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> There's simply no case that can be made that encrypted email is as secure as a modern secure messenger. -- BEGIN SCRATCH THIS Of course there is. I can send
by jolmg 7y ago
> There's simply no case that can be made that encrypted email is as secure as a modern secure messenger.
-- BEGIN SCRATCH THIS
Of course there is. I can send an encrypted email to anyone and be guaranteed that only that person has access to it, even if I have to give them instructions on how to decrypt it.
I can't do that with Whatsapp because it's closed source. I can't do that with Signal because nobody has Signal. Everyone has email.
-- END SCRATCH THIS
There's also the problem that messengers like Whatsapp and Signal are tied to my phone and so to my identity. With email I can make a free, new email account with almost any provider and send an anonymous, encrypted email from a public Wifi with a spoofed MAC.
You can't get that level of anonymity that easily from using a phone. Every phone provider I know will at least want to keep a record of your ID before giving you a new SIM card.
EDIT: I concede my first argument sucked.
- lvh 7y ago> I can't do that with Whatsapp because it's closed source. I can't do that with Signal because nobody has Signal. Everyone has email. Are you saying the install base for people who use GPG with e-mail is larger than the user base for Signal, or are you saying you can send people instructions for decrypting e-mail but for some reason not instructions for installing Signal?
- jolmg 7y agoYou know what. I'll accept that it's not that good of an argument and scratch it, leaving the other.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago> I can send an encrypted email to anyone and be guaranteed that only that person has access to it, even if I have to give them instructions on how to decrypt it. Genuine question: how would you send me an encrypted email, and give me instructions for how to decrypt it? I have no published public keys; you'd have to send me a keypair that you yourself generated - how would you do that part securely?
- jolmg 7y agoI can also send you the commands to copy-paste into your terminal to generate the key pair and ask you to give me the public key.
- asimpletune 7y agoThat could def. be MITM’d though
- jolmg 7y agoThat would have to be someone actively engaging in MitM and not merely listening and keeping record. Even if that's the case though, you can raise the difficulty by doing it through a phone call.
- asimpletune 7y agoYou could associate your public key with a DNS record that you control? e.g. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929
- jolmg 7y agoThe MitM problem is not with sending the public key. They can just email it. The MitM problem is with intercepting the instructions from person A, having the MitM person generate them, and provide the pair to person B while impersonating A.
- dane-pgp 7y agoIf you know you want to email alice@example.dk and if you trust DNSSEC, then fetching the public key for alice@example.dk from the DNS should be at least as secure as visiting https://example.dk https://example.dk in your browser. (If you don't trust that Alice's email address is alice@example.dk then you shouldn't send an email for her to that address regardless of MitM attacks.)
- cbuq 7y agoIsn't authentication just as important as encryption for secure communication? What is the benefit of being both anonymous and encrypted?
- jolmg 7y agoYou can do authentication with the party you're communicating with as your real identity or as a pseudo-identity without letting everyone else know who you really are. With PGP, just use an identity that identifies you to that party and sign your emails with it. It doesn't matter what address you send them from. However, anonymous emails where you don't even authenticate yourself to the party your communicating with is also useful. It's like when someone wants to make an anonymous report to the police. Why leave a trace with the phone company? I imagine people that make these reports typically use street phones (in countries where they're still plenty).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stinky613 7y agoInstead of instructions for how to use PGP to you could give instructions on how to use Signal. A new SIM card isn't free, but it seems like it would be easier to reliably cover your tracks by buying a burner phone with cash than concealing your PII through the process of setting up a new email account. That's at least the case in the USA; I don't know if you live in a country where it's more difficult to anonymously obtain a new SIM card.
- ubercow13 7y ago>I don't know if you live in a country where it's more difficult to anonymously obtain a new SIM card. ie. most countries.
- stinky613 7y agoI wasn't aware. Do you have some specific examples, for my own edification?
- ubercow13 7y agoThis page seems to track them. The linked paper has some nice maps https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3018/timeline-sim-card-registration-laws https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3018/timeline-sim...
- stinky613 7y agoThat's a great link! Thank you, very much
- gravitas 7y agoEcuador us one such country.
- tptacek 7y agoSo use a secure messenger that isn't tied to your phone. Wire is an example. I'd strongly prefer Signal, because the reason Signal is tied to your phone is so they can piggyback on your contacts database and not keep a plaintext contact graph serverside where it's vulnerable to interdiction. But Wire is still vastly better than encrypted email.
- 0x006A 7y agousing the contacts feature of the phone, in most cases means the contact graph is shared/synced with google, apple servers. It's great Signal does not need a copy, but by outsourcing the contacts they have already leaked and its just pretending to solve the problem.