you were posting on
3. Since you were not "acting completely normal", it is obvious that you were not employing any encryption scheme.
4.
5. Profit!
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"The birds rise at sundown. Where are the minnows?"
"All is well, north of the river."
Supposedly, the government would see them and get suspicious, thinking they were coded messages.
I've also wondered: why doesn't someone test whether the government is reading emails? For example, have some guys plot an imaginary terrorist attack via unencrypted email and
Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The Fascination with Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
And for the chat (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And for the chat (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this different from the gaim-encryption plugin?
The gaim-encryption plugin provides encryption and authentication, but not deniability or perfect forward secrecy. If an attacker or a virus gets access to your machine, all of your past gaim-encryption conversations are retroactively compromised. Further, since all of the messages are digitally signed, there is difficult-to-deny proof that you said what you did: not what we want for a supposedly private conversation!
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Well, that qualifies for a -1, troll since I've never
Re:And for the chat (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you want to make sure it IS from the person you think it is, but, that doesn't mean you have to know who the person IS in real life.
It would be cool if these email plugins would help make it easy to register and use the nym [iusmentis.com] servers. This way you could set up an email address on each end. PGP sigs can be used, but, there is plausible denyability as to who really is at each end of the email.
Of course if you're really worried about tracability, then set up a nym account to send out on, but, on return messages...just have it post encrypted to one of many USENET groups. You then really have a disconnect 'cause there's no good way to monitor around the world who gets what messages of USENET.
Say 'no' to gaim-encryption, use OTR (Score:5, Interesting)
Particularly since having two mutually-incompatible encryption packages is a pretty crummy state of affairs; it just means that the few users who do use encryption, are going to be fragmented between incompatible systems.
OTR probably has the greatest market penetration of any IM-encryption system, outside of corporate clients (Sametime, I think, uses encryption by default, although I don't think it's end-to-end, only client-server, because there they want the ability to intercept on the server), because it's built into the fairly popular OS X Adium [adiumx.com] client. So there's already quite a few users out there who have software that supports it. If only some of the other IM clients would start building it in by default, rather than making it an optional addon, I think it would quickly gain traction as a de facto standard. (And that would be a good thing, since it's a good system and open source.)
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Particularly since having two mutually-incompatible encryption packages is a pretty crummy state of affairs; it just means that the few users who do use encryption, are going to be fragmented between incompatible systems.
This is what standards are for. We need a standard for IM encryption, possibly as part of a larger encryption framework. I have no problem advocating a standard, which I think is a lot better idea than advocating a given program/library.
If only some of the other IM clients would start building it in by default, rather than making it an optional addon, I think it would quickly gain traction as a de facto standard.
OTR is licensed as GPL/LGPL. As such, I'm not sure a lot of major software makers will be all that keen about implementing it. Take a look at iChat or Yahoo Messenger. They're not going to open source their application just to add an encryption format that is still pret
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OTR is licensed as GPL/LGPL. As such, I'm not sure a lot of major software makers will be all that keen about implementing it. Take a look at iChat or Yahoo Messenger. They're not going to open source their application just to add an encryption format that is still pretty rare and where there is not a lot of demand.
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Which is why they use the LGPL, which allows usage without forcing openness.
I'm familiar with the LGPL license, but while it is great for "tivoization" type uses, it is usually a no-no for software inclusion. Most corporate lawyers I know don't want employees including LGPL code in distributed software, because the cost of making sure it is compliant and making sure the developers understand what they do and don't have to resubmit, and the cost of documenting the linkages, is too onerous, especially for this small of a chunk of code. It is easier to simply write their own code th
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Is it really this hard to just keep all of the LGPL code in its own files, and only add code to them that needs to be there?
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Is it really this hard to just keep all of the LGPL code in its own files, and only add code to them that needs to be there?
For a lot of companies, I think so. We manage a fair number of LGPL and GPL software packages here. Then again, we ship servers preloaded with it, just like Tivo does. The LGPL requires not only changes to the LGPL library, but also all the linkable object files used to glue it to your code base. This means you have to track it all and educate users. Here, most of the developers have a good handle on OSS licensing and we already have to track GPL software we also include on our boxes, making it not a huge
I wouldn't think google would like this (Score:5, Interesting)
"BUY jjhHDJEy6786ERLKLXhdfeprERIOUPewoenOIhgshgrgeyrew now for a low price on Ebay.co.uk"
Re:I wouldn't think google would like this (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I wouldn't think google would like this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I wouldn't think google would like this (Score:5, Insightful)
So... you are saying that the NSA has the ability and desire to break every ElGamel 2048-bit length encrypted message it captures with Echelon? I've seen too much of government from the inside to think that any agency operates as well as the NSA FUD would have us believe. Especially when you realize it is far easier and cheaper to make your enemies believe you have super powers than it is to actually develop those super powers, completely in-house with no outside knowledge or help.
Silly Rabbit (Score:3, Insightful)
Altered for slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Version: GNUPG v0.4.0 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Wonderful
ewurnfi3u834j9few4jf9oewfqvi7y&H*&HAwr8hw78er7hfw
wf8943f89jw3r8j9fesajaejro5gvl;rhyklyfp[ult0h43jg
fnw98efj89324rtuerjgeiorgtjerilgtjireogniregunren
werj
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
I have nothing more to add
Re:Altered for slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Does not this break GMAIL's business model? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought, their ability to automatically parse the messages — so as to show users the relevant advertisements, was the reason, I am getting an unlimited mailbox with nice interface for free.
If all/most of my messages are encrypted, how will they know, what to peddle to me? Can't do much on Subjects alone... Or can they?
Re:Does not this break GMAIL's business model? (Score:5, Funny)
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You need tin foil to make the hats - mind control rays pass right through aluminum!!! Don't you ever wonder why everyone still talks about "tin foil" even though all you can buy on store shelves nowadays is aluminum? It's because They don't want you to notice the switch!!!
Survival equipment.
Sure, if you want a compass that's got the New World Order's tracking devices already installed. I make my own survival equipment.
Wellbutrin.
You see how well my encryption has kept me under your radar?
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Hmm, maybe that's the reason I need to start using encryption.
That, and to annoy the NSA of course.
Point & Click Encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?
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I don't know, but it seems really
1) Geeks really want such encryption to take off.
2) It shouldn't be that hard to implement.
3) Governments really, really, really don't want this to happen. (i.e. that everyone can efforlessly encrypt this well)
Is 3) or 1) working against 2)?
Re:Point & Click Encryption? (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAICT, it doesn't exist. At least not outside of corporate environments. There are lots of companies that have their encryption set up so that it's transparent to non-technical employees, but it's a lot of work for the people who actually make it run. Lotus Notes, for instance, will do public-key cryptography, using company-wide keyservers -- although it's a proprietary algorithm, or was last time I checked. Once you have the infrastructure in place, the users don't have to think much about it, besides clicking 'encrypt and sign' on the emails they want secured.
I've also heard that within Apple, they use Apple Mail with S/MIME to great effect
I think the problem with the free encryption tools is that they're still very much a 'hacker's product,' being designed by fairly advanced users, for other advanced users -- or at least, for users who don't have a problem installing extra software in order to communicate securely. This, IMO, is a mistake; in order for an encryption system to be useful, it has to be widely used. And that means getting it into the hands of people who might not even think, in advance, that they want it. There are lots of people who aren't going to go out and download/install encryption software, but if the feature was there, and working, all the time, they'd probably find themselves clicking the 'Encrypt' button quite a bit.
There's no real reason why encryption can't be built in. It's just that it tends to get viewed as a peripheral, rather than core, feature, in everything except some corporate packages. However, I think that if it was incorporated more widely, it would quickly become a core feature; but getting over that 'chicken and egg' hump is hard.
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In a standard GPG encryption scheme, each user creates a private key and a public key. Anyone who wishes to send them a message must request their public key in order to do the encryption, and then the private key is used to do the decryption. (Sometimes to save computation time the message is actually encrypted with a symmetrical key, and then the key--which is shorter than th
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Well, there's one problem. You'd have to have a consistent standard.
Also, how would you handle key exchange? For "it-just-works", you'd likely not even ask the user if they want to get a particular senders public key, which makes a man in the middle attack very feasable ( because no one has ever spoofed email headers... ).
Where would one get
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S/MIME, which is built in to Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, and every other major e-mail client. You just need to get yourself a certificate and install it.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~pkilab/pages/Using_SMIMRe: (Score:2)
I think it's the same as all true forms of message validation: delivery in person.
* grin *
javascript RSA cryptography demo (Score:2)
the code is BSD-licensed. i've been meaning to write a larger javascript app to hold your keys and everyone elses' in a single window, and with a click of a button create a block of XML that you can copy+paste t
Ehm... (Score:2)
GMail S/MIME plugin for firefox (Score:4, Informative)
This is not painless and easy, and IMHO S/MIME is alot nicer implemented than PGP signatures.
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S/MIME is oftentimes more slickly implemented, because it tends to get more use on the corporate side, but I think that it's unsuited for wide use because of its reliance on centralized certificate authorities. The whole certificate-based infrastructure isn't anything that most people want to have to deal with.
For 90% of all communications, what people want is an email (or IM, or whatever) version of PGPfone -- they
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S/MIME relies on people trusting third party certificate authorities and acquiring the certificates of other in order to send encrypted messages. This actually COULD work if the major email vendors agree to cooperate on some sort of certificate distribution method, and provide an easy way for people to get keypairs in the first place. This is at least possible.
Something wit
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You don't really need the web of trust for PGP. You can use it without any of that quite easily. You grab the keys from a keyserver, and then if you're paranoid or worried about MITM attacks, you verify the fingerprint with the recipient through a side-channel (voice phone, whatever). It's just like PGPfone.
Unfortunately, PGP and the 'web of trust' are often conflated, but
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There is just no way that could reach widespread adoption. Only a PKI model, backed by major mail providers, could have a chance. My mom will never understand fingerprinting. She could understand "This message is signed by John Doe!*" showing up in her mail client, where the asterisk means, "according to Verisign, who is trusted by Gmail."
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But it works wonderfully to sign short messages, but nothing more complicated.
It took quite sometime for the S/MIME extension to mature enough to be usable, so this may work in a couple of months..
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Does that plugin actually support signatures yet? Encryption is great and all, but has way less useful security properties without signatures.
Only Gmail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Works with any textarea, by the way (Score:5, Informative)
Won't AJAX textboxes kill this? (Score:5, Interesting)
That data would be all cleartext wouldn't it? Seems a tad risky to me.
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I can't help it.. (Score:2)
Useless if GMail accessed only via POP3 (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, FireGPG actually benefits Google and its advertising goals, since it only functions via Firefox and Google's ad-infested Web interface.
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PGP/GPG - inherent legal problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, I wondered if anyone could confirm this? I have heard that it is the case for Britain at least, although I don't see how it can possibly be legally compatible with the presumption of innocence.
Secondly, I wanted to suggest that perhaps this is a reason not to use PGP, because PGP encrypted information can always be decrypted using the recipient's key - even many years after the message was originally sent. So law enforcement officers will be able to get old PGP-encrypted documents from your email account (probably even if you delete them, thanks to backup tapes). They'll then be able to force you to decrypt them, and if you don't, they can assume you are witholding the key because the files are full of terrorist plans or whatever.
I suggest that people should only use cryptosystems where the session keys are destroyed immediately after use, such as SSH and (possibly) some secure instant messaging services. Even if law enforcement officers use a wiretap to record everything sent by you over an SSH connection, and then seize your computers, they still can't recover the plaintext because the session keys have already been deleted. It's impossible for you, the suspect, to produce the keys, which should help your legal defense. Here's a way to chat securely by SSH [vanemery.com].. if you need to transfer files, you can use SFTP.
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Yes I believe that is the case in the UK [bbc.co.uk] (I am too lazy to find out if this is actual law now, to be honest I'm a bit confused if it is or not)
However, I don't have a problem with this. We use GPG encryption for all our corporate emails, some of our staff are working in countries where it is quite likely that somebody at an ISP could be bribed
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You don't have to be target of an investigation to be searched, what matters is that relevant evidence may be in your possession.
In the american system, the presumption of innocence sets a high standard for conviction in a criminal trial - a standard of civility and caution that ought to be maintained through every stage of the criminal process.
But to obt
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It's not the case; there was a bill proposed which would have done that, but civil rights activists got it altered so they can only compel you to give up your encryption keys if they can proove you have them.
Secondly, I wanted to suggest that perhaps this is a reason not to use PGP, because PGP encrypted in
Thanks, most informative! (Score:2)
The --show-session-key option looks handy - but in a way, this illustrates the second point I was getting at, which is that information encrypted with GPG can be recovered as long as any recipient can be forced to give up his private key (or run --show-session-key). This is something that any GPG user should bear in mind, particularly as GPG ciphertext will sit in email boxes for many years. You're trusting the recipient to keep his key secret forever: you trust him now and in the f
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For realtime communication (e.g. phones), that makes sense, but when does "after use" happen with email? Whatever your answer, many people will disagree. There's no right time to stop remembering the session key.
What's All the Hubub? (Score:2, Informative)
Why can't Google do this? (Score:2)
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. It's secret terrorist plots to overthrow the tyrannical American Government!
Oh, wait! I wasn't supposed to say that, was I?
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm more concerned about the letter (or worse, a check) falling out.
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Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
I use security envelopes to obscure the contents of my mail. You probably would want to use that as an analogy instead.
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Funny)
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Here's a tip for you. Use a piece of tape to hold the pages of the letter shut. Write the address on the back, and add a stamp. You just saved the cost of an envelope.
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I highly doubt that, every time you mail something in an envelope, you consciously think about the possibility of the mail falling out if you didn't seal it. Also, with most envelopes, you can simply tuck the flap in and it will be secure enough that the contents won't fall out.
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Informative)
Besides encryption, GPG also allows you to sign messages, ensuring that the message is indeed from you, and hasn't been modified after you've signed it. In the Ubuntu Community, this is important for a) verifying messages from developers are real, b) verifying that uploaded packages were created by trusted developers, c) verifying signatures (such as signing the code of conduct).
While FireGPG is useful, it's not so useful for signing messages; gmail auto-wordwraps messages after you send them, and FireGPG doesn't take that into account. Therefore, unless you wordwrap it yourself, gmail's going to add line breaks, and your signature will be invalid. When I need to sign messages, I either word wrap myself so that gmail doesn't, or send it through Thunderbird using Enigmail.
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Perhaps it's time for a GPG-wide standard for 'verification-lite', aimed at web-traffic. The idea being to trade a small amount of security for method robustness. Rather than signing a bit-for-bit copy, sign a version where anything other than
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe from your secret lover, etc. You get the picture.
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Funny)
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As always, XKCD is so relevent, it's not even funny, except it is, and so are chair dancing on the heads of penguins.
Re:Nerds with something to hide (Score:5, Funny)
Your girlfriend called... (Score:5, Funny)
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taxes (Score:2)
Re:Or you can use an actual mail client (Score:5, Informative)