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I agree with you on everything here except for your "don't use email" point in the followups. For 99+% of people, being able to recover your archive when you f

I agree with you on everything here except for your "don't use email" point in the followups. For 99+% of people, being able to recover your archive when you forget your password or lose your device is more valuable than being secure against a state-level adversary. I think the security debate around email suffers from an over-supply of confidentiality absolutists, in which both integrity and availability take the back seat to defense (or the theatre of defense) against a very narrow set of attacks.

jopsen 9y ago
Indeed just getting most senders and servers to use TLS would be a good start. That said, lots of businesses deal with sophisticated attackers who are trying to steal trade secrets, patents in progress, etc. Sometimes these attackers are state sponsored too (I would definitely suspect China, US and Russia for this kind of crimes).
- brongondwana 9y ago
  That comes down to risk analysis there. These businesses should probably be running their own mail infrastructure and doing exfiltration scanning of all outbound messages (which needs them to be in the clear at that point, or at least decryptable by the gateway box). Those sorts of businesses also benefit massively from being able to scan incoming messages for spear phishing and viruses BEFORE they get delivered to the end-user device, something which isn't possible if the business firewall can't introspect the messages which are coming through. I think you're actually making my confidentiality absolutist point for me here. Businesses benefit from being able to analyse mail flow across all their employees and spam/virus/fraud scan incoming messages.
  - guy98238710 9y ago
    You assume that secrets circulate only within organizations and that no external parties (contractors, business partners, investors) are involved. Outbound filters aren't smart enough to detect escaping secrets. And inbound malware scanner can just as well run on the target device or it can be invoked from the device for suspicious attachments.
- jcrites 9y ago
  Most email on the Internet today does use TLS at present. Google's Safer Email transparency report includes metrics for the rates of inbound and outbound email encryption at Gmail, and both are about 90%. These days all major providers and software support TLS and will employ it by default. (There are some holdouts though, just like for HTTP.) [1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview
- blattimwind 9y ago
  Secure cryptographic end-to-end protocols have a fun way of making it harder to actually run restricted, secure networks, because it makes enforcing content-based policies rather interesting.

jopsen 9y ago

Indeed just getting most senders and servers to use TLS would be a good start. That said, lots of businesses deal with sophisticated attackers who are trying to steal trade secrets, patents in progress, etc. Sometimes these attackers are state sponsored too (I would definitely suspect China, US and Russia for this kind of crimes).

brongondwana 9y ago
That comes down to risk analysis there. These businesses should probably be running their own mail infrastructure and doing exfiltration scanning of all outbound messages (which needs them to be in the clear at that point, or at least decryptable by the gateway box). Those sorts of businesses also benefit massively from being able to scan incoming messages for spear phishing and viruses BEFORE they get delivered to the end-user device, something which isn't possible if the business firewall can't introspect the messages which are coming through. I think you're actually making my confidentiality absolutist point for me here. Businesses benefit from being able to analyse mail flow across all their employees and spam/virus/fraud scan incoming messages.
- guy98238710 9y ago
  You assume that secrets circulate only within organizations and that no external parties (contractors, business partners, investors) are involved. Outbound filters aren't smart enough to detect escaping secrets. And inbound malware scanner can just as well run on the target device or it can be invoked from the device for suspicious attachments.
jcrites 9y ago
Most email on the Internet today does use TLS at present. Google's Safer Email transparency report includes metrics for the rates of inbound and outbound email encryption at Gmail, and both are about 90%. These days all major providers and software support TLS and will employ it by default. (There are some holdouts though, just like for HTTP.) [1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview
blattimwind 9y ago
Secure cryptographic end-to-end protocols have a fun way of making it harder to actually run restricted, secure networks, because it makes enforcing content-based policies rather interesting.