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Yours is a rare usecase. The metadata is bad for two reasons. First, simply knowing who mailed whom and when, the powerful adversary can merely visit all parti
by imglorp 5y ago
Yours is a rare usecase. The metadata is bad for two reasons.
First, simply knowing who mailed whom and when, the powerful adversary can merely visit all participants and urge them to divulge the key and contents. If the adversary didn't know the participants beforehand, they do after seeing the helpful metadata.
Second, even failing to read the mail, the powerful adversary can still apply guilt by association, so merely being on the email is enough to attract their attention.
- TillE 5y agoI use PGP email for business communication. It's absolutely no secret that a business relationship exists between us, merely the content is sensitive. Obviously it's a problem for like, whistleblowers, but that's not most people.
- imglorp 5y agoSometimes business comms /are/ sensitive to knowing the participants. If the head of M+A of one corp is talking to the CEO of another, that might be interesting. If a bunch of Silicon Valley HR leads are mailing each other, is there another anti-poaching agreement in the works? If some retail competitors' sales VPs are mailing each other, is there some price fixing or collusion going on? There's a lot of signals here revealed by metadata.
- mLuby 5y agoAren't both of those "powerful adversary" attacks equally valid against Signal, and really any digital communications platform? It depends on how accessible this email metadata is compared to Signal traffic, and how big you'd have to be to be able to eavesdrop on it. IIRC this was even a problem for Tor, when there are too few users relative to the nodes being snooped on.
- joshuamorton 5y agoNo, the signal protocol doesn't leak the sender/recipients pair, only that the recipient is getting a message.