7 ms·

I consulted for UC Berkeley on a project with the UCB IT email team. I can say firsthand they are excellent people, both technically and also morally. They are

by jph 11y ago

I consulted for UC Berkeley on a project with the UCB IT email team. I can say firsthand they are excellent people, both technically and also morally. They are careful about security and protecting people and data. There is the usual email protection for virus scanning, spam blocking, abuse alerting, archiving of legal items, and the like. In my direct experience, the entire chain of command up to and including the UCB CTO is solid. So I hope Napolitano steps up and explains what's happening now. In the meantime if any UC Berkeley people want to learn how to use GPG for encrypting email, and VPNs for encrypting traffic, I will donate pro bono hours.

wfunction 11y ago
> In the meantime if any UC Berkeley people want to learn how to use GPG for encrypting email Could you explain why this should be necessary when email communication between the servers and clients is already encrypted via SSL/TLS? Can they bypass that? (And if so how?)
- abstractbeliefs 11y ago
  Because the operators of the servers cannot be trusted. SSL/TLS protects the data in motion, from people monitoring the networking by illegitimately MITMing users. GPG protects data at rest from server operators reading things they should not.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  How do you know that all your recipients' mail server aren't monitored (or webclient and the NSA pumps the data between the ssl termination and the web server, eg: google)? As a rule of thumb, if you care enough that it should not be seen by others, encrypt before it is sent, before it is written to disk. You have no control over a stolen laptop, over what the backup servers (assuming remote backup), etc... If it is private, encrypt. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you do it often enough it just becomes part of the workflow. Good tools you should use on a regular basis: KeepassX, gpg, Enigmail
  - wfunction 11y ago
    That's always true though and it has nothing to do with this situation in particular.
    - dorfsmay 11y ago
      > it has nothing to do with this situation in particular. Please read the parent's question, asking why it would be necessary to encrypt when using SSL/TLS. I explain why, and yes I do go a little bit further to more general cases, because I am assuming that if they don't understand the need to encrypt in this specific case they could benefit, and hopefully appreciate, to understand the more general cases as well.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > servers You're trusting the server too much. While TLS servers an important role, it is only protecting the link, not he data. End-to-end encryption (which PGP/GPG provides) is important for the same reason bittorrent is so successful: it protects the data, not the host. When bittorrent was new, a common concern was that you might be getting the data form anybody, including people who are malicious. This concern was a product of traditional download methods where you had to trust the person sending the data ("only download from reputable sources"). Bittorrent bypassed that problem by providing hashes, so the data itself could be verified regardless of how you got it. Securing of a host or connection suffers from the same problem. Just like how reputable fileservers can still be hacked or strong-armed into serving incorrect data, the server at the end of the TLS connection can be compromised. > how That depends on the people at the TLS endpoints who see the plaintext. If they are collaborators, they simply build in access to the plaintext and we call it "Prism". If they are refuseniks, it might be necessary use a national security letter.
  - prdonahue 11y ago
    Not to mention the fact that they're probably installing their own root certs on the endpoints and then just MITM'ing everything with their own certs.
- zrm 11y ago
  > Could you explain why this should be necessary when email communication between the servers and clients is already encrypted via SSL/TLS? Can they bypass that? (And if so how?) RFC2487 Section 5: A publicly-referenced SMTP server MUST NOT require use of the STARTTLS extension in order to deliver mail locally. This rule prevents the STARTTLS extension from damaging the interoperability of the Internet's SMTP infrastructure. A publicly-referenced SMTP server is an SMTP server which runs on port 25 of an Internet host listed in the MX record (or A record if an MX record is not present) for the domain name on the right hand side of an Internet mail address. In other words, internet mail servers are required to allow a trivial downgrade to plaintext by a MITM attacker.
  - btgeekboy 11y ago
    And if you don't follow the RFC, the internet police will come after you! Yes, I am aware of the RFC2119 meaning of "MUST NOT." In reality, nothing prevents the servers from disallowing that downgrade, except that they may not be interoperable with other servers on the internet. If the operator of the server wishes to make that tradeoff, then requiring STARTTLS is an option.
    - zrm 11y ago
      If you don't follow the RFC then people will email you from gmail saying "I tried to send you mail from my company's mail server and it didn't work", other people will submit a github issue to your project saying they couldn't email you, and when you try to subscribe to one of djb's mailing lists you'll get a response from your mail server saying it couldn't deliver the message. That is what actually happened when I tried it.
      - spc476 11y ago
        And I subscribed to a mailing list years ago that suddenly went TLS-mandatory (for incoming email---it doesn't demand TLS when sending email) and now I can't even unsubscribe from the list.
  - LinuxBender 11y ago
- throwaway72727 11y ago
  I think this point has been made in some way or another in the thread, but I want to try to restate it. Suppose Alice (alice@gmail.com) emails Bob (bob@yahoo.com). If Alice sends Bob an email without PGP encryption, the text of those emails is stored on both Google's and Yahoo's servers, allowing either of those companies to read the email (or a government if served with a subpoena, or others -- possibly the general public -- in the event of a data breach). This is true regardless of whether it was sent with TLS at every point in the chain. On the other hand, if Alice uses PGP to actually encrypt the text of the email with Bob's and her public key, nobody except Alice and Bob themselves (not even Yahoo or Google, who have the message stored on their servers) can read the message. It's an important distinction -- as major consumer messaging products like Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp, etc. have recently started to implement this end-to-end encryption where even the company themselves are unable to read the message their users are sending, the FBI and other federal agencies have started to actually complain about their newly limited ability to spy, unlike when only TLS was used and they could just serve an NSL to Apple/Google/etc. to make them give up your message without your knowledge (with their only other option being shutting down their business, more or less).
garraeth 11y ago
That's wonderful you are willing to help everybody (seriously). But, I think people need to be aware that it's not just email: "The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus, and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of all this data ("full packet capture"). This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus." Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from, say, posting something into a HN forum? Or any chat program? Or FB chat, etc...?
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from, say, posting something into a HN forum? Or any chat program? Or FB chat, etc...? TLS or other encryption. However, if they [UCOP, vendor, other] get your key(s) they will be able to read archived traffic.
  - nsgi 11y ago
    Not with Perfect Forward Secrecy
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      PFS just adds additional keys.
      - mehrdada 11y ago
        Keys that are supposedly short-lived on the client and the server. And if you are assuming they already control the client or the server endpoint, then the entire discussion is moot, but considering we are talking about archived packets at a router interface, the parent comment is very valid.
        jsprogrammer 11y ago
        It is certainly valid, but is also covered by my original case. I just wanted to be explicit about the connection between the posts.
tehwebguy 11y ago
> So I hope Napolitano steps up and explains what's happening now. Not likely, she is the former head of the Homeland Security Department
trhway 11y ago
>So I hope Napolitano steps up and explains what's happening now. given Napolitano's pedigree, in AZ and DHS, i think the best explanation you can expect, if any, that it is either to protect children and/or national security without any details. Btw, how she could end up as the head of UC?. Her record is like a mini-Bush in action. You can't make it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano#Walmart.E2.80.93DHS_partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano#Walmart.E2.80... Do you seriously think that choosing between new spectrometer and network snooping device she would choose spectrometer over her DHS security contractors? I can only suppose that the UC search committee somehow ended up with only Hoover and Napolitano on the short list, and as Hoover hadn't returned multiple phone calls...
- jacobolus 11y ago
  “Mini-Bush in action” is a ridiculous summary of Napolitano’s career. Both Democratic Governor of AZ and Secretary of Homeland Security are quite politically constrained positions in US politics. Arizona is a state with a radical Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature which has been in control for decades. There’s really only so much a Democrat can do as governor. I personally think the structure and many of the activities of the DHS are ridiculous, but that’s the fault of Congress, not of the person appointed to be its executive. Napolitano seems to me like a competent mainstream (“centrist Democrat”) politician, not unlike most of the people who would be considered for a post like UC President. She’s not my personal favorite, and I disagree with her about many policy topics, but in a lineup of US ex-governors, she’s easily in the top quarter. By contrast, Bush was an absolute disaster in every way.
- toomanybeersies 11y ago
  > This is a video message from Napolitano on TV screens in Wal-Mart stores playing a "public service announcement" to ask customers to report suspicious activity to a Wal-Mart manager. The rationale is that national security begins at home. Napolitano "compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists." Generally, the communist witch hunts of the 50's, 60's and 70's (especially the House Un-American Activities Committee) aren't considered a good thing. Apparently now they are.
gregniemeyer 11y ago
Thanks it would be great to have a recipe for how to maintain privacy here at UC Berkeley, and also a recipe for how to ensure that the information we want to share can be shared.

by jph 11y ago

wfunction 11y ago

> In the meantime if any UC Berkeley people want to learn how to use GPG for encrypting email Could you explain why this should be necessary when email communication between the servers and clients is already encrypted via SSL/TLS? Can they bypass that? (And if so how?)

abstractbeliefs 11y ago
Because the operators of the servers cannot be trusted. SSL/TLS protects the data in motion, from people monitoring the networking by illegitimately MITMing users. GPG protects data at rest from server operators reading things they should not.
dorfsmay 11y ago
How do you know that all your recipients' mail server aren't monitored (or webclient and the NSA pumps the data between the ssl termination and the web server, eg: google)? As a rule of thumb, if you care enough that it should not be seen by others, encrypt before it is sent, before it is written to disk. You have no control over a stolen laptop, over what the backup servers (assuming remote backup), etc... If it is private, encrypt. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you do it often enough it just becomes part of the workflow. Good tools you should use on a regular basis: KeepassX, gpg, Enigmail
- wfunction 11y ago
  That's always true though and it has nothing to do with this situation in particular.
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    > it has nothing to do with this situation in particular. Please read the parent's question, asking why it would be necessary to encrypt when using SSL/TLS. I explain why, and yes I do go a little bit further to more general cases, because I am assuming that if they don't understand the need to encrypt in this specific case they could benefit, and hopefully appreciate, to understand the more general cases as well.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pdkl95 11y ago
> servers You're trusting the server too much. While TLS servers an important role, it is only protecting the link, not he data. End-to-end encryption (which PGP/GPG provides) is important for the same reason bittorrent is so successful: it protects the data, not the host. When bittorrent was new, a common concern was that you might be getting the data form anybody, including people who are malicious. This concern was a product of traditional download methods where you had to trust the person sending the data ("only download from reputable sources"). Bittorrent bypassed that problem by providing hashes, so the data itself could be verified regardless of how you got it. Securing of a host or connection suffers from the same problem. Just like how reputable fileservers can still be hacked or strong-armed into serving incorrect data, the server at the end of the TLS connection can be compromised. > how That depends on the people at the TLS endpoints who see the plaintext. If they are collaborators, they simply build in access to the plaintext and we call it "Prism". If they are refuseniks, it might be necessary use a national security letter.
- prdonahue 11y ago
  Not to mention the fact that they're probably installing their own root certs on the endpoints and then just MITM'ing everything with their own certs.
zrm 11y ago
> Could you explain why this should be necessary when email communication between the servers and clients is already encrypted via SSL/TLS? Can they bypass that? (And if so how?) RFC2487 Section 5: A publicly-referenced SMTP server MUST NOT require use of the STARTTLS extension in order to deliver mail locally. This rule prevents the STARTTLS extension from damaging the interoperability of the Internet's SMTP infrastructure. A publicly-referenced SMTP server is an SMTP server which runs on port 25 of an Internet host listed in the MX record (or A record if an MX record is not present) for the domain name on the right hand side of an Internet mail address. In other words, internet mail servers are required to allow a trivial downgrade to plaintext by a MITM attacker.
- btgeekboy 11y ago
  And if you don't follow the RFC, the internet police will come after you! Yes, I am aware of the RFC2119 meaning of "MUST NOT." In reality, nothing prevents the servers from disallowing that downgrade, except that they may not be interoperable with other servers on the internet. If the operator of the server wishes to make that tradeoff, then requiring STARTTLS is an option.
  - zrm 11y ago
    If you don't follow the RFC then people will email you from gmail saying "I tried to send you mail from my company's mail server and it didn't work", other people will submit a github issue to your project saying they couldn't email you, and when you try to subscribe to one of djb's mailing lists you'll get a response from your mail server saying it couldn't deliver the message. That is what actually happened when I tried it.
    - spc476 11y ago
      And I subscribed to a mailing list years ago that suddenly went TLS-mandatory (for incoming email---it doesn't demand TLS when sending email) and now I can't even unsubscribe from the list.
- LinuxBender 11y ago
throwaway72727 11y ago
I think this point has been made in some way or another in the thread, but I want to try to restate it. Suppose Alice (alice@gmail.com) emails Bob (bob@yahoo.com). If Alice sends Bob an email without PGP encryption, the text of those emails is stored on both Google's and Yahoo's servers, allowing either of those companies to read the email (or a government if served with a subpoena, or others -- possibly the general public -- in the event of a data breach). This is true regardless of whether it was sent with TLS at every point in the chain. On the other hand, if Alice uses PGP to actually encrypt the text of the email with Bob's and her public key, nobody except Alice and Bob themselves (not even Yahoo or Google, who have the message stored on their servers) can read the message. It's an important distinction -- as major consumer messaging products like Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp, etc. have recently started to implement this end-to-end encryption where even the company themselves are unable to read the message their users are sending, the FBI and other federal agencies have started to actually complain about their newly limited ability to spy, unlike when only TLS was used and they could just serve an NSL to Apple/Google/etc. to make them give up your message without your knowledge (with their only other option being shutting down their business, more or less).

garraeth 11y ago

That's wonderful you are willing to help everybody (seriously). But, I think people need to be aware that it's not just email: "The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus, and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of all this data ("full packet capture"). This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus." Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from, say, posting something into a HN forum? Or any chat program? Or FB chat, etc...?

jsprogrammer 11y ago
>Is there anything we can do to protect ourselves from, say, posting something into a HN forum? Or any chat program? Or FB chat, etc...? TLS or other encryption. However, if they [UCOP, vendor, other] get your key(s) they will be able to read archived traffic.
- nsgi 11y ago
  Not with Perfect Forward Secrecy
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    PFS just adds additional keys.
    - mehrdada 11y ago
      Keys that are supposedly short-lived on the client and the server. And if you are assuming they already control the client or the server endpoint, then the entire discussion is moot, but considering we are talking about archived packets at a router interface, the parent comment is very valid.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        It is certainly valid, but is also covered by my original case. I just wanted to be explicit about the connection between the posts.

tehwebguy 11y ago

> So I hope Napolitano steps up and explains what's happening now. Not likely, she is the former head of the Homeland Security Department

trhway 11y ago

>So I hope Napolitano steps up and explains what's happening now. given Napolitano's pedigree, in AZ and DHS, i think the best explanation you can expect, if any, that it is either to protect children and/or national security without any details. Btw, how she could end up as the head of UC?. Her record is like a mini-Bush in action. You can't make it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano#Walmart.E2.80.93DHS_partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano#Walmart.E2.80... Do you seriously think that choosing between new spectrometer and network snooping device she would choose spectrometer over her DHS security contractors? I can only suppose that the UC search committee somehow ended up with only Hoover and Napolitano on the short list, and as Hoover hadn't returned multiple phone calls...

jacobolus 11y ago
“Mini-Bush in action” is a ridiculous summary of Napolitano’s career. Both Democratic Governor of AZ and Secretary of Homeland Security are quite politically constrained positions in US politics. Arizona is a state with a radical Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature which has been in control for decades. There’s really only so much a Democrat can do as governor. I personally think the structure and many of the activities of the DHS are ridiculous, but that’s the fault of Congress, not of the person appointed to be its executive. Napolitano seems to me like a competent mainstream (“centrist Democrat”) politician, not unlike most of the people who would be considered for a post like UC President. She’s not my personal favorite, and I disagree with her about many policy topics, but in a lineup of US ex-governors, she’s easily in the top quarter. By contrast, Bush was an absolute disaster in every way.
toomanybeersies 11y ago
> This is a video message from Napolitano on TV screens in Wal-Mart stores playing a "public service announcement" to ask customers to report suspicious activity to a Wal-Mart manager. The rationale is that national security begins at home. Napolitano "compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists." Generally, the communist witch hunts of the 50's, 60's and 70's (especially the House Un-American Activities Committee) aren't considered a good thing. Apparently now they are.

gregniemeyer 11y ago

Thanks it would be great to have a recipe for how to maintain privacy here at UC Berkeley, and also a recipe for how to ensure that the information we want to share can be shared.