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So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should

by hpoe 6y ago

So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should prevent that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? Ultimately I prefer the more information that we can get on politicians available. It seems to me that especially when an elected official has something they don't want others to know about that it should be public knowledge. After all an efficient marketplace only is efficient if all actors have access to as much information as possible. EDIT: As a follow up, several people point out that it could happen to me or a family member, but this seems even further reason to have DKIM so that if someone attempts to blackmail me based on the contents of my email, checking the DKIM signature makes it even easier to disprove a bad blackmail attempt.

mthoms 6y ago
The threat is not limited to politicians. Anyone (including you and your family members) could be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed.
- hashtagmarkup 6y ago
  > The threat is not limited to politicians. Anyone (including you and your family members) could be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed. ... for what they actually did. You think the solution is allowing people to be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed for things they didn't do, while removing their ability to verify that they didn't do them?
  - blendergeek 6y ago
    No. Once DKIM keys are published, one can simply deny all emails published "from their account". We currently have a way for an attacker to prove an email's origin years after the fact.
    - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
      Yes. We are saying the same thing.
  - daveFNbuck 6y ago
    You're assuming no one has compromised the old keys. If that has happened, a blackmailer can forge old emails with proof of things you didn't do.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    You're misunderstanding how this works. You can't be blackmailed by someone who has no plausible evidence.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      They don’t have plausible evidence anyway. Gmail has had bugs before with SPF/DKIM and will have some again for sure. Some google employees have direct and indirect access to signing keys or writing emails. Not many, and they have good controls, but still many people with the ability to sign messages. Not to mention a Trojan infiltration or account takeover, of which thousands (if not millions) a day occur. The DKIM evidence is, for legal purposes, a good hint but far from proof.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        In the court of public opinion, the standard is not "100% proven beyond any reasonable doubt". Hence, blackmail can still be very effective if an accusation is highly plausible.
        beagle3 6y ago
        Yes, but it’s not DKIM or not DKIM that will make it plausible in the court of public opinion.
        mthoms 6y ago
        Current events prove otherwise. See Hunter Biden.
        beagle3 6y ago
        I have not seen a single mention of DKIM w.r.t to Hunter Biden. Did you? Was any evidence presented? I couldn’t find any. I fail to see how admissibility or lack of it, in a court of law or of public opinion, has anything to do with DKIM+Hunter Biden. Can you elaborate?
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > ... for what they actually did. Being gay is not a crime, and yet people can be blackmailed with it. It is very easy to open yourself up to blackmail by perfectly legitimate activities.
    - ivanhoe 6y ago
      True, there are things that might ruin someone's life even though there's nothing bad about them, but the list of actual crimes and bad things that people do is WAY longer, and being able to prove it is definitely useful...
      - avianlyric 6y ago
        The same argument can be used to build a police state. But I suspect that you’re not in favour that either. We shouldn’t be building technical systems that “trap” people, just because they might be doing something bad and might want to prove that one day. Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument. DKIM signatures are only useful if the emails are stolen, are you trying to suggest that it’s ok to steal emails from people if they’re bad?
        ivanhoe 6y ago
        > Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument No, just the opposite, that is an excellent argument and I think that the privacy should be the real focus when we discuss the freedom, and not the accountability. Because freedom is not to be able to get away for the lack of evidence, freedom is not to put innocent people in that kind of situation in the first place. Police state doesn't come from the ability to track citizens, it comes from the lack of transparency and government's misuse of the information. Now, reality is that having more data collecting increases the chances of misuse, but I think we're attacking the problem from the wrong side. Rather than killing the option to track emails, there should be much more control and transparency on when and how that data can be collected and used.
  - bee_rider 6y ago
    People change over time, and normal human communications have a natural sunset as most people don't remember every conversation in exacting detail. It is worth at least considering the fact that we've signed up to have basically all our communications preserved and cryptographically signed in perpetuity. Most people using these services didn't fully weigh the options.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    > for what they actually did All blackmail involves things a person actually did... otherwise it would be libel or slander. You seem to be arguing that blackmail shouldn't be illegal.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I propose gouging out everyone's eyes, that way they can't see you do anything potentially embarrassing - thus making blackmail harder.
  - hyperpape 6y ago
    This is a helpful comment because not having DKIM is in the same range of bad outcomes as having your eyes gouged out.
    - couchand 6y ago
      Except the proposal weakens legitimate use of DKIM not one whit.
blendergeek 6y ago
> that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? He mentions the politicians because those were high profile cases. This could be used against anybody, not just politicians. > It seems to me that especially when an elected official has something they don't want others to know about that it should be public knowledge. Is this true of everybody else as well? Should anybody be able to deny an email they sent in the past? If so, we have to take this step.
- ivanhoe 6y ago
  Other than whistleblowers and activists fighting the dictatorships (and they can work-around this), what is the case where not being able to prove who sent the email would be a good thing?
  - mthoms 6y ago
    -- Example -- Dear Ivanhoe, I regret to inform you that your HIV test came back positive. Please contact my office at your earliest convenience to arrange a follow up. Sincerely, Your doctor
    - santraginean 6y ago
      No doctor should be writing that email in the first place; it would be an example of such a flagrantly negligent treatment of PHI that cryptographic signatures and reputability are kind of irrelevant.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        Email is used outside of countries with these kinds of protections. For example, I know someone who had an STI test in Thailand and the results did indeed come via email. Even if this example is imperfect, it's really not that hard to imagine a scenario where some type of compromising information is sent to you. Perhaps even accidentally.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
LinuxBender 6y ago
I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe that DKIM provides repudiation specific to an individual. DKIM provides evidence that email originated on an email provider. The users neither own nor control the server and user accounts get compromised all the time as well as fake accounts created all the time. Google battles this daily. DKIM might be one piece of information, used in combination with a client IP address and some method of proving who was at that client IP address at the time, but I do not believe that DKIM could stand on its own. For example, I have servers that DKIM sign emails. If a person uses my servers to send a death threat, the FBI is going to want web access logs and smtp logs.
- beagle3 6y ago
  It is even weaker than that. DKIM keys themselves can be stolen - most servers don’t store them in HSMs (and HSMs are also not infallible). Or factored - Debian had a bug 12 years ago that caused weak SSH keys, a similar thing could happen to DKIM key generation (or has happened, but not yet discovered). Some study showed many RSA keys in the wild had a common factor. A weakness of this family might be discovered with DKIM keys. It is supporting circumstantial evidence, not proof of identity.
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    Many DKIM keys uses outdated key generation defaults with 512 bit RSA keys. Google used to have such weak DKIM keys too in ~2012.
mthoms 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but elsewhere you to claim to be a conservative who has at least some mistrust in the recent election results. This seems like a paradox. Do you trust the government and its systems or not? Because the "I've got nothing to hide" [0] argument doesn't work if you recognize that governments can and do go bad. Once that happens, they can retroactively change what is acceptable thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument Edit: Already at -1 votes with no explanation. To be clear I don't want to bring the election/politics into this. I only want to point out that "I've got nothing to hide" is a strange argument if you explicitly distrust the democratic systems in place around you.
013a 6y ago
> As a follow up, several people point out that it could happen to me or a family member, but this seems even further reason to have DKIM so that if someone attempts to blackmail me based on the contents of my email, checking the DKIM signature makes it even easier to disprove a bad blackmail attempt. I think his point is that the DKIM signatures could be used to verify that you did, in fact, send something worth being blackmailed over, rather than having the plausable deniability of saying that your DKIM private key from that period is already public and thus could be forged. Which, to me, sounds similar to the classic XKCD "Theoretically, I use 2048bit RSA encryption and the hackers can't get my data. In Reality, they just beat me with a hammer until I give up the password." Maybe a public DKIM argument would hold up in court, but if we're just talking reputation blackmail among family and friends, it aint it chief.
woodruffw 6y ago
> So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should prevent that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? Ultimately I prefer the more information that we can get on politicians available. I don't think Matthew Green is arguing against transparency. What he's observing is that non-repudiation is an unintentional byproduct of DKIM's design. Because it's a byproduct, DKIM's users have made implementation decisions that make it susceptible to weaknesses in the unintentional non-repudiation property. By 2030, a motivated nation state will probably have the ability to crack the 2048-bit RSA keys that Google is currently using for DKIM. Do you really want someone in 2031 to be able to contrive fake signatures for the emails of politicians in 2021?
- beagle3 6y ago
  Well, by 2030 the non-repudiation will be considered lost if that’s the case. Maybe even 2027. But today, in 2020, a verified DKIM is strong indication about the identity of the writer, or that the keys weren’t safely stored.
  - woodruffw 6y ago
    > Maybe even 2027. But today, in 2020, a verified DKIM is strong indication about the identity of the writer, or that the keys weren’t safely stored. Except that we're talking about leaks of emails that date back by years: the earliest Podesta emails are from 2010, back when Google was using 512-bit (!) keys for DKIM. Those were leaked in 2016, at which point 1024-bit keys were already considered crackable by a motivated attacker. This isn't to say that those emails were faked, only that "an email written in 2020 that's verifiable in 2020" is not the target of interest.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      ..... so? That means in 2016, the DKIM was already deniable. And it made no difference whatsoever. The DKIM signature is proof only that whoever signed the email possessed the key, nothing more, nothing less. This, in turn, is a suggestion about the identity of the signer and possibly the author - but not proof. Did DKIM change anything about the podesta emails? Or were they basically acknowledged as authentic regardless, and had a lot of other verifyable info in them?
feanaro 6y ago
A good blackmail attempt could then be devastating for you, on the other hand.
jchook 6y ago
DKIM was not designed to authenticate emails far into the future. In fact, it does not authenticate any emails without a corresponding public key currently published to DNS. It provides specifically for "empty" or revoked keys to avoid such retro-validation. Seems the central thesis is that because these messages are patently no longer authenticated by DKIM, we should eliminate any remaining hope of them being construed as authenticated by DKIM.
dan-robertson 6y ago
Why is this argument not equivalent to the much-derided “nothing to hide” or “ban encryption by law” arguments? The way to have transparency into politician’s communications is to require them by law to be made public, and to use law enforcement to make sure that this actually happens. It seems that relying on information going over email (as opposed to eg signal), and getting hacked (perhaps you want it all hacked, perhaps you are more happy while it is the side you don’t like getting hacked, either way I think one must acknowledge that by focusing on what is hacked, one is granting those hackers great control of the narrative) is not really very useful.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  I understand the sentiment For local politics this would expose the haggling/threats/backdowns not good for image making very hard to make deals For international, how do you expect this to work when a politician is getting briefing Or guidances or heads up about dealing with an dictatorship or a unfriendly global power or an foreign company ? Perhaps have a classification system ? Then everything will be secret classification
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    To be clear, I’m not particularly advocating for my parent comment’s view that these communications should be transparent. I’m advocating for any such transparency being fair and deliberate rather than due to hacks and a protocol quirk.
- eloisius 6y ago
  That’s a false equivocation. Private citizens having “nothing to hide” in their personal lives is disimilar to public officials having nothing to hide in relation to their official duties. Blackmail related to embarrassing sexual proclivities or anything like that is unfortunate, but kindly asking politicians to be transparent isn’t a realistic answer. Of course they will use official channels and be transparent about everything they _should_ be doing, but it’s exactly the things they want hidden that will go over alternate channels. What I think is most shocking in this age of political hacks and leaks is the fact that people are outraged by it when it’s their side. Sure, the timing can be unfortunate when it harms their chances of re-election, but I’m surprised that I hear more about that, and calling it election interference, than I do about the actual contents of the leaks. Don’t like it when your side’s dirty laundry hurts their campaign? Solution: nominate candidates with less dirty laundry.
bouncycastle 6y ago
Checking the DKIM key doesn't prove anything with certainty - the keys could have been leaked or stolen, or the mail server hacked. Or, the operator of the mail server could even forge the message. Many possibilities. The purpose of DKIM is to help prevent spam, not to verify the authenticity of the sender.
eru 6y ago
> So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should prevent that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? Ultimately I prefer the more information that we can get on politicians available. No matter what you think about politicians, it is a failure of cryptography, or perhaps our common application of it, that the signatures we use to assure our conversation partner of our identity can also be used for our conversation partner (or divers third parties) to prove what we said. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging which solved this problem quite a few years ago. Off-the-Record Messaging allows your conversation partner to know that they are talking to the real you, but does not empower them to prove that to anyone else.
bambax 6y ago
Well said. The article is interesting, but this is wrong: > This is an amazing resource for journalists (...) But it doesn’t benefit you. If it's an amazing resource for journalists it benefits me.
willyt 6y ago
If a nation state adversary has hacked the DKIM keys from your email server, they can send fake emails signed with this key. So it doesn't prove that a high value target like a presidential candidate has actually typed and pressed send on that email, it just proves that the first SMTP server that routed the email has sent it. Even google didn't bother to rotate their DKIM keys as recommended by the standard, so one wonders if the google keys are stored in a cage guarded by lasers and dogs or if there are copies on someones laptop somewhere and any sysadmin with a gambling problem or a secret affair could have leaked them to an unscrupulous journalist or a spy.

by hpoe 6y ago

mthoms 6y ago

The threat is not limited to politicians. Anyone (including you and your family members) could be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed.

hashtagmarkup 6y ago
> The threat is not limited to politicians. Anyone (including you and your family members) could be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed. ... for what they actually did. You think the solution is allowing people to be blackmailed or otherwise publicly embarrassed for things they didn't do, while removing their ability to verify that they didn't do them?
- blendergeek 6y ago
  No. Once DKIM keys are published, one can simply deny all emails published "from their account". We currently have a way for an attacker to prove an email's origin years after the fact.
  - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
    Yes. We are saying the same thing.
- daveFNbuck 6y ago
  You're assuming no one has compromised the old keys. If that has happened, a blackmailer can forge old emails with proof of things you didn't do.
- mthoms 6y ago
  You're misunderstanding how this works. You can't be blackmailed by someone who has no plausible evidence.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    They don’t have plausible evidence anyway. Gmail has had bugs before with SPF/DKIM and will have some again for sure. Some google employees have direct and indirect access to signing keys or writing emails. Not many, and they have good controls, but still many people with the ability to sign messages. Not to mention a Trojan infiltration or account takeover, of which thousands (if not millions) a day occur. The DKIM evidence is, for legal purposes, a good hint but far from proof.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      In the court of public opinion, the standard is not "100% proven beyond any reasonable doubt". Hence, blackmail can still be very effective if an accusation is highly plausible.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        Yes, but it’s not DKIM or not DKIM that will make it plausible in the court of public opinion.
        mthoms 6y ago
        Current events prove otherwise. See Hunter Biden.
        beagle3 6y ago
        I have not seen a single mention of DKIM w.r.t to Hunter Biden. Did you? Was any evidence presented? I couldn’t find any. I fail to see how admissibility or lack of it, in a court of law or of public opinion, has anything to do with DKIM+Hunter Biden. Can you elaborate?
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > ... for what they actually did. Being gay is not a crime, and yet people can be blackmailed with it. It is very easy to open yourself up to blackmail by perfectly legitimate activities.
  - ivanhoe 6y ago
    True, there are things that might ruin someone's life even though there's nothing bad about them, but the list of actual crimes and bad things that people do is WAY longer, and being able to prove it is definitely useful...
    - avianlyric 6y ago
      The same argument can be used to build a police state. But I suspect that you’re not in favour that either. We shouldn’t be building technical systems that “trap” people, just because they might be doing something bad and might want to prove that one day. Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument. DKIM signatures are only useful if the emails are stolen, are you trying to suggest that it’s ok to steal emails from people if they’re bad?
      - ivanhoe 6y ago
        > Additionally you’re also ignoring the whole “people have the right, to not have their emails stolen” argument No, just the opposite, that is an excellent argument and I think that the privacy should be the real focus when we discuss the freedom, and not the accountability. Because freedom is not to be able to get away for the lack of evidence, freedom is not to put innocent people in that kind of situation in the first place. Police state doesn't come from the ability to track citizens, it comes from the lack of transparency and government's misuse of the information. Now, reality is that having more data collecting increases the chances of misuse, but I think we're attacking the problem from the wrong side. Rather than killing the option to track emails, there should be much more control and transparency on when and how that data can be collected and used.
- bee_rider 6y ago
  People change over time, and normal human communications have a natural sunset as most people don't remember every conversation in exacting detail. It is worth at least considering the fact that we've signed up to have basically all our communications preserved and cryptographically signed in perpetuity. Most people using these services didn't fully weigh the options.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  > for what they actually did All blackmail involves things a person actually did... otherwise it would be libel or slander. You seem to be arguing that blackmail shouldn't be illegal.
whimsicalism 6y ago
I propose gouging out everyone's eyes, that way they can't see you do anything potentially embarrassing - thus making blackmail harder.
- hyperpape 6y ago
  This is a helpful comment because not having DKIM is in the same range of bad outcomes as having your eyes gouged out.
  - couchand 6y ago
    Except the proposal weakens legitimate use of DKIM not one whit.

blendergeek 6y ago

> that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? He mentions the politicians because those were high profile cases. This could be used against anybody, not just politicians. > It seems to me that especially when an elected official has something they don't want others to know about that it should be public knowledge. Is this true of everybody else as well? Should anybody be able to deny an email they sent in the past? If so, we have to take this step.

ivanhoe 6y ago
Other than whistleblowers and activists fighting the dictatorships (and they can work-around this), what is the case where not being able to prove who sent the email would be a good thing?
- mthoms 6y ago
  -- Example -- Dear Ivanhoe, I regret to inform you that your HIV test came back positive. Please contact my office at your earliest convenience to arrange a follow up. Sincerely, Your doctor
  - santraginean 6y ago
    No doctor should be writing that email in the first place; it would be an example of such a flagrantly negligent treatment of PHI that cryptographic signatures and reputability are kind of irrelevant.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      Email is used outside of countries with these kinds of protections. For example, I know someone who had an STI test in Thailand and the results did indeed come via email. Even if this example is imperfect, it's really not that hard to imagine a scenario where some type of compromising information is sent to you. Perhaps even accidentally.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago

LinuxBender 6y ago

I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe that DKIM provides repudiation specific to an individual. DKIM provides evidence that email originated on an email provider. The users neither own nor control the server and user accounts get compromised all the time as well as fake accounts created all the time. Google battles this daily. DKIM might be one piece of information, used in combination with a client IP address and some method of proving who was at that client IP address at the time, but I do not believe that DKIM could stand on its own. For example, I have servers that DKIM sign emails. If a person uses my servers to send a death threat, the FBI is going to want web access logs and smtp logs.

beagle3 6y ago
It is even weaker than that. DKIM keys themselves can be stolen - most servers don’t store them in HSMs (and HSMs are also not infallible). Or factored - Debian had a bug 12 years ago that caused weak SSH keys, a similar thing could happen to DKIM key generation (or has happened, but not yet discovered). Some study showed many RSA keys in the wild had a common factor. A weakness of this family might be discovered with DKIM keys. It is supporting circumstantial evidence, not proof of identity.
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  Many DKIM keys uses outdated key generation defaults with 512 bit RSA keys. Google used to have such weak DKIM keys too in ~2012.

mthoms 6y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but elsewhere you to claim to be a conservative who has at least some mistrust in the recent election results. This seems like a paradox. Do you trust the government and its systems or not? Because the "I've got nothing to hide" [0] argument doesn't work if you recognize that governments can and do go bad. Once that happens, they can retroactively change what is acceptable thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument Edit: Already at -1 votes with no explanation. To be clear I don't want to bring the election/politics into this. I only want to point out that "I've got nothing to hide" is a strange argument if you explicitly distrust the democratic systems in place around you.

013a 6y ago

> As a follow up, several people point out that it could happen to me or a family member, but this seems even further reason to have DKIM so that if someone attempts to blackmail me based on the contents of my email, checking the DKIM signature makes it even easier to disprove a bad blackmail attempt. I think his point is that the DKIM signatures could be used to verify that you did, in fact, send something worth being blackmailed over, rather than having the plausable deniability of saying that your DKIM private key from that period is already public and thus could be forged. Which, to me, sounds similar to the classic XKCD "Theoretically, I use 2048bit RSA encryption and the hackers can't get my data. In Reality, they just beat me with a hammer until I give up the password." Maybe a public DKIM argument would hold up in court, but if we're just talking reputation blackmail among family and friends, it aint it chief.

woodruffw 6y ago

> So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should prevent that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? Ultimately I prefer the more information that we can get on politicians available. I don't think Matthew Green is arguing against transparency. What he's observing is that non-repudiation is an unintentional byproduct of DKIM's design. Because it's a byproduct, DKIM's users have made implementation decisions that make it susceptible to weaknesses in the unintentional non-repudiation property. By 2030, a motivated nation state will probably have the ability to crack the 2048-bit RSA keys that Google is currently using for DKIM. Do you really want someone in 2031 to be able to contrive fake signatures for the emails of politicians in 2021?

beagle3 6y ago
Well, by 2030 the non-repudiation will be considered lost if that’s the case. Maybe even 2027. But today, in 2020, a verified DKIM is strong indication about the identity of the writer, or that the keys weren’t safely stored.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  > Maybe even 2027. But today, in 2020, a verified DKIM is strong indication about the identity of the writer, or that the keys weren’t safely stored. Except that we're talking about leaks of emails that date back by years: the earliest Podesta emails are from 2010, back when Google was using 512-bit (!) keys for DKIM. Those were leaked in 2016, at which point 1024-bit keys were already considered crackable by a motivated attacker. This isn't to say that those emails were faked, only that "an email written in 2020 that's verifiable in 2020" is not the target of interest.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    ..... so? That means in 2016, the DKIM was already deniable. And it made no difference whatsoever. The DKIM signature is proof only that whoever signed the email possessed the key, nothing more, nothing less. This, in turn, is a suggestion about the identity of the signer and possibly the author - but not proof. Did DKIM change anything about the podesta emails? Or were they basically acknowledged as authentic regardless, and had a lot of other verifyable info in them?

feanaro 6y ago

A good blackmail attempt could then be devastating for you, on the other hand.

jchook 6y ago

DKIM was not designed to authenticate emails far into the future. In fact, it does not authenticate any emails without a corresponding public key currently published to DNS. It provides specifically for "empty" or revoked keys to avoid such retro-validation. Seems the central thesis is that because these messages are patently no longer authenticated by DKIM, we should eliminate any remaining hope of them being construed as authenticated by DKIM.

dan-robertson 6y ago

Why is this argument not equivalent to the much-derided “nothing to hide” or “ban encryption by law” arguments? The way to have transparency into politician’s communications is to require them by law to be made public, and to use law enforcement to make sure that this actually happens. It seems that relying on information going over email (as opposed to eg signal), and getting hacked (perhaps you want it all hacked, perhaps you are more happy while it is the side you don’t like getting hacked, either way I think one must acknowledge that by focusing on what is hacked, one is granting those hackers great control of the narrative) is not really very useful.

zaphirplane 6y ago
I understand the sentiment For local politics this would expose the haggling/threats/backdowns not good for image making very hard to make deals For international, how do you expect this to work when a politician is getting briefing Or guidances or heads up about dealing with an dictatorship or a unfriendly global power or an foreign company ? Perhaps have a classification system ? Then everything will be secret classification
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  To be clear, I’m not particularly advocating for my parent comment’s view that these communications should be transparent. I’m advocating for any such transparency being fair and deliberate rather than due to hacks and a protocol quirk.
eloisius 6y ago
That’s a false equivocation. Private citizens having “nothing to hide” in their personal lives is disimilar to public officials having nothing to hide in relation to their official duties. Blackmail related to embarrassing sexual proclivities or anything like that is unfortunate, but kindly asking politicians to be transparent isn’t a realistic answer. Of course they will use official channels and be transparent about everything they _should_ be doing, but it’s exactly the things they want hidden that will go over alternate channels. What I think is most shocking in this age of political hacks and leaks is the fact that people are outraged by it when it’s their side. Sure, the timing can be unfortunate when it harms their chances of re-election, but I’m surprised that I hear more about that, and calling it election interference, than I do about the actual contents of the leaks. Don’t like it when your side’s dirty laundry hurts their campaign? Solution: nominate candidates with less dirty laundry.

bouncycastle 6y ago

Checking the DKIM key doesn't prove anything with certainty - the keys could have been leaked or stolen, or the mail server hacked. Or, the operator of the mail server could even forge the message. Many possibilities. The purpose of DKIM is to help prevent spam, not to verify the authenticity of the sender.

eru 6y ago

> So the author's central thesis essentially seems to boil down to that leaked emails were able to be cryptographically verified, because of DKIM and so we should prevent that so people can't use email to blackmail politicians? Ultimately I prefer the more information that we can get on politicians available. No matter what you think about politicians, it is a failure of cryptography, or perhaps our common application of it, that the signatures we use to assure our conversation partner of our identity can also be used for our conversation partner (or divers third parties) to prove what we said. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging which solved this problem quite a few years ago. Off-the-Record Messaging allows your conversation partner to know that they are talking to the real you, but does not empower them to prove that to anyone else.

bambax 6y ago

Well said. The article is interesting, but this is wrong: > This is an amazing resource for journalists (...) But it doesn’t benefit you. If it's an amazing resource for journalists it benefits me.

willyt 6y ago

If a nation state adversary has hacked the DKIM keys from your email server, they can send fake emails signed with this key. So it doesn't prove that a high value target like a presidential candidate has actually typed and pressed send on that email, it just proves that the first SMTP server that routed the email has sent it. Even google didn't bother to rotate their DKIM keys as recommended by the standard, so one wonders if the google keys are stored in a cage guarded by lasers and dogs or if there are copies on someones laptop somewhere and any sysadmin with a gambling problem or a secret affair could have leaked them to an unscrupulous journalist or a spy.