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It's not a "middlebrow dismissal", it's a well reasoned argument about why this whole area of work is doomed to failure for structural reasons which can't be so
by brongondwana 9y ago
It's not a "middlebrow dismissal", it's a well reasoned argument about why this whole area of work is doomed to failure for structural reasons which can't be solved.
- antris 9y agoThe thing is, there's different degrees of failure. You can make email much more secure than it already is for a massive amount of users without sacrificing user experience. Just because it's not possible to make email the most perfectly secure messaging system invented by man doesn't mean we shouldn't make it more secure.
- brongondwana 9y ago[CITATION NEEDED] as they say. Email providers are doing things like that - TLS encryption between systems is a legit improvement with no significant downsides. And there's work on improving that: https://tools.ietf.org/wg/uta/ https://tools.ietf.org/wg/uta/ (SMTP-STS, SMTP-REQUIRETLS, etc) And nobody's objecting to that. People are objecting to the idea of changing email to be a dumb blob payload transport for encrypted blobs, because: (a) you can't do perfect forward security with email because of store and forward (b) there are plenty of better protocols for immediate blob delivery, where PFS is possible - like Signal. So for pure encrypted transfer, Signal is a better choice than email. (c) confidentiality absolutism is not the best security tradeoff for most users. The vast majority people likely to forget their password and need to get into their email at some point.
- tptacek 9y agoTo be clear: store and forward doesn't keep you from doing forward secrecy; it just means that the existing SMTP security infrastructure can't provide end-to-end guarantees. You could come up with some sort of ratcheting protocol for email messages. I don't think you could easily/effectively do X3DH+Sesame with it, though.