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When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. When you use third-party services, the government can go to them. The third party might no

When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. When you use third-party services, the government can go to them. The third party might not fight the request the same way you would. And, you might not even know it happened. The third party might be expressly forbidden from telling you it happened, in fact. This was why Hillary Clinton wanted to host her personal email in her basement. A physical server that she owned, on property she owned; there was no legal way to request that data without going to her personally. If she had used the State Dept server for her personal email, Congress could have accessed all her personal emails simply by asking State to send them over. That’s a controversial example, but the same principle is followed by many companies and organizations who have kept some portion of their data self-hosted. It’s often email or some core of file storage that they consider legally sensitive. This is getting harder to do, though. Look at the recent revelation that the government tried to get newspaper email metadata from Proofpoint, a spam filter provider. Self-hosting a good spam/phishing filter seems almost impossible in 2021, because of the huge amounts of data needed to train filters well.

ceejayoz 5y ago
> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Sure, but my ability to stop them is probably substantially smaller than, say, Amazon’s legal departments capabilities.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Amazon probably won’t even try.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    They’ve clearly and openly committed to trying for years. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2705826/amazon-web-services--we-ll-go-to-court-to-fight-gov-t-requests-for-data.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2705826/amazon-web-ser... Even Twitter doesn’t like to roll over, and they’ve got a lot less at stake. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-17/twitter-fights-justice-department-subpoena-over-rep-nunes-parody-account https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-17/twitter-fi...
- bob1029 5y ago
  What incentive does Amazon have to fight against the government on your behalf?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    The trust of their customers?
    - paganel 5y ago
      Afaik the US Government is a big Amazon customer.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        I would imagine that particular customer would rather Amazon not quietly honor, say, a Russian subpoena for their data.
        synchrone 5y ago
        does it mean you have to put your data into Yandex or Alibaba Cloud if you wanna avoid USG quietly getting it?
        coldtea 5y ago
        The problem for an Amazon hosted server is US subpoenas, not Russian or European or whatever...
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Amazon has AWS regions in six continents.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - johnklos 5y ago
      Ha ha ha ha ha... Amazon? Trust? People trust Amazon to exist and to bill. Providing services to those who pay the bills is almost incidental.
- sleavey 5y ago
  But your ability to delete the data is substantially higher than your ability to get Amazon to delete it.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    If you are hosted on AWS, it is really easy to delete your data. Also, you can encrypt it with keys that they will NOT use to decrypt. The data will also NOT leave the region (or country) that you specify
    - mnahkies 5y ago
      Is the "NOT" due to process, or technical constraints? Because it's very easy to make an exception to normal process, if the right people are asking
    - sleavey 5y ago
      What guarantee do you have that Amazon will delete it when you tell them to, though? It doesn't even necessarily come down to whether you trust Amazon ethically and legally, but also whether you trust their internal processes. Shredding the data on your own hard drive gives you a pretty good guarantee. Drilling a big gaping hole through it afterwards gives you an even better one.
- the_rectifier 5y ago
  Quite the opposite.
- cube00 5y ago
  Any company's legal department is like HR, it's role is to protect the company, not the employees and certainly not the customers.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Even more so for non-paying users, as in gmail or facebook. Especially when the companies are already happily selling account metadata.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Getting a reputation for handing customer data over to the government without a fight seems like the sort of thing that would damage a hosting company.
    - Phrenzy 5y ago
      Having a poor data security reputation? It didn't effect Experian. https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/another-data-leak-for-experian-credit-scores-of-americans-were-available-to-anyone-due-to-api-security-issue/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/another-data-leak... It didn't effect Yahoo. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/might-mother-password-leaks-billions-001204813.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/might-mother-password-le... It didn't effect Sony. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/sony-hack https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/sony-hack It didn't effect AT&T. https://www.wired.com/2011/09/911-surveillance/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/911-surveillance/
      - gruez 5y ago
        >It didn't effect Experian. You, as a consumer don't really get to choose experian or not. >It didn't effect Yahoo. Who says it didn't? >It didn't effect Sony. So a bunch of internal business documents got leaked. As a consumer I couldn't care less. >It didn't effect AT&T. If every provider was mandated to do this, then I wouldn't call it "poor data security reputation".
- newsclues 5y ago
  Ability and willingness are two different things.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  It’s probably better than you think. You’ll need a competent lawyer but beyond that you’ll depend on the court system, which attempts to put you and the government on equal footing. Depending on the legal issue at stake, it might also be possible to access additional legal expertise pro bono, or through an organization like the ACLU.
lbotos 5y ago
> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Right, and your example of a literal server in a basement supports that, but if you are colocating or using a VPS they will almost definitely go to your provider first and probably won't even tell you.
- cube00 5y ago
  If you encrypt the disk is a VPS provider going bother going to effort of trying to hook into the running machine via their hypervisor in a way that won't be evident to the owner of the server? I'm not saying they can't I just don't see that they would spend their time doing this when they can send to the request to the server's owner and then it's no longer their problem to deal with.
  - the_rectifier 5y ago
    Dumping VM memory contents is pretty trivial.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 10000truths 5y ago
      AMD's SEV and Intel's SGX should protect from this. Of course, you still have to take the VPS provider's word that they've enabled them on their CPUs.
      - closeparen 5y ago
        That is for applications specifically written to compute on the secure element, no?
        gruez 5y ago
        The parent poster probably got his terminology confused. AFAIK SGX runs on the secure element, SEV is for isolating the VM from the host.
viraptor 5y ago
> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Yes, and rather than sending a letter to the hosting company, they can come to your house and confiscate all electronic equipment. (that's not a joke btw, when local LE comes to your house, you can lose anything electronic from laptop/server down to backup drives and ipod, possibly taking years to recover) For me that doesn't sound like a good potential tradeoff. > This was why Hillary Clinton wanted to host her personal email in her basement. [citation needed]
adevx 5y ago
I recently had to hand-over a ton of data for a police investigation. The data had to come from off-site backups, I had to write manual SQL queries because of unique data requests that required cross references. All in all a lot of work that would be hard and time consuming to get if they bypassed me and accessed the raw data from my VPS provider. It would have saved me a ton of time though had they bypassed me.
- bredren 5y ago
  Did you charge them fees? It can be possible to reasonably recover costs associated with these efforts.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    It doesn't work that way. Government forces us to use their service for a fee, and forces us to provide services for free. Tax filing, and handling authorities requests are prime examples.
    - bredren 5y ago
      It does sometimes in the US. Some agencies will pay companies to perform digital forensic work necessary to offer data. Even administration of the job of forensic work, ie PM level assistance can be compensated. This includes if a company is served a subpoena and a warrant to provide certain data. Billing can be good, certainly valley-competitive. Iirc, this has been well covered as a thing that happens at big tech companies, including fb, but it also can apply to small ones.
  - adevx 5y ago
    No, I didn't. Not sure this is possible in the Netherlands. I had an hour long Teams call for them to know what data they could request. After the formal request came in it took a good part of the day to get everything they requested. Received some follow up requests so probably a full day "lost". If nothing else it was a good test of the backup system.
chovybizzass 5y ago
You should be encrypting any PII
vidyesh 5y ago
I agree keeping all or some portion of data self-hosted should be an important aspect of data storage for everyone, but the same does not hold true for email. You see, the problem with emails is that unless you are sending emails just within your organization and controlling where it lands (landing server), you cannot guarantee where it lands. Email is communication with other people, if you are sending an email to a person using Gmail your basement server for email gives you no protection over your email data a such. Govt. can easily request email data from Google of the recipient's account.
- dwild 5y ago
  > if you are sending an email to a person using Gmail your basement server for email gives you no protection over your email data a such. Govt. can easily request email data from Google of the recipient's account. It does give you protection on the fact that they then need to know the recipients emails and do multiple warrants to gather them if they are over multiple providers, which may or may not go through. For sure it's easier considering that most people use a few US providers, but it's not always the case (even less so for governments matters, which include foreign countries, thus foreign providers too).
escalt 5y ago
Spam filtering on your own mail server is easy. 99% of spam are generic automated E-Mails that are sent in bulk with lots of spoofed metadata (domain, sending address, date, etc.). I have an address on a domain that used to be hosted by a third party and it got tons of spam. At some point I moved the domain to my own server with mailcow, and it blocked the vast majority of spam out of the box with no false positives. It uses rspamd, not sure if they have a tweaked config for it or something Generally I really like mailcow. It makes dealing with all the ugly parts of hosting E-Mail fairly simple
- berkes 5y ago
  I'm using mailinabox, very similar to mailcow. Before that, did all the config myself. Incoming spam is hardly a problem. Spammassassin, rspamd and those catch most. Greylisting the rest. Once a year I see an uptake in spam, spend a few minutes dilligently marking everything a spam/not spam which the server the uses to retrain itself a little. Spamfilgering when selfhosting is hardly more work than on gmail, live, proton and such. Your outgoing mail icw spamfiltering, however, is an entirely different, and tough problem.
holri 5y ago
I self host my personal mail server with stock debian / exim / spamasssasin without any tweaking on a tiny A20 Olimex Server. Spam filtering works better than that of the professional posteo.de service which I also use for a club.
- human 5y ago
  How is your email deliverability though? My main issue was having my mail sent to spam even if my IP was clean. I resigned and moved to O365 and haven’t had issues. But I hate that I had to do that.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Not the OP but I have a similar environment, and do not know of any deliverability problems. Early on I found mails to one or two providers, like Yahoo and some Canadian ISP were bouncing, but I got a new IP and those troubles went away.
  - ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
    Not OP, but I have had deliverability problems with only one provider, and that is outlook.com. They seem to not care at all whether you have set up everything correctly (I pass all checks for reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, etc., and I am not on any blacklists) but just have their own shitty whitelist of senders and throw everything else in spam. I had to throw in the towel and send through an SMTP proxy hosted by my VPS provider which solved all issues. Please try to avoid using O365 as they literally are the main culprits that make self-hosting email a pain in the butt.
    - shaicoleman 5y ago
      Wanted to say exactly the same thing. I've set up everything according to best practices (SPF, DKIM, TLS, static IP for almost a year, reverse DNS, blacklist removal, spam checks). I've also repeatedly contacted Microsoft support to get unblocked. All my requests to whitelist the IP in the last year or so have been ignored. Microsoft is the sole bad actor I've encountered in more of a decade of self hosting email. On principle, I've decided not to use a different provider, and users on Microsoft services will not get emails from me or from my websites. This will only change if enough people complain. As a paying O365 customer, I'd encourage you to open support tickets that you're not receiving emails from some the smaller email servers, e.g. those hosted on DigitalOcean.
cm2187 5y ago
Though with TPM/full drive encryption you can have a box you own hosted by a third party but that third party cannot "open".
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  What was the most popular TPM chip for many years had a broken RSA key generator. It produced private keys that could be cracked with $76 worth of computing power: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tpm-chipsets-generate-insecure-rsa-keys-multiple-vendors-affected/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tpm-chipsets-... https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 It is really hard to see this as anything other than a bugdoor. My laptop has this TPM chip. I am really glad I never used it, and even went so far as to disable support for it when I built my coreboot image. Products sold with the buzzword "trusted" are a magnet for this sort of garbage. They've painted a "please bugdoor me" target on their back. The only thing you can hope to trust is general-purpose computing devices, with a large market, that obey their owner. Unfortunately it is increasingly difficult to find those.
- caeril 5y ago
  As long as it's running, anyone can exfiltrate your key material from SDRAM. And even for a few minutes after it's running, if they can dump them in LN2 quickly enough. There are kludgy schemes to make this harder, like Schneier's Boojum, but in the end your attacker just needs enough resources and patience. Most FDE schemes don't run crypto ops on the TPM itself - key derivation occurs there, then the results are cached in RAM ( or sometimes, protected CPU registers, in which case they may be able to inject privileged code into the kernel address space? ). LUKS on a colo will probably protect you if you're a fentanyl distributor or movie pirate. Probably not if you're a terrorist or a high-value nation-state target.
rodolphoarruda 5y ago
In the country I live, Brazil, federal police has been breaking into people's homes/offices and taking away all digital devices at once: laptops, phones, thumb drives etc. That makes me think what type of contingency I should have in place to stay minimally operational after such event happens to me. A VPS somewhere with my work toolkit installed and files synced via syncthing, for example? Maybe... but what if the police could get to the same VM via the confiscated devices? I don't know...
- gpm 5y ago
  > but what if the police could get to the same VM via the confiscated devices? I don't know... This is usually what passwords are for, something you know that cannot be stolen (short of rubber hose cryptography)
  - rodolphoarruda 5y ago
    Yes. For that I've been thinking of using VeraCrypt's hidden volumes. A volume inside another volume where an adversary cannot see their boundaries, which could allow some plausible deniability for passwords. I guess.
- fubbyy 5y ago
  If your server has full disk encryption it should be relatively safe against attacks where they just take the device, and so whatever you use to sync should be safe too?
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  That's an interesting opsec problem. Here is the solution that requires writing more software: 1. Find some friends or people you trust to not sell you out to the police. Ideally, these people should be in another country. 2. Place a server box on their property. This box will be a replica of your every-day home-server and devices. 3. However, in order to stop law enforcement from technically [1] finding this replica-box, you will need to use Tor. This ensures your home-server does not store the ip address or the physical location of the replica-box. 4. If your home-server is taken by law enforcement, you can buy another home-server and use memorized details (or call your friends on a burner phone) to restore a backup from the remote device [2]. [1] Please note that law enforcement can legally compel you with threats of jail time to reveal where these replica boxes are. [2] Since you will probably be under surveillance, it's unlikely law enforcement will allow you to freely communicate on the internet with new devices and servers.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Another great reason for self hosting if you or an organization you work for will ever be at odds with a governmental power structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_data_seizure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_data_seiz... The most notable example of self hosting going right is CNN, they self hosted their emails and were therefore able to fight the court order until it is narrowed and there was a change of leadership in the white house & DoJ. If you aren't going to self host write it into the contract that you must be informed (Google pushed back on court order because it would have violated the contract with NYT) Instances of data seizure that went unimpeded: Phone records (both work and personal) for all orgs. Emails for Politico, buzzfeed, the Times, a congressional staffer, and more. iCloud metadata for at least a dozen individuals associated with the House Intelligence Committee, and more.
ValentineC 5y ago
> When you use third-party services, the government can go to them. The third party might not fight the request the same way you would. And, you might not even know it happened. The third party might be expressly forbidden from telling you it happened, in fact. I just read the LinkedIn Incident [1] from the Darknet Diaries, and it's scary how the FBI managed to get all that information about the Russian hacker. [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/
- prophesi 5y ago
  I'm a bit astonished that LinkedIn's IT[0] needed the FBI to figure out that the person had a unique useragent. And that they don't have alerts for unknown IPs SSH'ing into their server. [0] though this is before Microsoft acquiring them, so it was probably just the usual startup reckless abandon.
normac2 5y ago
> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. And better, if you catch wind they're after you, you can format your HD to zeroes, or (if you don't want even the physical drive around) throw it in a fire or something :).
- pessimizer 5y ago
  The person in the example got to use any criteria she wanted to distinguish personal from work email (which seemed to be sorting on keywords and phrases), do all this privately before turning the work emails over, and IIRC charge the government for the time it took. If she had co-located, I bet they could have carted that server away, and her person would have to do the same process in some office with officials in and out of the room and over their shoulder.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  And when you do this they go ahead and convict you for that instead often much easier than whatever they were trying to get you for in the first place.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Friendly reminder that if law enforcement asks you for data, you can fight it in court, but they can require you to preserve the data while you fight. Deleting data under such protection could end with you facing an obstruction of justice charge.
  - normac2 5y ago
    Better yet is for the government to not even know the data existed, non? (Of course, you'd better make damn sure that they had no way of knowing before.)
bitwize 5y ago
Hillary Clinton was being investigated for using her personal basement server to handle official emails containing classified or confidential information. Something which, if I had done it when I had a security clearance, I would have been not only fired on the spot, but escorted off the facility in handcuffs for doing.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Anyone can put classified information into your email account by forwarding the right news story or Wikipedia page to you in an email. There is a lot of classified information that is also publicly known. Federal law enforcement understands this and takes it into account when deciding to prosecute. Note that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted despite the subsequent administration basically running on a promise to do so. Official business with classified information is never done via email, even if everyone is using the government email servers. There are separate networks, devices, and protocols for storing and operating with classified information.
  - vmladenov 5y ago
    Also, as has been said repeatedly, the US government doesn’t have a binary “classified” or “not classified”. There are many different levels and administrations introduce/adapt them as necessary[1], and there is a practice of retroactive classification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States#Levels_of_classification_used_by_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_...
jjav 5y ago
> Self-hosting a good spam/phishing filter seems almost impossible in 2021 No, it's very easy to filter spam locally. You don't need huge amounts of data, just your regular email. Which makes it much better on your data. Running my own email infrastructure for a long time, filtering spam is a non-issue.
basilgohar 5y ago
Mail-in-a-box [0] has a very good mail filter. Junk mail is about at Gmail levels for me, with almost zero false positives and almost zero false negatives. Some of my accounts are fairly high volume and I have found its performance to be very acceptable. The fact that I can host as many domains and accounts as I want with all kinds of filters and rules and forward them all to my main account as needed with rules is just gravy. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/

ceejayoz 5y ago

> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Sure, but my ability to stop them is probably substantially smaller than, say, Amazon’s legal departments capabilities.

christophilus 5y ago
Amazon probably won’t even try.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  They’ve clearly and openly committed to trying for years. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2705826/amazon-web-services--we-ll-go-to-court-to-fight-gov-t-requests-for-data.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2705826/amazon-web-ser... Even Twitter doesn’t like to roll over, and they’ve got a lot less at stake. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-17/twitter-fights-justice-department-subpoena-over-rep-nunes-parody-account https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-17/twitter-fi...
bob1029 5y ago
What incentive does Amazon have to fight against the government on your behalf?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  The trust of their customers?
  - paganel 5y ago
    Afaik the US Government is a big Amazon customer.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I would imagine that particular customer would rather Amazon not quietly honor, say, a Russian subpoena for their data.
      - synchrone 5y ago
        does it mean you have to put your data into Yandex or Alibaba Cloud if you wanna avoid USG quietly getting it?
      - coldtea 5y ago
        The problem for an Amazon hosted server is US subpoenas, not Russian or European or whatever...
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Amazon has AWS regions in six continents.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnklos 5y ago
    Ha ha ha ha ha... Amazon? Trust? People trust Amazon to exist and to bill. Providing services to those who pay the bills is almost incidental.
sleavey 5y ago
But your ability to delete the data is substantially higher than your ability to get Amazon to delete it.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  If you are hosted on AWS, it is really easy to delete your data. Also, you can encrypt it with keys that they will NOT use to decrypt. The data will also NOT leave the region (or country) that you specify
  - mnahkies 5y ago
    Is the "NOT" due to process, or technical constraints? Because it's very easy to make an exception to normal process, if the right people are asking
  - sleavey 5y ago
    What guarantee do you have that Amazon will delete it when you tell them to, though? It doesn't even necessarily come down to whether you trust Amazon ethically and legally, but also whether you trust their internal processes. Shredding the data on your own hard drive gives you a pretty good guarantee. Drilling a big gaping hole through it afterwards gives you an even better one.
the_rectifier 5y ago
Quite the opposite.
cube00 5y ago
Any company's legal department is like HR, it's role is to protect the company, not the employees and certainly not the customers.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Even more so for non-paying users, as in gmail or facebook. Especially when the companies are already happily selling account metadata.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Getting a reputation for handing customer data over to the government without a fight seems like the sort of thing that would damage a hosting company.
  - Phrenzy 5y ago
    Having a poor data security reputation? It didn't effect Experian. https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/another-data-leak-for-experian-credit-scores-of-americans-were-available-to-anyone-due-to-api-security-issue/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/another-data-leak... It didn't effect Yahoo. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/might-mother-password-leaks-billions-001204813.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/might-mother-password-le... It didn't effect Sony. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/sony-hack https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomgara/sony-hack It didn't effect AT&T. https://www.wired.com/2011/09/911-surveillance/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/911-surveillance/
    - gruez 5y ago
      >It didn't effect Experian. You, as a consumer don't really get to choose experian or not. >It didn't effect Yahoo. Who says it didn't? >It didn't effect Sony. So a bunch of internal business documents got leaked. As a consumer I couldn't care less. >It didn't effect AT&T. If every provider was mandated to do this, then I wouldn't call it "poor data security reputation".
newsclues 5y ago
Ability and willingness are two different things.
snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s probably better than you think. You’ll need a competent lawyer but beyond that you’ll depend on the court system, which attempts to put you and the government on equal footing. Depending on the legal issue at stake, it might also be possible to access additional legal expertise pro bono, or through an organization like the ACLU.

lbotos 5y ago

> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Right, and your example of a literal server in a basement supports that, but if you are colocating or using a VPS they will almost definitely go to your provider first and probably won't even tell you.

cube00 5y ago
If you encrypt the disk is a VPS provider going bother going to effort of trying to hook into the running machine via their hypervisor in a way that won't be evident to the owner of the server? I'm not saying they can't I just don't see that they would spend their time doing this when they can send to the request to the server's owner and then it's no longer their problem to deal with.
- the_rectifier 5y ago
  Dumping VM memory contents is pretty trivial.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    AMD's SEV and Intel's SGX should protect from this. Of course, you still have to take the VPS provider's word that they've enabled them on their CPUs.
    - closeparen 5y ago
      That is for applications specifically written to compute on the secure element, no?
      - gruez 5y ago
        The parent poster probably got his terminology confused. AFAIK SGX runs on the secure element, SEV is for isolating the VM from the host.

viraptor 5y ago

> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. Yes, and rather than sending a letter to the hosting company, they can come to your house and confiscate all electronic equipment. (that's not a joke btw, when local LE comes to your house, you can lose anything electronic from laptop/server down to backup drives and ipod, possibly taking years to recover) For me that doesn't sound like a good potential tradeoff. > This was why Hillary Clinton wanted to host her personal email in her basement. [citation needed]

adevx 5y ago

I recently had to hand-over a ton of data for a police investigation. The data had to come from off-site backups, I had to write manual SQL queries because of unique data requests that required cross references. All in all a lot of work that would be hard and time consuming to get if they bypassed me and accessed the raw data from my VPS provider. It would have saved me a ton of time though had they bypassed me.

bredren 5y ago
Did you charge them fees? It can be possible to reasonably recover costs associated with these efforts.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  It doesn't work that way. Government forces us to use their service for a fee, and forces us to provide services for free. Tax filing, and handling authorities requests are prime examples.
  - bredren 5y ago
    It does sometimes in the US. Some agencies will pay companies to perform digital forensic work necessary to offer data. Even administration of the job of forensic work, ie PM level assistance can be compensated. This includes if a company is served a subpoena and a warrant to provide certain data. Billing can be good, certainly valley-competitive. Iirc, this has been well covered as a thing that happens at big tech companies, including fb, but it also can apply to small ones.
- adevx 5y ago
  No, I didn't. Not sure this is possible in the Netherlands. I had an hour long Teams call for them to know what data they could request. After the formal request came in it took a good part of the day to get everything they requested. Received some follow up requests so probably a full day "lost". If nothing else it was a good test of the backup system.

chovybizzass 5y ago

You should be encrypting any PII

vidyesh 5y ago

I agree keeping all or some portion of data self-hosted should be an important aspect of data storage for everyone, but the same does not hold true for email. You see, the problem with emails is that unless you are sending emails just within your organization and controlling where it lands (landing server), you cannot guarantee where it lands. Email is communication with other people, if you are sending an email to a person using Gmail your basement server for email gives you no protection over your email data a such. Govt. can easily request email data from Google of the recipient's account.

dwild 5y ago
> if you are sending an email to a person using Gmail your basement server for email gives you no protection over your email data a such. Govt. can easily request email data from Google of the recipient's account. It does give you protection on the fact that they then need to know the recipients emails and do multiple warrants to gather them if they are over multiple providers, which may or may not go through. For sure it's easier considering that most people use a few US providers, but it's not always the case (even less so for governments matters, which include foreign countries, thus foreign providers too).

escalt 5y ago

Spam filtering on your own mail server is easy. 99% of spam are generic automated E-Mails that are sent in bulk with lots of spoofed metadata (domain, sending address, date, etc.). I have an address on a domain that used to be hosted by a third party and it got tons of spam. At some point I moved the domain to my own server with mailcow, and it blocked the vast majority of spam out of the box with no false positives. It uses rspamd, not sure if they have a tweaked config for it or something Generally I really like mailcow. It makes dealing with all the ugly parts of hosting E-Mail fairly simple

berkes 5y ago
I'm using mailinabox, very similar to mailcow. Before that, did all the config myself. Incoming spam is hardly a problem. Spammassassin, rspamd and those catch most. Greylisting the rest. Once a year I see an uptake in spam, spend a few minutes dilligently marking everything a spam/not spam which the server the uses to retrain itself a little. Spamfilgering when selfhosting is hardly more work than on gmail, live, proton and such. Your outgoing mail icw spamfiltering, however, is an entirely different, and tough problem.

holri 5y ago

I self host my personal mail server with stock debian / exim / spamasssasin without any tweaking on a tiny A20 Olimex Server. Spam filtering works better than that of the professional posteo.de service which I also use for a club.

human 5y ago
How is your email deliverability though? My main issue was having my mail sent to spam even if my IP was clean. I resigned and moved to O365 and haven’t had issues. But I hate that I had to do that.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Not the OP but I have a similar environment, and do not know of any deliverability problems. Early on I found mails to one or two providers, like Yahoo and some Canadian ISP were bouncing, but I got a new IP and those troubles went away.
- ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
  Not OP, but I have had deliverability problems with only one provider, and that is outlook.com. They seem to not care at all whether you have set up everything correctly (I pass all checks for reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, etc., and I am not on any blacklists) but just have their own shitty whitelist of senders and throw everything else in spam. I had to throw in the towel and send through an SMTP proxy hosted by my VPS provider which solved all issues. Please try to avoid using O365 as they literally are the main culprits that make self-hosting email a pain in the butt.
  - shaicoleman 5y ago
    Wanted to say exactly the same thing. I've set up everything according to best practices (SPF, DKIM, TLS, static IP for almost a year, reverse DNS, blacklist removal, spam checks). I've also repeatedly contacted Microsoft support to get unblocked. All my requests to whitelist the IP in the last year or so have been ignored. Microsoft is the sole bad actor I've encountered in more of a decade of self hosting email. On principle, I've decided not to use a different provider, and users on Microsoft services will not get emails from me or from my websites. This will only change if enough people complain. As a paying O365 customer, I'd encourage you to open support tickets that you're not receiving emails from some the smaller email servers, e.g. those hosted on DigitalOcean.

cm2187 5y ago

Though with TPM/full drive encryption you can have a box you own hosted by a third party but that third party cannot "open".

KirillPanov 5y ago
What was the most popular TPM chip for many years had a broken RSA key generator. It produced private keys that could be cracked with $76 worth of computing power: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tpm-chipsets-generate-insecure-rsa-keys-multiple-vendors-affected/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tpm-chipsets-... https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 It is really hard to see this as anything other than a bugdoor. My laptop has this TPM chip. I am really glad I never used it, and even went so far as to disable support for it when I built my coreboot image. Products sold with the buzzword "trusted" are a magnet for this sort of garbage. They've painted a "please bugdoor me" target on their back. The only thing you can hope to trust is general-purpose computing devices, with a large market, that obey their owner. Unfortunately it is increasingly difficult to find those.
caeril 5y ago
As long as it's running, anyone can exfiltrate your key material from SDRAM. And even for a few minutes after it's running, if they can dump them in LN2 quickly enough. There are kludgy schemes to make this harder, like Schneier's Boojum, but in the end your attacker just needs enough resources and patience. Most FDE schemes don't run crypto ops on the TPM itself - key derivation occurs there, then the results are cached in RAM ( or sometimes, protected CPU registers, in which case they may be able to inject privileged code into the kernel address space? ). LUKS on a colo will probably protect you if you're a fentanyl distributor or movie pirate. Probably not if you're a terrorist or a high-value nation-state target.

rodolphoarruda 5y ago

In the country I live, Brazil, federal police has been breaking into people's homes/offices and taking away all digital devices at once: laptops, phones, thumb drives etc. That makes me think what type of contingency I should have in place to stay minimally operational after such event happens to me. A VPS somewhere with my work toolkit installed and files synced via syncthing, for example? Maybe... but what if the police could get to the same VM via the confiscated devices? I don't know...

gpm 5y ago
> but what if the police could get to the same VM via the confiscated devices? I don't know... This is usually what passwords are for, something you know that cannot be stolen (short of rubber hose cryptography)
- rodolphoarruda 5y ago
  Yes. For that I've been thinking of using VeraCrypt's hidden volumes. A volume inside another volume where an adversary cannot see their boundaries, which could allow some plausible deniability for passwords. I guess.
fubbyy 5y ago
If your server has full disk encryption it should be relatively safe against attacks where they just take the device, and so whatever you use to sync should be safe too?
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
That's an interesting opsec problem. Here is the solution that requires writing more software: 1. Find some friends or people you trust to not sell you out to the police. Ideally, these people should be in another country. 2. Place a server box on their property. This box will be a replica of your every-day home-server and devices. 3. However, in order to stop law enforcement from technically [1] finding this replica-box, you will need to use Tor. This ensures your home-server does not store the ip address or the physical location of the replica-box. 4. If your home-server is taken by law enforcement, you can buy another home-server and use memorized details (or call your friends on a burner phone) to restore a backup from the remote device [2]. [1] Please note that law enforcement can legally compel you with threats of jail time to reveal where these replica boxes are. [2] Since you will probably be under surveillance, it's unlikely law enforcement will allow you to freely communicate on the internet with new devices and servers.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

Another great reason for self hosting if you or an organization you work for will ever be at odds with a governmental power structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_data_seizure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_data_seiz... The most notable example of self hosting going right is CNN, they self hosted their emails and were therefore able to fight the court order until it is narrowed and there was a change of leadership in the white house & DoJ. If you aren't going to self host write it into the contract that you must be informed (Google pushed back on court order because it would have violated the contract with NYT) Instances of data seizure that went unimpeded: Phone records (both work and personal) for all orgs. Emails for Politico, buzzfeed, the Times, a congressional staffer, and more. iCloud metadata for at least a dozen individuals associated with the House Intelligence Committee, and more.

ValentineC 5y ago

> When you use third-party services, the government can go to them. The third party might not fight the request the same way you would. And, you might not even know it happened. The third party might be expressly forbidden from telling you it happened, in fact. I just read the LinkedIn Incident [1] from the Darknet Diaries, and it's scary how the FBI managed to get all that information about the Russian hacker. [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/

prophesi 5y ago
I'm a bit astonished that LinkedIn's IT[0] needed the FBI to figure out that the person had a unique useragent. And that they don't have alerts for unknown IPs SSH'ing into their server. [0] though this is before Microsoft acquiring them, so it was probably just the usual startup reckless abandon.

normac2 5y ago

> When you self-host, the government has to come to you for your data. And better, if you catch wind they're after you, you can format your HD to zeroes, or (if you don't want even the physical drive around) throw it in a fire or something :).

pessimizer 5y ago
The person in the example got to use any criteria she wanted to distinguish personal from work email (which seemed to be sorting on keywords and phrases), do all this privately before turning the work emails over, and IIRC charge the government for the time it took. If she had co-located, I bet they could have carted that server away, and her person would have to do the same process in some office with officials in and out of the room and over their shoulder.
colechristensen 5y ago
And when you do this they go ahead and convict you for that instead often much easier than whatever they were trying to get you for in the first place.
snowwrestler 5y ago
Friendly reminder that if law enforcement asks you for data, you can fight it in court, but they can require you to preserve the data while you fight. Deleting data under such protection could end with you facing an obstruction of justice charge.
- normac2 5y ago
  Better yet is for the government to not even know the data existed, non? (Of course, you'd better make damn sure that they had no way of knowing before.)

bitwize 5y ago

Hillary Clinton was being investigated for using her personal basement server to handle official emails containing classified or confidential information. Something which, if I had done it when I had a security clearance, I would have been not only fired on the spot, but escorted off the facility in handcuffs for doing.

snowwrestler 5y ago
Anyone can put classified information into your email account by forwarding the right news story or Wikipedia page to you in an email. There is a lot of classified information that is also publicly known. Federal law enforcement understands this and takes it into account when deciding to prosecute. Note that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted despite the subsequent administration basically running on a promise to do so. Official business with classified information is never done via email, even if everyone is using the government email servers. There are separate networks, devices, and protocols for storing and operating with classified information.
- vmladenov 5y ago
  Also, as has been said repeatedly, the US government doesn’t have a binary “classified” or “not classified”. There are many different levels and administrations introduce/adapt them as necessary[1], and there is a practice of retroactive classification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States#Levels_of_classification_used_by_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_...

jjav 5y ago

> Self-hosting a good spam/phishing filter seems almost impossible in 2021 No, it's very easy to filter spam locally. You don't need huge amounts of data, just your regular email. Which makes it much better on your data. Running my own email infrastructure for a long time, filtering spam is a non-issue.

basilgohar 5y ago

Mail-in-a-box [0] has a very good mail filter. Junk mail is about at Gmail levels for me, with almost zero false positives and almost zero false negatives. Some of my accounts are fairly high volume and I have found its performance to be very acceptable. The fact that I can host as many domains and accounts as I want with all kinds of filters and rules and forward them all to my main account as needed with rules is just gravy. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/