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Google Workspace Updates: Send Gmail end-to-end encrypted emails to anyone
- pluc 1y agoAn ad company that has been creating ads for years based on what is in your email, is telling us emails will now be encrypted eh? Why do I have my doubts
- crazygringo 1y ago> that has been creating ads for years based on what is in your email They stopped that a long time ago. Close to a decade ago IIRC.
- pluc 1y agoIt's still free, therefore they didn't.
- OptionOfT 1y agoLooking at the screenshot, this is another recipe for disaster. A pop-up where you need to authenticate with credentials... I'm sure no-one will abuse this.
- rickette 1y agoOnly available for Google Workspace: Enterprise Plus with the Assured Controls add-on.
- dgoldstein0 1y agoAny idea what those are exactly? Does it only work for recipients on teams with SSO? Or is this just gating who can start these supposedly e2e encrypted email threads?
- dgoldstein0 1y agoLooks like recipients can be anyone but would be forced to create a guest account if they don't have one. Which sounds like Google meditating key exchange? Which isn't really e2e encryption at least for the initial message.
- rickette 1y agoOnly the higher/highest tier Google Workspace users can send these kind of emails. Anyone can read them.
- j16sdiz 1y agoThose option allows storing private key on smart card.
- beckler 1y agoI think this is just to compete with stuff like Mimecast. Pretty sure admins can still audit emails even if they're E2EE.
- progval 1y ago"send end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) emails to anyone, even if the recipient uses a different email provider" but the video shows Gmail asking the recipient to authenticate. How does that work? If a Gmail user sends an email to my self-hosted server, there is nowhere to authenticate me to. And it means either Gmail or the actual email stores decryption keys, so what is the threat model in which E2EE is useful here? The only "advantage" I see is that now recipients must manually archive these "encrypted" emails if they want to keep access to them in the future (so most of them won't). That would be consistent with Google's strategy with AMP's editable emails.
- gardnr 1y agoIn other words? > The only way that would work if Google could decrypt the message!
- arlcode 1y agoThe threat model seems to be "there are other email providers beside Google. How can we change that?" Not necessarily a threat model that benefits you
- Terr_ 1y ago> If a Gmail user sends an email to my self-hosted server, there is nowhere to authenticate me to. They'll probably just force external recipients to create a Google account and verify control over the independent email address...
- crazygringo 1y agoExactly this. No different from if someone shares a Google Doc with your email address. And it makes sense. It's the logical way to prove you have access to the email account.
- progval 1y agoBut that's not end-to-end encryption, that's a pastebin with a login
- Hnrobert42 1y ago
- darkwater 1y agoI don't like cynical takes, even on BigCo like Google, but this totally feels like a "someone wants to get a promotion" type of project.
- pferde 1y agoThing is, with big corporations, cynical takes are usually the correct ones.
- crazygringo 1y agoNo, there is a real enterprise need for this, for compliance in certain sectors. This is about the last kind of thing a company or engineer or PM would build just for fun. This is a feature that will be genuinely used a bunch. Its use gets mandated, in fact.
- darkwater 1y agoHow so? You get an email with a link from a GSuite user, you need to put your, I guess, own mail provider user and password and get redirected to a mini-gmail website where you can see the email sent, that can be blocked for copying or removed by the sender as admins can already do in GSuite?
- crazygringo 1y agoWhat do you mean, how so? This is a feature for the sending org, not the receiving org. It's not something that could be done previously.
- darkwater 1y agoHow can this be critical for compliance. It's not real E2EE because there are no keys exchanged, and when the other party downloads the attachment, it can be stolen almost the same way an email attachment could. It also open the doors to yet another phishing attack
- teiferer 1y agoIt is not end-to-end if Google has your key.
- petepete 1y agoWell they did go to the trouble of using the date April 1st in the gif!
- globular-toast 1y agoI never liked the term "end-to-end encryption". I guess we can now say it's fully meaningless. The one thing I've learnt in security after many years is there are no shortcuts. If you don't understand the basics, you can't have security. Things like "end-to-end encryption" are just trying to avoid teaching people the basics by using nice words. People understand if someone has a copy of their front door key then it's no longer secure and they need to change the locks. So it should be simple to understand encryption too. But most interfaces try to hide away the existence of keys, which is the most basic principle of all. If you don't know where your key is, how can you be secure?
- j16sdiz 1y agoIt don't. The "Assured Controls" add on put keys on smartcard / hsm not owned by google.
- teiferer 1y agoHeaders incl. subject are still not encrypted. We've already had that tech 30 years ago.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago> We've already had that tech 30 years ago. S/MIME? Yeah; the tragedy is no-one could figure out a user-friendly UI/UX for the whole thing.
- blibble 1y agothe ms implementation of smime was pretty good and just worked (quite something for microsoft)
- e12e 1y agoThe tragedy is that they seem to have wrapped s/mime in some property nonsense to get this to work (see bottom of): https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879497655583224-EU https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879...
- kingstnap 1y agoThe demo gif looks so weird. So you send someone an email, and (if it's not a gmail) it asks them the log into some mini gmail looking thing to view the actual message? > preserving enhanced data sovereignty As in you need google in order to view any of your data? > end-to-end encrypted Ah yes end (googles server) to end (also googles server) encryption. Very useful. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this genuinely seems completely pointless at best. It's middleman to that same middleman encryption solving the last mile delivery problem by not sending the actual message.
- jon-wood 1y agoI assume the point here is to check a box in some big corporate's matrix of required features before they'll move to Google Workspace. Nobody really cares whether its really end to end, they just need some to say the magic letters E2E and they can tick it.
- jwr 1y ago"Embrace, extend, extinguish" all over again. I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy, control over E-mail, and leading to an overly centralized system where our mail is controlled by 2-3 companies at most (about 30% of my spam comes from Google servers, they pretty much ignore abuse reports, and I have no way to block it, because they are "too big to fail"). Now we will get a slowly introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open", but will be carefully controlled so that it is slightly broken for everyone except Google. Several years down the road we'll wake up in a world where people will be annoyed that you can't receive their E-mail and will tell you to "just use gmail". Replace "Google" with "Microsoft" and "Gmail" with "Outlook" and it's the 1990s all over again.
- aptwebapps 1y agoWhat's the best Gmail alternative wrt UI features?
- ssivark 1y agoWhat UI features do you consider important? I feel that email UI is largely standardized, and the main differentiating factor is speed (and Gmail is definitely not fast). OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.
- aptwebapps 1y agoGood conversation threading first. For the rest it may just be that I'm used to it but I find it generally much easier to read than, say, Outlook.
- Hnrobert42 1y agoI use the Spark Mail client for that reason.
- l72 1y ago
- Anon4Now 1y agoAll I want from Google Workspace is a single-user email account tied to my domain name. Instead, I have an overly complex system where I need to grant my own phone permission to watch YouTube videos. It would be nice if they had a more basic version.
- tomaszsobota 1y ago> end-to-end encrypted emails > without the hassle of exchanging keys > access the encrypted message via a guest account Feels like shifting the goalposts and trying to brand a new working definition of E2EE
- j16sdiz 1y agoCan't you read the faq before comment? The "guest account" is hosted on IdP, not necessary google. https://support.google.com/a/answer/14757842 https://support.google.com/a/answer/14757842
- e12e 1y agoTo me this looks strictly worse than if they just used s/mime with some magic to integrate in the Gmail client for ux. As I read it[1] - Gmail users are given a hidden s/mime key pair, possibly with secret key stored in a hw token/on device. I can only assume that when mailing an external user without guest/Gmail account, Gmail will generate a (temporary?) key pair for the recipient, encrypt the message under temporary public key of the recipient - then when recipient creates the guest account - either generate a new key pair and re-encrypt or assign the key pair held for the user? To allow Gmail to decrypt the mail in the browser? As well as implicitly trust the sender key for verification? I struggle to see how this is e2e in any meaningful sense? When I log into a public terminal at my library - how will the browser access my keys? [1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879497655583224-EU https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879...
- nunobrito 1y agoThey are saying the truth: those emails are "technically" encrypted. Just nowhere private on the sender side since they won't even keep the keys private. Now much less private on the receiver side since they have for "reasons" to login into a gmail hosted server and give them data like their IP address and permit other things like browser fingerprinting. Fantastic, from the title I almost believed they'd be adding private messaging as done by other email providers almost 30 years ago. But not yet.
- Shank 1y agoThis is just Google going after those proprietary “end to end encrypted” email services healthcare and other places use. Technically speaking they don’t accomplish anything but from a compliance perspective they seem to satisfy regulators.
- theshrike79 1y agoOver here "encrypted email" is actually them just sending you a link and a password to a web form in separate mails. There you enter the password and unlock the content. "secure mail" my ass.
- newscracker 1y agoAuthenticate where? How does the authentication prove that the intended recipient is the one who has clicked on the link and should be able to view? What happens if the email is forwarded with the link? What should one do to forward the email to someone without this encryption? Organizations may need ways to store, archive and manage received email content from others. I don’t understand what problem this solves for organizations and how. Microsoft Outlook 365 has a somewhat similar feature where the email is just a link to hosted content on its servers (this kind of functionality isn’t new or recent on other platforms). It doesn’t require any authentication by the recipient. IIRC, the sender can also decide on the expiry of the content.
- Hnrobert42 1y agoI have used a similar service. Anytime you want to access the link, you must enter a code sent to your email. So if you forward the link, and the person to whom you forward it click the link, they need you to also forward the code to them.
- crazygringo 1y ago> How does the authentication prove that the intended recipient is the one who has clicked on the link and should be able to view? You log in with a Google account associated with the recipient address. You prove you control the email by putting in a code Google sends you. > What happens if the email is forwarded with the link? They can't open it because they don't have access to the Google account associated with your email address. > What should one do to forward the email to someone without this encryption? Obviously, encrypted emails are not meant to be forwarded. Nothing prevents you from taking a photo though. Maybe copy and paste will work. > Organizations may need ways to store, archive and manage received email content from others. Organizations can't control how they receive information. It doesn't matter what they want in this regard. If a judge orders them to do something about it, that's for the judge to figure out. > I don’t understand what problem this solves for organizations and how. It keeps messages private. You don't see why organizations in e.g. health care, law, or the military want increased privacy of messages in a way that is super easy to use? And where recipients can't accidentally forward sensitive messages? A lot of this is determined by compliance requirements too.