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.'"
I welcome our new (Score:3, Funny)
Goodbye Market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hushmail did NOTHING WRONG (Score:2, Informative)
Standard Hushmail downloads (& caches) an applet on your computer that encrypts & decrypts your private key with your passphrase. Only the encrypted private key is stored on Hushmail servers, and your email encrypted with the public key. They don't give your decrypted
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.
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If I were them, I'd wipe the private key that's used to sign the applet. That way, if they're ever forced to do this, they'd have to use a different signing certificate, and the users (at least those who had checked the 'always trust applets from Hush Communications' checkbox the first time they signed in) would get an unexpected security dialog
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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.
Re:Entirely secure? (Score:5, Informative)
(Of course, if you use a single dictionary word or only a handful of ASCII characters, then the brute forcing is trivial, but that's a PEBKAC problem, not a cryptographic one.)
Re:Entirely secure? (Score:4, Funny)
I know this is slashdot but I refuse to define a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation as having 8 significant digits.
Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
GPG works fine.
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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:5, Insightful)
Web Mail (Score:2)
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.
That's been recommended to me, but I can't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's been recommended to me, but I can't do i (Score:3, Informative)
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"FireGPG is a Firefox extension under GPL which brings an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG. FireGPG adds an contextual menu to access to some useful functions. We will support some webmails. Currently, only Gmail is supported (some useful buttons are added in the interface of this webmail!)."
I haven't used it or Hushmail*, but it looks interesting. It does lack the portability, though. Maybe it could be made to
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.
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Hmmm. I have a method for factoring any prime, enormous or not. Here it is:
For any prime p, the factorization of p = p * 1
Now excuse me while I run to the patent office.
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These are Canadian feds
Also, on a side note, prime numbers are the easiest numbers to factor
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Ha ha, the more things change the more they stay the same. Say what you will about them, but the NSA is *very* good at keeping secrets. Sure, because they've asked for the keys it might make you think they don't have the ability to read the emails without them, but asking for the keys is exactly what they would do to keep the secret. If t
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I hope no one's figured out a way to factor any primes. I've gotten used to the job security of being a math teacher :)
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.
Not paranoid enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing from the article (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Was there a court order? Or Canadian equivalent?
2) Did hushmail lie? The obviously commited willful deception, but did they outright lie?
3) Did hushmail violate it's TOS?
4) Did hushmail do anything illegal?
Of course, what the article did mention is important, especially to hushmail, and potential hushmail users. However, it would have been nice if they had dug a little bit to answer these obvious questions.
Re:Missing from the article (Score:5, Informative)
US federal law enforcement agencies have obtained access to clear text copies of encrypted emails sent through Hushmail as part a of recent drug trafficking investigation.
The access was only granted after a court order was served on Hush Communications, the Canadian firm that offers the service.
Hush Communications said it would only accede to requests made in respect to targeted accounts and via court orders filed through Canadian court.
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Re:Missing from the article (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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End of Hushmail? (Score:2, Insightful)
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If they really lived up to their name, they would never have the private keys, unencrypted emails, or any way to get either of those.
No mater how secure (Score:5, Insightful)
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The point is that according to hushmail's end-user documentation, *they can't do this*.
Hushmail supposedly store everything, including your key, encrypted. The encrypted key is sent to an applet running on your computer, which decrypts it *locally* without sending a copy of your passphrase to the server. If you send e-mail to another hushmail user (as was the case in this instance) it is supposed to be encrypted with t
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Oh, but I *can* expect them not to render the law useless!
You can expect them to FIGHT it. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll assume you meant "follow." This is true. However, we have absolutely no evidence that HushMail attempted to FIGHT this order. This should have made a big stink about it and tried to come up with ways to protect their users both technically and legally, but instead they just rolled over and tried to keep it quiet to avoid letting it hurt their bottom line.
They lied to their customers by pretending to offer them a
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(emphasis mine)
They followed a court order, this story is a non-issue.
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.
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I don't understand why folks are so upset over this. You do NOT
give out your private keys. Ever. For anything. I don't care
how convenient the new version is, if you don't have control over
your private keys, they're no longer private.
In a related note:
Last night I noticed that my encrypted emails were not making it
to my Comcast account. ( Yeah, I hate em too but they're a monopoly
in my area. You want high speed ? You have Comcast or you have dial
up. )
After checking sp
who the hell gives away their private keys??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Last time I looked at hushmail... (Score:2)
Theoretically, hushmail can be used in a perfectly secure manner; download the source, check it for back-doors, compile the applet yourself and memorize its hash. Then whenever you use hushmail, just verify that the hash of the downloaded applet is the same as the one you compiled yourself.
Probably hushmail was just feeding
Re:Last time I looked at hushmail... (Score:4, Informative)
Why is this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Of course, hushmail's original selling point was that you _do_ keep your own key, or at least your key's AES-encrypted while on their servers and not decrypted there. That's the story that most people here about the service, even now.
However, at some point in the not-too-distant past, hushmail added a new service that didn't require a java applet to work, but that does require them to have your key. They're not forthcoming enough (IMO) about the dif
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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:
Lesson Learned: (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.sjtrek.com/trek/rules/ [sjtrek.com]
trust any electronic devices (Score:2)
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Not as big a deal as you think (Score:5, Informative)
They only had the keys to give away for those people who chose server side encryptions. They don't have the private keys for those who cleint side.
Also, when you choose you method, Hushmail tells you that server side is much less secure. They and anybody else operating in the US would have to turn over the private keys they heald with a court order.
Whats the leason? Key your private keys private. Duh.
Wired article with an interview (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like a honey-pot (Score:2)
1. Present yourself as a way to keep secrets from people.
2. Sell/Give those secrets to the people directly.
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.
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In other words, crypto works -- but the problem is getting human beings to do proper crypto.
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Duh! I agree - even my grandmother knows the difference between a private key generated on her PC by a Java applet running in a browser pointed to hushmail.com and a private key that's generated server-side and displayed in her browser pointed to hushmail.com.
Oh, wait, no she doesn't.
Server-side Webmail Only! (Score:5, Informative)
If you use their client-side Java applet to do the encryption on your computer - as they strongly recommends that you do - then this is not an issue. Hushmail never see you keys and thus cannot be compelled to hand them over.
Several other sites covered this story earlier in the month all without the crappy sensationalism of slashdot. I first saw it at arstechnica [arstechnica.com], which linked to an interview with the CEO by wired [wired.com].
I'm not usually one to hard on individual slashdot editors, but this is the 4th intentionally misleading troll that zonk has posted today. It is crap like this that caused me to not renew my slashdot subscription so many years.
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If they "strongly recommend" this, why is it off by default?
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Embarrassing?? (Score:2, Insightful)
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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, t
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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 an
War on drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
broader issue (Score:2)
This seems to me like an example of a much broader issue, which is the plethora of concerns, including privacy concerns, that surrounds the whole concept of using the browser as a platform for applications. People have been struggling with this forever, ever since Sun and MS first locked horns over Java applets. Over and over, we've seen security holes in IE caused by MS's poor handling of the javascript security model. Over and over, we've seen nonproprietary, multiplatform solutions (javascript, ajax) ba
What does it mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most successful hackers have been social hackers... and will continue to be.
Hushmail isn't secure - they use Outlook! (Score:2, Flamebait)
if you read your mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Except, according to hushmail's docs, that's not the case. They may have your private key, but according to the docs, it's AES-encrypted with your passphrase, and never leaves your local machine in any other state. That doesn't seem so dumb.
How did this happen? Fuck knows. It isn't supposed to be possible. Hushmail's system was supposedly designed so that they couldn't do this, even if
Re:By the authorise? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, Hushmail has two main modes of operation. One of them is (reasonably) secure, the other is a trainwreck.
In one mode, the 'secure' one, you -- the user -- access their site and download a Java applet to your browser, which contains the OpenPGP encryption engine. You type your emails, they're encrypted on your machine, and sent to the server that way. Hushmail never, at any point in the operation, knows the password to your private key.
Now, because a lot of people use browsers that don't support Java, as of a few years ago, Hushmail came up with an alternative, which doesn't require it. Instead of using a Java applet, it works like a regular HTML/HTTPS webmail system, and all the encryption is done on the server. This means you don't need to be able to run the Java applet on your client machine.
However, and this is the crucial part, when you use this second mode even once, you expose the passphrase to your private key to Hushmail. And that's how they could decrypt all the messages. Once a person used the insecure service, they had basically sold themselves down the river. Hushmail had their passphrase, and from there could decrypt their private key, and from there get at all their messages. (Or at least their incoming messages; I don't know whether Hushmail encrypts outgoing messages to the sender's private key as well as the recipient's.)
From what I can tell, if you used Hushmail and were careful to always use the Java-based service, you wouldn't necessarily be vulnerable to this sort of attack. Since Hushmail wouldn't have your passphrase, the most they could do would be to hand over your encrypted messages and encrypted keys to the Feds, who would then have to try to brute-force your private key. (Meaning, everything would rest on how good a passphrase you used...)
Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from
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We new they ratted out a week ago (Score:4, Informative)
http://cryptome.org/hushmail-rat.htm [cryptome.org]
Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same (Score:5, Interesting)
On the same token, while I am appalled at HushMail's actions, it's for a different reason than most here I suspect. I don't have a problem with HushMail sharing information about customers engaging in illegal behavior with the authorities. Those people don't deserve their activities to be protected - they're illegal. But I DO have a problem with HushMail not disclosing that they're doing it right up front. Now, I've not fully read their ToS so maybe they do but their statements on the website would lead you to believe they aren't.
Really though, why would anyone use a PUBLIC service to conduct illicit activities? Setting up a private mail system complete with encryption is trivial and MUCH more secure.
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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
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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.
Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same (Score:4, Interesting)
Prostitution, for example, varies widely in whether it is considered illegal or immoral. I would be appalled if supposedly secure communications could be seized because they contained evidence of consensual sex for money.
The only position I find tenable is that secure communication must be considered a right of free people. Yes, that means that the murderers, child molesters and terrorists will have it too, but the alternative is that nobody has secure communication.
Certainly there are technological solutions, such as proper use of encryption. But because of cases like this I would like to legal and social support for the right, such as laws making communications that were 'reasonably believed to be secure' inadmissable as evidence. I would also love to hear a group like the NRA saying that the right to secure communication is as essential as the right to bear arms. It certainly is in my mind.
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'DEA agents received three CDs of decrypted emails 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.
I received three decrypted cds of decrypted emails that were once encrypted but are now decrypted so the encrypted emails are now decrypted. I've now reading through for formerly encrypted decrypted emails and by reading the decrypted emails that were encrypted but now decrypted I will find out what was so important that it had to be encrypted and now decrypted.
--
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Andy
Err.. right. So spammers (who conduct often-illegal activities) are using a webmail service that makes it a little more difficult than usual for law enforcement to get hold of their details.
And you're surprised... why?