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Riseup moves to encrypted email in response to legal requests
- _delirium 10y agoBackground: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13007234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13007234
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoSeven Spanish activists were jailed in 2015 for their "possession of certain books...and the fact that the defendants used emails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server" [1]. Do we know what became of that case? [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/security-not-crime-unless-youre-anarchist https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/security-not-crime-unl...
- Esau 10y agoProof that a warrant canary is useless.
- _delirium 10y agoIt seems to me that it did its job here. The only thing a warrant canary claims to be able to do is to make people aware that a warrant was served on a provider, even when a gag order prevents the provider explicitly saying so. The warrant canary at riseup disappeared, which did have the effect of making people aware of that fact. Now it turned out that the warrant was just for some malware-extortion ring, not due to a crackdown on political dissidents, so arguably a "false positive" from the perspective of what most people using riseup for its stated purpose care about. But the warrant canary didn't claim to make those kinds of fine-grained distinctions in the first place. It claimed that it would let you know when there was an unannounced warrant, and it succeeded in doing so.
- nebabyte 10y ago> Now it turned out that the warrant was just for some malware-extortion ring, not due to a crackdown on political dissidents, so arguably a "false positive" from the perspective of what most people using riseup for its stated purpose care about Except that now that it's gone there's nothing to say that people who were previously held at bay by the canary [side note: hah] moved in right after it disappeared. Thus I agree; a WC should be seen as nothing more than a "probably not" to a "maybe/assume so".
- mirimir 10y agoNot at all! Riseup's response to questioning about failure to update the canary was: listen to the hummingbird, whose wings you cannot see, listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me. #LeonardCohen That is, "yes, there's a gag order".
- tankered 10y agoThat wasn't an official riseup response to the failure to update the canary statement. That was a tribute to Leonard Cohen. It seems many people on twitter thought this was a hidden message, but Riseup said it wasn't.
- mirimir 10y agoWell, of course they said that it wasn't! They were subject to a bloody gag order. It certainly makes sense now, doesn't it?
- r0muald 10y agoUh? > There was a “gag order” that prevented us from disclosing even the existence of these warrants until now. This was also the reason why we could not update our “Canary” Seems the exact purpose it was intended for. And they discuss at length why that canary was too broad and how the new one is better.
- Cyphase 10y agoI would be very interested in seeing people experiment with more specific warrant canaries. Many of them currently are of the form, "This service has not received any of these kinds of orders at any time before YYYY-MM-DD." What if instead, to go to an extreme (though it could be somewhere in between), each user could check a page that had a long list of statements regarding their account, e.g. "We did not comply with a {TYPE} order between 02:00 and 03:00 GMT on 2017-02-17 that affected your account." Obviously that's poking the surveillance bear more than a really broad canary (ooh, big deal, now people know X provider with 100 million users received an order within T time of the last update to the canary), but I'm not sure that it's qualitatively different.
- secfirstmd 10y agoOr even better, have a distributed canary across multiple jurisdictions.
- hackuser 10y agoThey encrypt using a Dovecot plugin named Trees that comes from Riseup Labs: How it works: 1. On IMAP log in, the user's cleartext password is passed to the plugin. 2. The plugin creates an argon2 digest from the password. 3. This password digest is used as a symmetric secret to decrypt a libsodium secretbox. 4. Inside the secretbox is stored a Curve25519 private key. 5. The Curve25519 private key is used to decrypt each individual message, using lidsodium sealed boxes. 6. New mail is encrypted as it arrives using the Curve25519 public key. https://0xacab.org/riseuplabs/trees https://0xacab.org/riseuplabs/trees If someone would briefly describe argon2 and libsodium to the non-crypto geeks, it would be appreciated.
- pmontra 10y agoMaybe I misunderstood the meaning of one or more of the steps above. However it seems that if law enforcement wants to look at the messages of a user they only need to make Riseup decrypt for them every message at step 5. The only protection is not logging in because they need the cleartext password to start with. People check their email often, so maybe this is why they are writing > this type of encryption is not end-to-end message encryption. With Riseup’s new system, you still put faith in the server while you are logged in The message should be "if you think you're under investigation, abandon your email and don't login anymore." Another attack is with the received messages: I assume they are all cleartext and can be intercepted before they are encrypted at step 6, with or without the cooperation of Riseup. Messages in a conversation often integrally quote all the previous messages so there might even be no need to force Riseup decrypt anything at step 5.
- Crosseye_Jack 10y agoIf your going to make Riseup decrypt every message on login, might as well have them mirror the email and encrypt with an LE password (They can still claim every stored email is encrypted) for any future incoming mail. They won't get access to past mail until the user next logs in but would least get access to any future mail the account receives and you are not in control of any email being received.
- maxerickson 10y ago
- WhitneyLand 10y agoWhat kind of people is Riseup supposed to help? For anything serious it seem inadequate unless I'm missing something. How is it even better that something like proton mal?
- SwellJoe 10y agoIt is intended for activists, but I have never felt comfortable recommending it to my activist friends. I trust the people who run it not to give up data easily, but I don't trust their tech to be at all resistant to a state level actor, which is primarily who activists need to fear. I'm not convinced this change alters that assessment, as the implementation seems questionable (the secret exchange seems to be on the wrong side of the connection). But maybe I just misunderstand it.
- amdavidson 10y agoThe secret exchange is certainly on the wrong side of the connection, but it's either that or change the way email clients work. We are living in an IMAP4 world and if you choose to "trust the server", as they state it, this seems like a reasonable solution.
- tankered 10y agoProtonmail is not email. Its like email, but it isn't.
- nachtigall 10y agoI'd like to recommend https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en which also has strong encryption on various layers, including the user's data: https://posteo.de/en/site/encryption https://posteo.de/en/site/encryption
- captainmuon 10y agoQuestion: Can a gag order in the US force a person to lie? If they say publicly there are no outstanding gag orders, FBI warrants, or other compromizing orders (and assuming I'd trust them apart from that), can I trust that they are telling the truth?
- n4r9 10y agoI think they respond to this in the Q&A below.
- N0RMAN 10y agoOff Topic: Does anybody have an invite left?
- smonff 10y agoYou are supposed to receive invites only from people you know. Riseup users who deliver invites to somebody creating trouble will have their account revoked.
- xkcd-sucks 10y agoThe admins are likely to approve an account if you're a member of a health collective for trafficked transgender women of color or something like that. Read some activist publications to learn the jargon, and you too can have your own network of riseup addresses