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Client-side encryption for Gmail in Google Workspace is now generally available
- JadoJodo 4y ago> client-side encryption for Gmail is now generally available for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers. So nothing for power users?
- 0x53 4y agoThe year is 2023.
- acatton 4y agoThis is purely marketing AFAIT. I don't see how it provides any protection against the 5 eyes or having one's google account breached. The encryption/decription is done with javascript code served to your browser by google (= can be hijacked/changed/…) The only way to do client side encryption is PGP on a native client distributed by a third party.
- Gasp0de 4y agoIf the key is encrypted with your password, I don't see how that compromises security by a lot. If they adapt the javascript to break encryption on a large scale, that would sooner or later come out. Yes, they could target specific people, deliver different javascript and break their encryption, but in general it's still a huge security gain. It makes it impossible for Google to handover E-Mails retrospectively to police or spy agencies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kenniskrag 4y agoIt is encrypted by the key service and not by google: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10801691 https://support.google.com/a/answer/10801691 can be self hosted.
- tantalor 4y agoNot saying much. Same is true about any e2e encrypted messaging (Telegram, Signal, etc.) There's no way to tell if they are intercepting your messages clientside, and you'd have to monitor all the network traffic (which would be encrypted with their keys) to detect exfiltration.
- sneak 4y agoNo. Signal is not redownloaded from Signal each time you launch the app, unlike javascript web apps.
- tantalor 4y agoYou're 100% sure they didn't already ship the code and have the ability to flip a flag to enable message interception per user? Or the ability to execute arbitrary external code?
- sneak 4y agoSignal's feature flags are public as the client is open source and anyone can retrieve the feature flags from the server. You can also run your own self-built client (alternative implementations are available) and forward the messages securely any way you wish. Such subterfuge would not remain undetected. Signal is e2ee in ways that iMessage and WhatsApp are not.
- macspoofing 4y ago>I don't see how it provides any protection against the 5 eyes or having one's google account breached. It isn't supposed to protect you from government agencies. Really what this feature is, is 1) e2e of email, and 2) integration with an external enterprise key management service. #2 means that at very least, your org will have access to your keys and therefore all encrypted mail, and if they have access to that, then they are open to things like subpoenas from law enforcement.
- kevincox 4y agoI think the primary benefit is that in theory you can cut Google off at any time. If you disable the key service they can no longer decrypt your data. So if you decided that Google is no longer trustworthy you can leave and they can't access your data. Of course this is sort of an odd game where you need to cut their access off before they backdoor it, so you have to somehow predict that Google is going to become malicious and beat them to the punch. If you a reacting to something that they are doing it likely isn't helping much. Another possible advantage is that you could potentially have logging on key access which could give some idea of data usage. So if Google starts requesting keys for all of your stored data then you can be suspicious that they are siphoning up your data. (Or doing some background maintenance? Who knows?) In practice this is probably mostly checkbox theater where it is a feature that Google and their users can list.
- pmontra 4y agoI wonder which tool we can use to decrypt the exported messages before importing them into a local (mbox, maildir) or remote message store (IMAP.) At worst we can use the JS code Google sends us, but extracting it from the gmail JS bundle is probably non trivial.
- Idiot_in_Vain 4y agoWonder if there's a browser plugin that can calculate SHA 256 checksum for a page and all linked JS - to help verify that the encryption/decription code has not been compromised.
- 3ul3r 4y agoWhatsApp build something like that: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/10/security/code-verify/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/10/security/code-verify/
- UncleMeat 4y agoExcept that we've got two decades of evidence of people regularly fucking up PGP leaking the contents of entire email threads. If the only thing that works is PGP then nothing works.
- belltaco 4y agoTitle is misleading. > Not available to users with personal Google Accounts
- Thaxll 4y agoThis blog is not for personal accounts: "about new features and improvements for Google Workspace customers." RTFM.
- belltaco 4y agoI was referring to the HN title. The domain that shows up is 'googleblog.com' which doesn't indicate it's not for regular Gmail. > RTFM What manual?
- Gasp0de 4y agoYes, perhaps "for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers" could be added to the HN title?
- rerdavies 4y agoOr perhaps change the title to "narrowly available".
- Gasp0de 4y agoDoes it work with mailing lists? Edit: Found out that it doesn't: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897#zippy=%2Cwhich-data-cse-encrypts%2Cgmail https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897#zippy=%2Cwhich-...
- _theskumar 4y agoThere is no info on how it works! It looks more like a marketing stunt! How the key is generated, where it is stored, and which encryption is used.
- kenniskrag 4y agosee here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10801691 https://support.google.com/a/answer/10801691
- sumitgt 4y agoIt’s in the references below the blog post https://support.google.com/a/answer/13069736?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/13069736?hl=en
- cientifico 4y agoThat is not Generally available: Availability * Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers * Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers * Not available to users with personal Google Accounts
- deelowe 4y agoAt Google, generally available means it's no longer in testing. It's a development lifecycle term.
- Semaphor 4y agoNot just at Google, MS also uses GA when something is sold, no need for it to be free.
- groffee 4y agoThat's weasel word marketing. They know the majority of their users are going to think 'generally available' is exactly what it sounds like, not their made up meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
- akerl_ 4y agoIf a restaurant near you says their new menu is generally available, do you turn up looking for a free meal without a reservation? The Google announcement is pretty direct about the plans the feature is included with, and how to enable it.
- DrewADesign 4y agoWhile the education plans aren't publicly available, apparently there is no minimum for Enterprise Plus accounts. Theoretically, an enterprising (unless nonplussed) individual could indeed get this feature at I think $30/mo.
- xinu2020 4y ago>Availability > >Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers >Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers >Not available to users with personal Google Accounts Also to be available it must first be enabled by a workspace admin, then by the end user.
- kybernetikos 4y agoYeah, It's understandable that they would use this as a differentiator, but in reality, we all gain when encryption is rolled out more broadly.
- shadowgovt 4y agoWho is "we" in this context?
- fauigerzigerk 4y agoTo me this feature looks like a box ticking exercise with an eye toward government contracts. Microsoft has it so Google needs it too in order to avoid looking less secure to decision makers who may not know whether or not it will ever be needed.
- jeffbee 4y agoSure, it ticks this exact box that the help article mentions: > Your organization operates in a highly regulated industry, like aerospace and defense, financial services, or government.
- latchkey 4y agoThis is not just tick a checkbox and it is done. Enabling it is non-trivial as it requires setting up a whole bunch of stuff, like integrating with a third party key service provider (or setting up your own).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jmclnx 4y agoGood for gmail. These days, people really should get their own domain and host there email there. If you do not know how to do this, there are plenty of cheap hosting companies you can use. And if you want to encrypt, use gnupg or that thing Thunderbird now uses. I am a mutt user and gnupg with mutt is rather easy.
- jeremyjh 4y agoWhat if you want email you send to make it to the inbox of gmail, 365 users?
- sucinq 4y agoI suppose jeremyjh@ meant emailing someone with a Google account kind of defeats the purpose of self hosting as your message is now at Google's hands. Self hosting probably makes more sense if people you're emailing are self hosting too.
- seanw444 4y agoThen get a legit-looking domain name and hope you don't get algorithmically deranked. It's literally a gamble.
- misterio7 4y agoMost hosted mail services have no issues getting to mailbox. I've used Gandi, Mailbox, FastMail, and never have any mails flagged as spam. Deliverability is only an issue when self hosting (particularly for home IPs)
- misterio7 4y agoI mean, at least for me it hasn't been a problem. I currently self host mail on a VPS and everything's awesome. YMMV
- josefresco 4y ago>never have any mails flagged as spam You don't know this for certain, no one can unless you monitor both ends.
- a-dub 4y agoi think i read all the blog posts and announcements, yet i can't for the life of me find a technical explanation of what exactly this does. it looks like it could be like s/mime, or possibly a scheme for encrypting the contents of messages stored in gmail accounts. where are the keys stored? what is the threat model? can anyone enlighten?
- _23sd 4y agoIt’s primarily for industries with strict regulatory/compliance requirements on managing sensitive data. The more detailed description is at [1]. Keys are stored in a cloud service, admins and end users use SSO to retrieve a key whenever they need to access an encrypted document. This is supposed to let companies do things like enforce rules on forwarding or printing sensitive emails, revoke access to particular documents if needed, and reduce the scale and risk of leaks if Google or an individual user account was breached. Of course, it’s not perfect in practice. [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897 https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897
- a-dub 4y agook so it's basically like 0bin for google apps storage. that's a step in the right direction... it's confusing because they present it in the context of email. although i suppose that's probably what customers are most worried about. corporate scandals tend to frequently be rooted in leaked internal communications.
- zugi 4y agoCan you only send encrypted messages to recipients who also use Google? If it isn't S/MIME then as far as I'm concerned it almost isn't email. Anyone can already make encrypted ZIP files or other proprietary encrypted attachments and send them via email. If it's not S/MIME, it feels like just a convenience layer on top of that.
- DeepYogurt 4y agoCan't find anything about key rotation. How do they crack that nut?
- Cockbrand 4y agoMy understanding is that you create a new key in the external key management service, re-encrypt all applicable data in Workspace with the new key and then revoke/delete the old key. All this is API-based, of course, so it can be automated. (Testing Cunningham's Law here)
- Kiro 4y agoWent into this thread thinking "how will HN find an angle where this is a bad thing?". Was not disappointed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- margorczynski 4y agoMaybe they're trying to penetrate more the Enterprise market where usually people are very nervous about not having on-prem e-mail and full control of the data. This is supposed to give them some guarantees that the data is locked&safe outside of their premises.
- ddevault 4y agoNaturally they have reinvented the proprietary wheel instead of implementing PGP, so that their domesticated users are nicely corralled in their walled garden.
- paxys 4y agoI'm surprised it took them this long. Outlook/Exchange has supported IRM protected emails since 2007. Little things like these show why Microsoft has an unassailable lead in enterprise software and Google, despite all of its resources, is forever playing catch up.
- bgitarts 4y agoNot available to users with personal Google Accounts. Why not?
- jcrites 4y agoI’m speculating about how this works, but it probably doesn’t make sense for general-purpose email. For emails between members of one workspace/domain, you can conceptually perform key exchange to implement client-side encryption. You also don’t have spam concerns within members of a workspace. There’s no general way to do key exchange between different email domains, and you do have spam concerns (which to address requires scanning the content). There’s no protocol for doing such things over different email domains in a way that’s compatible and interoperable across software stacks. This technology is proprietary, and would make spam challenging to deal with (which again is not a problem within one workspace). It’s also not clear to me whether this is really client-side encryption, so much as encryption at a layer higher than the email stack. (It’s pretty hard to do client-side encryption in the browser, in a way that matches user expectations. How do you store/retrieve the encryption key?)
- jsgpg 4y agoOoenPGP.js is open source and developed by ProtonMail https://openpgpjs.org/ https://openpgpjs.org/ https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs A number of Chrome (and I think also Firefox) extensions include their own local copy of OpenPGP.js for use with various webmail services, including GMail. WKD (and HKP) depends upon HTTPS without cert pinning, FWIU: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD How does an email client use WKD? 1. A user selects a recipient for an email. 2. The email client uses the domain part of the email address to construct which server to ask. 3. HTTPS is used to get the current public key. The email client is ready to encrypt and send now. An example: https://intevation.de/.well-known/openpgpkey/hu/it5sewh54rxz33fwmr8u6dy4bbz8itz4 is the direct method URL for "bernhard.reiter@intevation.de
- jcrites 4y agoHow/where exactly does it store the user's private keys? The initial reaction that I have to client-side encryption with a web browser is: how does the client fetch/obtain the encryption key? (For signing outbound messages, or decrypting/verifying inbound.) Local storage wouldn't be appropriate as the sole storage for something like an asymmetric keypair, and it wouldn't provide the behavior that users expect: being able to log in and use a service from any web browser. No one interacts with a web browser in such a way that it would be appropriate for the browser's local state to be the sole storage of something important like a private key. So this necessitates a service that the client interacts with during login to fetch its private key. If you can log in with a browser, then that implies that you're fetching the key from somewhere. In the context of hosted Gmail, then that means that Gmail will be storing and providing your key. In which case it's nominally client-side encryption -- and the system that stores and provides your key might be totally separate from the email systems (and tightly controlled) -- but it's still not what I'd think of as client-side encryption generally. It's not really client-side encryption if the service that you're using to store data is the same service (from your perspective) as the one that stores/provides your key (those responsibilities might be separated from an implementation perspective, but they aren't from a user's perspective). The service can employ various techniques like encrypting its copy of my private key using a symmetric key derived from my passphrase (and then discarded) -- and this decryption could perhaps be done client-side in the browser -- but ultimately the service still has the ability to obtain my key (at time of next login, if not any time). If the service that provides a client-side encryption key could be divorced from a particular use-case -- e.g., if I could use my own pluggable key-providing service with Gmail, which my browser uses to fetch my key on login -- then the model would make a bit more sense. (You'd still have to trust a service like Gmail not to steal your key, but at least you don't have to trust it to store the key as well.) Would it be possible to implement a standardized pluggable key server model? It seems plausible. Imagine that there was a standard HTTP protocol for this purpose, kind of like how WebAuthN is standardized. I log into Gmail, link it to my key server <https://keys.jcrites.example.com https://keys.jcrites.example.com>, verify the connection, and then when logging into Gmail, then the web page is allowed to make HTTPS calls to <https://keys.jcrites.example.com https://keys.jcrites.example.com> to either fetch my asymmetric key, or alternatively make calls to decrypt or encrypt specific content. In the former case, it implements client-side encryption using a key server I control, while trusting Gmail not to misuse the key; in the latter case, it implements encryption using a keyserver that I control, and makes remote calls for each encryption operation. In that case Gmail would never have my key, although while browsing Gmail.com it could probably make arbitrary requests to the key server to perform operations using the key -- but you could log what operations are performed.