7 ms·

Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed.

josteink 11y ago
And by ideally placed, you mean for the NSA, right? I'd never put any GPG keys of mine in an American cloud provider. That sort of voids the entire point of it.
- mineshaftgap 11y ago
  It is actually easier for the NSA if you host in Europe, but that is not really the point is it? Take America down a notch is the real goal.
- scrupulusalbion 11y ago
  More importantly, end-to-end encryption means that your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone/TI-83 is doing the crypto, especially signatures. On a somewhat related note, I remember reading some documentation on a one-time password scheme, which I can't find anymore. It briefly mentioned something about using DES calculators to handle crypto signatures (for what reason i cannot remember). For our purposes, a PGP/GPG hand-held device would be neat, though perhaps cumbersome to actually user.
  - nyan4 11y ago
    > phone/TI-83 is doing the crypto Phone? Can we remotely trust nowadays smartphones not to have a number of backdoors?
    - scrupulusalbion 11y ago
      I don't think that phones are secure, but people do use them for things like 2-factor authentication. I suppose that it is the form-factor that is more relevant, since most phones are smaller than a TI-83, so much so that people are willing to carry them around everywhere. Ultimately, what I envision would be a cross between a Blackberry (size, QWERTY keyboard) and the TI-83 (focus on being a simpler, lower-end computer). Heck, one may as well give it a unix-like OS and leave out wireless communications and sophisticated graphics. I think this is feasible, but the market would be quite small.
- superuser2 11y ago
  Why do you believe non-American cloud providers aren't compromised?
  - fixermark 11y ago
    In the short run, they're simply a smaller and more diverse attack surface. There's pretty valid "security through obscurity" reasoning to apply here (though that is, of course, not a train of thought one should bet the whole farm upon).
schoen 11y ago
They've been working on a browser extension for it: https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-end-to-end-encryption-easier-to.html https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-end... https://github.com/google/end-to-end https://github.com/google/end-to-end I don't know what they might do in the future to encourage people to use this, or if they feel that there's a point at which it would be sensible or useful to actively promote it.
- darkr 11y ago
  It's still not ready for production use. One problem with e2e is that it's JavaScript based and runs in he browser, so there is a certain attack vector present there. To defend against this, ideally e2e needs to work with a smartcard (such as the yubikey neo) so that the private key cannot be stolen. There was an issue I was tracking a while back to integrate this support, but it's still a work in progress.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    It doesn't even need the hardware part in most cases. OS keyrings support pkcs11 interface with signing exposed. That means you can just send data to be encrypted for example by gnome-keyring and the browser never sees the actual key.
    - darkr 11y ago
      But e2e doesn't use the OS keyring. It uses it's own JavaScript keyring that runs in the browser and uses localstorage for storing private keys.
cornholio 11y ago
> Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed. In fact, they will fight tooth and nail against it since their business model relies on having access to the plain text of the message. It's the very reason they are releasing this technology: a user sees a padlock icon that's confusing similar to other "encrypted" mail offerings, for example OpenPGP. For Google, it's essential that end-to-end encryption does not become the norm and that plain text emails are kept inside their walled garden. That being said, as a form of opportunistic encryption, TLS on the SMTP layer is great and there are really no excuses not to use it in 2016. Google could push it aggressively and add an (user optional) delay against servers that try to deliver email over a plain connection: "472 Try again in 30 sec or use STARTTLS"
- tyre 11y ago
  How would I search my encrypted inbox? Either Google knows my private key, in which case this doesn't seem to buy us anything, or I can't search. I search a lot.
  - cornholio 11y ago
    With encrypted indexes maintained on the client end. Web search is a complex problem, but searching a single user's mailbox is child's play, you don't need Google for that. Client end processing could work for advertising too, but at that point you have an information leak that severely weakens security, the client will ask for adds relevant to terms found in the message.

And by ideally placed, you mean for the NSA, right? I'd never put any GPG keys of mine in an American cloud provider. That sort of voids the entire point of it.

mineshaftgap 11y ago
It is actually easier for the NSA if you host in Europe, but that is not really the point is it? Take America down a notch is the real goal.
scrupulusalbion 11y ago
More importantly, end-to-end encryption means that your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone/TI-83 is doing the crypto, especially signatures. On a somewhat related note, I remember reading some documentation on a one-time password scheme, which I can't find anymore. It briefly mentioned something about using DES calculators to handle crypto signatures (for what reason i cannot remember). For our purposes, a PGP/GPG hand-held device would be neat, though perhaps cumbersome to actually user.
- nyan4 11y ago
  > phone/TI-83 is doing the crypto Phone? Can we remotely trust nowadays smartphones not to have a number of backdoors?
  - scrupulusalbion 11y ago
    I don't think that phones are secure, but people do use them for things like 2-factor authentication. I suppose that it is the form-factor that is more relevant, since most phones are smaller than a TI-83, so much so that people are willing to carry them around everywhere. Ultimately, what I envision would be a cross between a Blackberry (size, QWERTY keyboard) and the TI-83 (focus on being a simpler, lower-end computer). Heck, one may as well give it a unix-like OS and leave out wireless communications and sophisticated graphics. I think this is feasible, but the market would be quite small.
superuser2 11y ago
Why do you believe non-American cloud providers aren't compromised?
- fixermark 11y ago
  In the short run, they're simply a smaller and more diverse attack surface. There's pretty valid "security through obscurity" reasoning to apply here (though that is, of course, not a train of thought one should bet the whole farm upon).

schoen 11y ago

They've been working on a browser extension for it: https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-end-to-end-encryption-easier-to.html https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-end... https://github.com/google/end-to-end https://github.com/google/end-to-end I don't know what they might do in the future to encourage people to use this, or if they feel that there's a point at which it would be sensible or useful to actively promote it.

darkr 11y ago
It's still not ready for production use. One problem with e2e is that it's JavaScript based and runs in he browser, so there is a certain attack vector present there. To defend against this, ideally e2e needs to work with a smartcard (such as the yubikey neo) so that the private key cannot be stolen. There was an issue I was tracking a while back to integrate this support, but it's still a work in progress.
- viraptor 11y ago
  It doesn't even need the hardware part in most cases. OS keyrings support pkcs11 interface with signing exposed. That means you can just send data to be encrypted for example by gnome-keyring and the browser never sees the actual key.
  - darkr 11y ago
    But e2e doesn't use the OS keyring. It uses it's own JavaScript keyring that runs in the browser and uses localstorage for storing private keys.

cornholio 11y ago

> Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed. In fact, they will fight tooth and nail against it since their business model relies on having access to the plain text of the message. It's the very reason they are releasing this technology: a user sees a padlock icon that's confusing similar to other "encrypted" mail offerings, for example OpenPGP. For Google, it's essential that end-to-end encryption does not become the norm and that plain text emails are kept inside their walled garden. That being said, as a form of opportunistic encryption, TLS on the SMTP layer is great and there are really no excuses not to use it in 2016. Google could push it aggressively and add an (user optional) delay against servers that try to deliver email over a plain connection: "472 Try again in 30 sec or use STARTTLS"

tyre 11y ago
How would I search my encrypted inbox? Either Google knows my private key, in which case this doesn't seem to buy us anything, or I can't search. I search a lot.
- cornholio 11y ago
  With encrypted indexes maintained on the client end. Web search is a complex problem, but searching a single user's mailbox is child's play, you don't need Google for that. Client end processing could work for advertising too, but at that point you have an information leak that severely weakens security, the client will ask for adds relevant to terms found in the message.