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Facebook Is Ending Support for PGP Encrypted Emails
- ZiiS 3y agoPresumably the is no overlap in the Venn diagram of people who want PGP encrypted emails and people who use Facebook,
- CalRobert 3y agoOnce upon a time I tried to adapt Mailvelope to encrypt FB messages, for what it's worth. But that was a long, long, LONG time ago. https://mailvelope.com/en/ https://mailvelope.com/en/
- stupidmanager 3y agoI used mailvelope for the longest time as a gmail user until I found a better mail app with gpg support. It was pretty slick last time I used it. Shamefully I also turned on the pgp messages from Facebook. I never found value with it, but to this day it’s still enabled and I don’t care to log in to Facebook to disable it.
- redleader55 3y agoEmployees of Facebook are geeky enough to use GPG. I suspect it was a feature built for internal users, but problematic now as most people don't understand it or are able to use it.
- prepend 3y agoIt’s at least a small intersection. I had it set up and I think it’s the only social media company that supported this. Comically I forgot all about it until I had to reset my password and got an encrypted email. Was a pain to dig out my keys and decrypt it, but it worked.
- repelsteeltje 3y ago> Once a hacker gains access to a Facebook account, they can proceed to activate email encryption. > This renders recovery emails sent to the user’s email address unreadable, as only the hacker has the encryption keys. So: PGP encrypted emails were rarely used, except to lock out the legit user after account was compromised.
- sebstefan 3y agoGithub asks you to log in again to add SSH keys in, this could've been similar They're just looking for excuses
- crtasm 3y agoA lot of account compromise is due to reused passwords so I'm not sure that's a complete solution.
- Kwpolska 3y agoSending a PGP-encrypted email with a verification link to activate the feature should solve that.
- westurner 3y agoWhat are the disadvantages of only signing (and not encrypting the message body of) account reset emails?
- sebstefan 3y agoThe point is that much more sensitive things exist online and it's a solved problem
- jhanschoo 3y agoWhat use case for FB relies on this feature?
- martin_a 3y ago
- b112 3y agoAfter persons destroyed the usefulness and value of all the keyservers a few years back, via flooding and other actions, this is no shock. I suspect this was a state actor funded operation, for this has effectively, and significantly reduced the usefulness of PGP/GNUPG. Many people I know were starting to use it, now they do not. It doesn't matter that security should overcome conveniences, conveniences often win. And state actors hate encryption at rest.
- repelsteeltje 3y agoIt's that, and the fact that a hacker would enable the feature after compromising the account (some other way, unrelated to PGP) to prevent the legit user from using the account recovery email. So feature was basically there only to shoot oneself in the foot.
- b112 3y agoThat is part of facebook's reasoning, as to why they dropped it. The second part should be kept in mind, and that is, few use it. If it was popular, they wouldn't axe it. My comment was certainly about facebook dropping it, but also about how this is a larger picture issue. You don't need to weaken encryption standards(NSA, others), or have back doors(loads of states), if people just find it too annoying to use!
- repelsteeltje 3y agoWould have helped a lot of there would have been some sponsorship and adoption by banks, bigtech, governments. With only push from Snowden and a couple of nerds (I'm making a hyperbole :-) ) and it being complicated, inconvenient this never gained momentum. Banks, bigtech, government choose other means, for their own reasons. Some of those might have been spies lobbying to hold on to their surveillance superpowers, for sure. Another might have been "not invented here".
- prmoustache 3y agoFor that to work, your email has to be compromised in the first place. And if your email is compromised, well, it is game over already, for every single thing you have access to. So it is just a poor excuse. I guess the main reason is that virtually nobody knew this feature existed and the intersection between the population privacy savy enough to use PGP and using Facebook is ridiculously small.
- perihelions 3y agoI don't understand how the attack works. Does the workflow for enabling, or changing, Facebook email PGP keys not include an email verification step? Or is that being circumvented in some way?
- repelsteeltje 3y agoIt's just a DoS attack. If valid PGP pubkey is added to account, the account recovery email becomes useless because it's encrypted gibberish that cannot be deciphered unless you have PGP private key.
- perihelions 3y agoCan you associate a PGP pubkey to an email address, in Facebook's workflow, without verifying access to that address?
- repelsteeltje 3y agoNot sure, I don't use Facebook. I suppose that if you have access to the account and are able to associate PGP, you might as well change the recovery email address too if hacker doesn't already have a way to read it.
- citrin_ru 3y agoA new key can (should) be activated only if a user can confirm that they can read messages encrypted with this key sent to a configured account recovery email.
- im3w1l 3y agoEven email verification might not be enough. Consider the following scenario 1. Attacker somehow gets control of email 2. Attacker uses email to "recover" facebook. 3. Attacker uses email to add pgp. (time passes) 4. User realizes facebook and email are taken over 5. User somehow recovers email 6. User tries to recover facebook using email but is unable to
- pelagicAustral 3y agoFeels like killing a feature for the sake of an edge-case. What's the prevalence of malignant entities taking over a Facebook account (of all accounts you can nick) via PGP takeover?
- Ambroos 3y agoFacebook account takeovers are really elaborate and very common. Since this is a very easy way to essentially block users from recovering their own account, I can see why they're killing this vector. The account was not taken over through the feature, but the feature made self-service recovery near impossible.
- liopleurodon 3y agoI doubt that this was widely adopted Hell, even amongst my peers, I'm continually shocked at how many people have never used gpg, ever. And, anecdotally, the number gets lower as age gets lower. Young people aren't using it. It's dying.
- bantunes 3y agoMakes sense to me, it was never super usable. The Windows versions in the early 2000s were ok enough (PGPWin by Symantec?) but outside of that, it was by CLI lovers for CLI lovers which is fine but this could only have worked with massive adoption driving network effects. Not to even mention keysigning parties, that were just the nerdiest thing ever :)
- dale_glass 3y agoGPG sadly never grew up. It's a program firmly stuck in the 90s. The original PGP manual talked about secretly communicating with your lover. That was the usage model, transmitting secret messages to people you could sometimes meet in person, and where the model was you talking to people you directly know. Try to verify the GPG signature on say, the Tor Browser. It's signed by "Tor Browser Developers (signing key)". Have you ever met this "Tor Browser Developers" person? Okay, what about the web of trust? Well, GPG offers no help whatsoever in finding a way of making a connection. And that's why it's dying, because the model it targets ceased to be relevant, and we developed plenty new needs like verifying software signed by random people on the other side of the globe, while GPG did nothing to accommodate that use.
- rany_ 3y ago> and we developed plenty new needs like verifying software signed by random people on the other side of the globe, while GPG did nothing to accommodate that use That's actually a really common use-case for GPG. I've seen it used for this more than for email...
- dale_glass 3y agoI mean sure, there's a bunch of developers out there signing their code with GPG. But have you actually tried verifying it properly? To verify the tor browser correctly, you need a trust path. Option A: You've met at least one of them directly, and for some reason decided to sign a key with the label "Tor Browser Developers" on it. How did that person prove to you that they're a legitimate Tor developer? That's a pretty tricky thing to demonstrate. Option B: You've signed the key of somebody who did the above. Same problem, but even more dubious. Technically, GPG allows longer trust paths, you can do Alice -> Bob -> Carol -> Tor, or I think even Alice -> Bob -> Carol -> Dave -> Tor. But the software won't help you with this. To do the first, you download the Tor key, look at who signed it, download all those keys, and hope that one of those might have a signature by somebody you know on it. To do the second... you're on your own. You can do a brute force key download, where you download thousands of keys in the hopes of some connection being found, and blowing up the size of your keyring. This will add lots of random people into whatever UI you use and slow down every GPG invocation. And you'll need to write some sort of shell script for that, it's a pain.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI dont use FB much. I did not know I could send mail from Facebook.
- Anamon 3y agoThis isn't about sending e-mail through Facebook (although that may be possible, too, I don't know), it's about the e-mails Facebook sends to users, such as password recovery messages.
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoSeems like Facebook turned into Emacs between 2004 and now. I left after tagging people in photos became a thing but before "privacy" controls existed.
- computerfriend 3y agoI tried to add my key a while ago, but their version of PGP doesn't support Curve25519.
- twiss 3y agoIt's possible to solve both the friction to start and stop using PGP by looking up keys automatically on the target domain, for example using WKD [1]. We (Proton) host a key for every user, which can be used to automatically end-to-end encrypt emails to all Proton Mail users, without any setup needed, nor risk of DoS (since the user can always remove their key from WKD). Various other providers also offer this [2]. [1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-service https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-koch-openpgp-web... [2]: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD#Mail_Service_Providers_offering_WKD https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD#Mail_Service_Providers_offering_W...
- ploum 3y agoProton user here: I’ve an anecdote because it happened this week and support was unable to help me. I’ve received a PGP encrypted email by a non-proton user. It worked fine. But I was unable to encrypt my reply to him. Proton support told me that he needs to attach his public key to his message so I can use it. It seems that the Proton interface doesn’t offer any way to automatically try to find the public key of an user (from which you have an email address and probably a signature).
- twiss 3y agoWe do look up keys automatically using WKD. However, if the non-Proton user's provider doesn't support that, they'll indeed have to attach it or you'd have to import it manually. We have plans to also look up keys on keys.openpgp.org as well, to offer an automatic solution in case the provider doesn't support WKD.
- ploum 3y agoThanks for the clarification. I now understand better: I was confusing WKD and keys.openpgp.org as same thing. As I received the email without the key attached and his domain doesn’t support WKD, I was stuck to manually import from keys directory. It makes sense.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
- alance 3y agoWondering if this is FB's attempt at a toothy grimace towards the UK's Online Safety Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
- brabel 3y ago> Some Facebook users have also reported instances of hackers taking advantage of the PGP encryption feature to compromise accounts. Once a hacker gains access to a Facebook account, they can proceed to activate email encryption. It's quite disingenuous to make it sound like PGP was the problem here. Read that sentence again: "Once a hacker gains access to a Facebook account" regardless of PGP or not... then, of course, they own the account and can do what they want!! But that's the problem, not that they can enable PGP encryption. If you had PGP encryption to start with, ironically you wouldn't be "susceptible" at all as it's the hacker who wouldn't be able to read your emails even after compromising your account (though they may do worse thing at that point).
- Anamon 3y agoYou may have still been susceptible because it seems that you can just change the key to a new one in that settings screen. I just tried, and setting a new key only asked me to confirm the password. An encrypted confirmation mail is apparently only sent when you enable the feature itself. So an attacker could potentially just replace your key with their own. Of course they could've just fixed that instead of sunsetting encryption entirely, but note that Facebook didn't say this was the reason why they're killing the feature, that's just speculation from the news article. Facebook didn't give an official reason, so maybe it's really just because of low adoption.
- CommodoreCrunch 3y agoBut how are they getting into the account to begin with? Enabling PGP would prevent at least one method of password reset and they wouldn't get as far as the settings screen. You could make the same case against 2FA. Most sites don't require email verification when you enable it. Someone with your password could lock you out by adding a TOTP app. But I wouldn't consider that a vulnerability. It is, if anything, a consequence of not locking down the account in the first place.
- LinAGKar 3y agoProblem was, it didn't work properly. I tried to use it, but if you had it enabled they would send you HTML markup designated as plaintext, making it unreadable.