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(disclaimer: I'm employed by Google, though not in anything related to Gmail) The article quotes Vint Cerf as saying that encryption isn't being used because i

(disclaimer: I'm employed by Google, though not in anything related to Gmail) The article quotes Vint Cerf as saying that encryption isn't being used because it would inhibit advertising, but I think that's incorrect. There is no obvious reason why ads couldn't be selected client-side, with the text of a message sent to Google over an encrypted connection and not stored. In my opinion, there are at least three much more significant reasons why Gmail won't support end-to-end encryption: 1) It puts a huge barrier in front of new users. Instead of picking a username and password, now they have to create an encryption key, have a (strong!) password for the key, install client-side software to manage it, keep a backup of the key, and keep backups of their email in an encrypted form (with yet another strong password). Can you imagine any ordinary person going through with all that just to read email? -- 2) User-managed encryption would be a support nightmare. Imagine: your grandmother buys a new laptop, and donates her old beige box to a local school. After getting home, she tries to check her email. Except she can't, because the encryption keys were on her old computer, and now they're just noise on some platters because the school's IT guy wiped the drive. Would you want to be the customer support agent who had to tell her that her email was gone forever, and that she would have to make a new account with a new address? This is why no major company encourages users to manage their own encryption keys, and why every company that does will never become a major company. -- 3) Google's primary value-add to anything is search. That's their brand, they are the company people go to for finding stuff. End-to-end encryption means that Gmail can't do search any more, and then what's the point of even having Gmail? Even if you could somehow convince users that it's worth putting up with all the extra hassle to protect their email, you'll never convince a company that it should scrap one of its most successful products just because a fraction of a percent of its userbase thinks its existing security features are insufficient. ------------------------ Here's another thought. The world the author describes, where people install special client software to manage their keys and read their email, ALREADY EXISTS. If people actually want to, they can download Thunderbird and GPG and set up their keys and treat Gmail as just another IMAP/SMTP service. It's an annoying process, but the only ways to make it simpler would also render it useless by reducing the security. So really the author isn't asking for Gmail to support encrypted email, he's asking Gmail to stop supporting un-encrypted email. Hands up if you think this will ever happen. The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client-side encryption support is strong evidence that most users consider the convenience of provider-readable mail to be more important than protection against police warrants.

napoleond 14y ago
You're right, there are very real barriers to this happening, and I agree that the author of the article may not have considered them all, but barriers aren't always insurmountable. (1) basically reduces to having the user install client software (which would handle key management, etc). Not easy (and complicated by the fact that existing software sucks) but not impossible. (2) is probably the biggest challenge. The solution requires a server which can manage keys without being able to read them. It does reduce the strength of the system to a strong passphrase or series of passphrases (and there are ways of making the UX for this less horrible than it currently is in most places) but that's still way better than anything we have right now--it essentially reduces the attack vectors available to someone with root access to the server to those available to everyone on the internet for any other service right now (ie. brute force). (3) I agree, no one will ever convince Google to encrypt Gmail. Search would still work for meta information though (to/from/subject lines) which is good enough for most situations. The client would be able to perform deeper searches within a particular date range by decrypting messages in that range should it be necessary. So yeah, the world of encrypted email already exists but it sucks. Yes, making it easier involves reducing security somewhat (not even close to "rendering it useless") but it also provides a level of privacy that should have been expected from the get-go. Nobody should be able to run a search on every word I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me. The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client-side encryption has more to do with the poor usability of existing solutions and general (changing) assumptions about the privacy of email than anything to do with police warrants.
- jmillikin 14y ago
  For (1), if the user has to install software on their client, then the entire point of webmail has been bypassed. I disagree that reducing the security wouldn't render end-to-end encryption useless. Remember that the purpose of end-to-end encryption is to protect the user against malicious service providers. If you want to store a user's data on a Google server, but ensure that Google is unable to read it for XX years, then you need to take a lot of security precautions. Forgetting any of them would allow the user's data to be compromised. > Nobody should be able to run a search on every word > I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me. If this is your goal, then your only realistic option is to install an open-source mail client on its own dedicated machine, set up GPG, generate your GPG keys on that machine, and don't let it do anything but talk SMTP+POP3 with your mail provider. Read all your email in plaintext. This sounds paranoid, but it's actually the absolute minimum required if you want to ensure that your emails are safe from a malicious entity with corporate- or government-sized budgets. Further precautions might include removing the HDD and keeping the machine airgapped with email transfer performed by CD-ROM. Then you get to go down the physical-security rabbit hole to prevent someone with a warrant from bugging your keyboard. The reason for all these precautions is that a malicious provider could save all of the encrypted emails you send/receive over the years. They only need to grab your keys once. Or you could, you know, relax a bit and figure that storing personal email on Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple servers is probably OK.

napoleond 14y ago

You're right, there are very real barriers to this happening, and I agree that the author of the article may not have considered them all, but barriers aren't always insurmountable. (1) basically reduces to having the user install client software (which would handle key management, etc). Not easy (and complicated by the fact that existing software sucks) but not impossible. (2) is probably the biggest challenge. The solution requires a server which can manage keys without being able to read them. It does reduce the strength of the system to a strong passphrase or series of passphrases (and there are ways of making the UX for this less horrible than it currently is in most places) but that's still way better than anything we have right now--it essentially reduces the attack vectors available to someone with root access to the server to those available to everyone on the internet for any other service right now (ie. brute force). (3) I agree, no one will ever convince Google to encrypt Gmail. Search would still work for meta information though (to/from/subject lines) which is good enough for most situations. The client would be able to perform deeper searches within a particular date range by decrypting messages in that range should it be necessary. So yeah, the world of encrypted email already exists but it sucks. Yes, making it easier involves reducing security somewhat (not even close to "rendering it useless") but it also provides a level of privacy that should have been expected from the get-go. Nobody should be able to run a search on every word I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me. The fact that nobody outside the crypto-nerd community uses existing client-side encryption has more to do with the poor usability of existing solutions and general (changing) assumptions about the privacy of email than anything to do with police warrants.

jmillikin 14y ago
For (1), if the user has to install software on their client, then the entire point of webmail has been bypassed. I disagree that reducing the security wouldn't render end-to-end encryption useless. Remember that the purpose of end-to-end encryption is to protect the user against malicious service providers. If you want to store a user's data on a Google server, but ensure that Google is unable to read it for XX years, then you need to take a lot of security precautions. Forgetting any of them would allow the user's data to be compromised. > Nobody should be able to run a search on every word > I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me. If this is your goal, then your only realistic option is to install an open-source mail client on its own dedicated machine, set up GPG, generate your GPG keys on that machine, and don't let it do anything but talk SMTP+POP3 with your mail provider. Read all your email in plaintext. This sounds paranoid, but it's actually the absolute minimum required if you want to ensure that your emails are safe from a malicious entity with corporate- or government-sized budgets. Further precautions might include removing the HDD and keeping the machine airgapped with email transfer performed by CD-ROM. Then you get to go down the physical-security rabbit hole to prevent someone with a warrant from bugging your keyboard. The reason for all these precautions is that a malicious provider could save all of the encrypted emails you send/receive over the years. They only need to grab your keys once. Or you could, you know, relax a bit and figure that storing personal email on Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple servers is probably OK.