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Meanwhile in the real world, screenshots of emails without any cryptographic authentication at all are good enough to send people to prison.
by lupusreal 2y ago
Meanwhile in the real world, screenshots of emails without any cryptographic authentication at all are good enough to send people to prison.
- anonym29 2y agoI absolutely believe you - lawyers, judges, and juries alike tend to be technologically illiterate, but do you have any references/links to this happening?
- OJFord 2y agoIn particular where the defendant denies the veracity of the screenshot.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoIf you read the blog post, you'll see that newspapers frequently verify DKIM signatures on stolen email corpora before they publish about them. Eg: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/authenticating-email-using-dkim-and-arc-or-how-we-analyzed-the-kasowitz-emails https://www.propublica.org/nerds/authenticating-email-using-...
- tsimionescu 2y agoThey were asking for evidence that people have been convicted based on screenshots of emails, almost the opposite of using DKIM to authenticate emails.
- tptacek 2y agoThe issue here isn't rules of evidence, it's user privacy. In the real world, DKIM has repeatedly been used to violate privacy. More importantly: latent verifiable secure DKIM signatures on archived emails offer no value to users; they literally only have real-world value to attackers.
- tsimionescu 2y ago> More importantly: latent verifiable secure DKIM signatures on archived emails offer no value to users; they literally only have real-world value to attackers. I don't think this is quite true. First of all, this is not only valuable to attackers, it's also valuable in a court of law to establish the truth of what happened. Secondly, it can be valuable to me to be able to prove that you sent me an email, even if you wished to deny it, also mostly in legal contexts.
- tptacek 2y agoThose are cases where DKIM is working against the user! I get that we can come up with cases where we're glad some hapless user is undone by DKIM, but when we're discussing messaging security, we generally take the side of the hapless user, not the courts and tort lawyers!
- tsimionescu 2y agoAn email exchange has two users: one is the sender, the other the receiver. As the receiver, having proof that I received an email from you is potentially a feature, not a problem. More generally, authenticated communication has a long history of being considered a useful thing for society. Physical mail includes delivery confirmations where the receiver must sign for the receipt, proving to anyone that they did receive the letter. People would often add hard-to-forge personal seals to letters in even older days, that could prove to anyone that they were the ones who sent that document. And even common letters were usually signed rather, even when typewritten, again making it hard to later repudiate. While I absolutely see the value in making it possible to securely send repudiatable email in some specific circumstances, I think having non-repudiatable email as the default is a net benefit to society, and has been the de facto standard for at least a few hundred years before email ever came along.
- tptacek 2y agoThis is the classic argument in favor of verifiable DKIM signatures: because it benefits the consumers of hacked mail spools. Consider that as a security engineering decision, enabling that use case is a bad thing.
- reaperman 2y agoOnly if the defendant doesn't challenge the evidence. If I'm the defendant and I know I sent those emails, I'm not going to challenge the screenshot. If I know I did not send those emails, then I'll do my best to pay for forensic analysts to generate evidence to exonerate me.
- qingcharles 2y agoExperts are expensive. Most defendants never get them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]