6 ms·

If I can trust someone to do off-site cloud backups of my e-mail, why can't I trust the same person to run a Fastmail-like service so I don't have to have a $50

• garry 8y ago
  Because with Helm only you hold the encryption keys.
  • cwyers 8y ago
    But that's completely orthogonal to owning a piece of hardware. You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem?
    • dwg 8y ago
      Yes, this is what protonmail.com offers.
    • sjs382 8y ago
      > You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem? This is the key question, in my mind. There's only one reason I'd want to own the hardware—to manage/add/create my own services and handle my own backups because I don't trust a company's involvement in these[0]. If this is so tightly controlled that I can't add my own services and I can't restore a backup without Helm's involvement, why do I even want the hardware? [0] I don't mean that I don't trust them in a privacy sense. I mean that I don't trust them to make sure the backups are actually working and able to be decrypted and restored. Or be able to be restored without their software/hardware. There doesn't seem to be any transparency wrt/ these concerns.
      • garry 8y ago
        This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting. How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned. Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest. Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people. This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option. Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.
        • sjs382 8y ago
          So, we're in agreement that this sort of thing should 1) be paid for, 2) not readable by the provider, and 3) maintenance-free for the user. I still don't understand why this is a hardware play. There are advantages to owning the hardware but none of those advantages seem to apply here. The hardware feels like a bit of an albatross.
          • garry 8y ago
            If you want to truly control your data, you've got to control your hardware too. See: Lavabit.
            • wmf 8y ago
              But going all the way to the end of that tradeoff is so expensive. It seems like a Helm VM would be 90% as secure and also 90% cheaper.
            • sjs382 8y ago
              But with Helm, we don't control the hardware, do we?
          • 8y ago
      • gsreenivas 8y ago
        We use duplicity for backups so there's nothing proprietary in our approach. There will be more transparency coming in a series of technical posts about how the product works, what open source software we use, etc. Appreciate the feedback - we'll keep this in mind as we move forward.
        • sjs382 8y ago
          I understand that this is a new product launch and you can't have all answers to all questions front-and-center on the website on day one. With that in mind, kudos to you and garry for being so active in these threads. I definitely look forward to these posts!
          • gsreenivas 8y ago
            Thanks!
    • garry 8y ago
      One key principle for Helm is that you always hold your encryption keys to all your data— Helm and outside parties should never get access to that. So the backups are encrypted, and the Helm device itself stores your data in an encrypted fashion on its storage, and has a secure enclave such that those keys never enter user memory space. Hosted services like protonmail (great option) support some key management but that's rare. Most everyone stores all your data in the clear, and that sets you up for Facebook-style hacks where people just steal a database en masse, and/or leave you open to warrantless wiretap which has been a problem for email services broadly in the past. I want to point out that email is just the first part of what Helm wants to do. What is super valuable is that Helm can run its own software and add things like distributed anonymized VPN, or file sharing, and these things are all federated in a way that wasn't possible before. Not everyone is going to care about this, but enough people should. People reading this thread should care: decentralization and federation of this sort is the way we maintain an open Internet. You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them. That's the ultimate goal of Helm. Remember, there's no such thing as a cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
      • sjs382 8y ago
        > You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them. This statement indicates a lot of passion (and I side with it in spirit), but it feels irrelevant and out of place wrt/ this product. My data is only (available from) my own private Helm server. If mine gets taken down, the existence of millions of other "nodes" doesn't help me. Helm the company can help me with new hardware and my backups, presuming that they're allowed to—but what if they aren't. Then we're back in the same place.
        • comex 8y ago
          I mean, assuming we’re talking about a government trying to shut down or snoop on an email service – They’re probably not going to go door to door confiscating millions of devices; the cost to do that would be astronomical. You’d still be at risk if they were targeting you personally, but not if they were targeting all Helm users en masse. That’s a big improvement. And even if you were targeted personally, you’d at least be in a position to defend against surreptitious snooping, assuming that took the form of agents physically entering your home to hijack the device. Of course, there’s a lot of counterfactuals baked into that scenario. Helm does not currently have millions of users, for one. For another, the EC2-based proxy service run by Helm is a single point of failure that someone could take down, though supposedly Helm will release tools to replace it with your own server. And most problematically, the closed-source software could be silently subverted by Helm in an update, with no reasonable means for the user to detect this, even in theory. Still, it’s a lot better on that front than most cloud email services.
    • hawski 8y ago
      Then the keys are on the premises of the cloud company. Also data has to be at one time unencrypted in computer's memory. When there is a physical access to the computer you can't do much to ensure your data's safety.
      • sjs382 8y ago
        With public key encryption, a cloud provider doesn't need your private keys to encrypt data that can be only viewed by you—they need your public key. In the parent, the private keys are not on the premises of the cloud company.
        • hawski 8y ago
          I may not understand how things work, but how can a SMTP server function without private keys? How can it pass the hand shake? Does parent describes different scenario?
    • FunnyLookinHat 8y ago
      You're right. It's because devices / IOT make more sales than completely open source software - e.g. it's more valuable to invest in.
  • delroth 8y ago
    Does it matter if Helm is pushing auto-updates?
    • garry 8y ago
      It matters as long as Helm as a company is not compromised. This is true of Apple devices too, and when pushed, they stood up.
  • lvh 8y ago
    Doesn't Helm have RCE on the device at all times? Doesn't all e-mail come in on an EC2 instance, and go out over an EC2 instance?
• morley 8y ago
  I don't understand why you're so upset about this. If you don't think the product is a good value for your time and money, that's fine: don't purchase it. I think Helm comes with some obvious trade-offs, but the product looks nice and I think (judging from other HN comments) there's a market for it. I don't know if it's a large market for this to be a success, but it seems interesting at least, and at first blush the product looks well-made. I don't think this product is exactly for me as my main email, but it could be interesting as a side email service, or one for really sensitive emails. Depending on the price point, I'd consider purchasing. If the price point is too high or the maintenance costs are too large, then I won't. What's the big deal? That trade-off not working for you or me doesn't mean the product shouldn't exist.
  • cwyers 8y ago
    Because it bothers me when someone sells a "secure" product where the security measures are unrelated to the threat model. The Helm server is connected to the open Internet, which means that physical possession of the Helm server is not the only or even main thing necessary to secure it from compromise. Because of how it works, the server still has a dependency on cloud providers -- you need cloud backups and the public endpoint for the ssh tunnel to get around ISP packet sniffing. Since I still need to trust other people's servers for this to work, why the focus on owning your own server?
    • bostonvaulter2 8y ago
      How would you realistically completely remove the need for the relay server while still allowing the customer to run the server on a typical home internet connection?
      • wmf 8y ago
        Flip it around: don't run the server on a typical home internet connection but instead run it in a data center.
• gsreenivas 8y ago
  Hey cwyers - this is a good question. Our offsite backups use keys that only a Helm customer has access to. They are created during the setup process and stored on a USB thumb drive we include in the box as well as your phone. We will be publishing how this is done using duplicity so people can see the details of how it works.