15 ms·

Lavabit's founder: 'If You Knew What I Know About Email, You Might Not Use It'

386 points by DanielRibeiro 13y ago

mvkel 13y ago
So why doesn't he share with everyone? If he's willing to shut down his service in the spirit of security, why not expose details in the spirit of transparency? I can't imagine all of it would be subject to a lawsuit.
- ukandy 13y ago
  I guessing he doesn't really want the hassle that would involve. Fair play to the guy.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  I'd imagine that it's because under the current law he's gagged. Disclosing an NSL to the public (i.e. anyone that's not his lawyer or a judge) is something that will send him to jail. Rather than go to jail (where less useful and free), he's using his standing to try to have a legal precedent set that being gagged by an NSL is unconstitutional. Hence him asking for help with legal costs.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Well, presumably because he doesn't want to end up in jail or Russia. I very appreciate his actions, what he has felt able to say publicly and his dilemma in general. Part of me wants to call him a coward, but I can not say I would do better. I can't criticize. What this does show is how brave and "heroic" people like Snowden, Bradley, and the like really are. What would be interesting is to see if he tries to get his story heard via routes acceptable to government, and if so, what happens.
  - icambron 13y ago
    Right. Snowden's path was a brave one, but that kind of martyrdom can't reasonably be expected of anyone.
- jafaku 13y ago
  > I can't imagine all of it would be subject to a lawsuit. Where have you been all this time? Have you not read the news recently? Basically every US IT company is being NDA'd and backdoored/taped. Lavabit is the first one in choosing a different option: closing the business.
beedogs 13y ago
My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks and ship unencrypted communications directly to the NSA. The conversation probably went something like this: USG: Install this machine in your datacenter. Route all traffic through it. Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to configure this new router. You do not need to know where this traffic is going. If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. If you tell anyone about this, we will slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. LL: Get fucked. I'll shut everything down instead. The truly terrifying thing about this scenario is that they're likely already doing this elsewhere on a huge scale.
- sneak 13y ago
  It's called PRISM.
  - uxp 13y ago
    For the umpteenth time, PRISM is just a database, it's not the program that siphons data from all the telcos. PRISM only contains data that is retrieved via NSLs, Subpoenas, warrants, cooperating parties and possibly data siphoning if it's found useful and has been tagged/organized. If we want to fight the government on this, we'd better know what we're fighting against.
    - nilved 13y ago
      No, PRISM is the facility that allows them to take data directly from backdoors in Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's complemented by upstream, which allows them to collect disorganized data on a much larger scale. PRISM and upstream are the two data siphoning programs that have names.
      - dobbsbob 13y ago
        XKeyscore is the PRISM db search plugin/front end. There's a giant vacuum of everybody's personal data and XKeyscore allows you to see it in real time while it's archived into PRISM or look it up afterwards. http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/security-experts-on-the-nsas-real-problems/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/security-experts-on-the-nsas-... Bruce Schneier: First, be careful with names. PRISM is a specific NSA database, just a part of the overall NSA surveillance effort. The agency has been playing all sorts of games with names, dividing their efforts up and using many different code names in an attempt to disguise what they’re doing. It allows them to deny that a specific program is doing something, while conveniently omitting the fact that another program is doing the thing and the two programs are talking to each other. So I am less interested in what is in the specific PRISM database, and more what the NSA is doing overall with domestic surveillance.
chmike 13y ago
What is problematic with mail ? It's because it's in clear text most of the time and easy to tap with MITM attack? What about an alternate messaging system addressIng these issues ?
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  Email is more or less sent in clear text for a significant portion of its journey in most cases. Sender ----> SMTP ---*unencrypted*---> SMTP ----> Recipient I'm leaving out a lot of transport detail for brevity, but that's the essence. Also, email is generally stored unencrypted at rest. Even if you take precautions to secure your own mailbox, the recipient might just have it floating around in plain text in their Gmail account, just waiting for it to be nabbed by whoever can get a court order, or whatever. Also, even if your email is encrypted, the metadata isn't. So you can figure out who is talking to whom, when, and usually from where (by the IP address). Also, there are a lot of headers indicating details about your computer (if you used a fat client rather than webmail), such as the user-agent header which indicates what software you're running (e.g. Thunderbird, version x, on Linux/Windows/OS X for x architecture, etc) which can give clues about how to attack that client with some 0day exploit.
  - welterde 13y ago
    Actually the MTA can use opportunistic TLS to transfer the mail. And in a lot of cases my mail server actually does. So it's only not encrypted in 20% of the time (depending on who you communicate with).
- spyder 13y ago
  As you can see from the news the safer alternatives are getting shut down.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Well, shutting themselves down since they can't deliver perfectly safe and secure email because the problem is technically impossible. SilentCircle's other services are still up and running, for example, because they can be made secure. Ironic in SilentCircle's case (if you're an HNer) is that PZ noted to the BBC how important his service was because it protects Navy SEALs deployed to areas fighting terrorism where they might otherwise be detected.
digipaper 13y ago
One the companies closed and deleted all their paying customers emails? That's bad imo.
- phpnode 13y ago
  better to delete it than hand it over if privacy was your selling point in the first place. if i were a customer, i'd be ok with this.
  - iaskwhy 13y ago
    Also, if I understand this correctly, his customers most probably had a copy of the emails on their computers so their loss was only the email address (and emails eventually received after the closedown).
    - digipaper 13y ago
      If that's the case it would be fine with me too.
    - orblivion 13y ago
      They might have lost roughly a day's worth, depends how often they connect via IMAP.
      - pdonis 13y ago
        What if they're not using IMAP?
    - pdonis 13y ago
      his customers most probably had a copy of the emails on their computers Based on the fact that a number of them are talking about having lost data, I suspect that at least a significant number of customers only used webmail to access their accounts, so they never had a local copy of their data.
      - 13y ago
kintamanimatt 13y ago
For those without showdead on, there's an insightful comment from beedogs: My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks. The conversation probably went something like this: USG: Install this machine in your datacenter. Route all traffic through it. Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to configure this new router. You do not need to know where this traffic is going. If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. If you tell anyone about this, we will slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. LL: Get fucked. I'll shut everything down instead. ----- Why beedogs is shadowbanned is beyond me. A quick glance through his comment history doesn't indicate he's done anything to deserve it. ---- Hey beedogs: I can't reply to you directly because you're hellbanned. Send an email to PG. I'm not usually a fan of posting people's contact information, but in this case it's everywhere anyway - pg [at] ycombinator.com
- beedogs 13y ago
  Yeah, I'd like to know why I'm shadowbanned, too. This is the first I'd heard of it. Can someone at least let me know what the hell I did?
  - kintamanimatt 13y ago
    Welcome back!
    - beedogs 13y ago
      thanks -- and to whoever sorted this out: thank you as well.
- phpnode 13y ago
  replying to beedogs because I can't directly: You made this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 and one of the admins arbitrarily decided that you needed silent punishment. nice eh?
gst 13y ago
There are already some existing Bitmessage gateways such as http://bitmsg.cc/ http://bitmsg.cc/. Looks like using something like this would be a better solution for a Lavabit-successor: Use a secure messaging protocol and then only use gateways to send messages between the traditional email world and your own secure protocol. Of course, the gateway could still log your messages, but the same security issue applied to Lavabit. The main advantage is that once the gateway has forwarded your message, no one can force the operator to retroactively decrypt the message. Bitmessage sounds like one potential solution for this, but it has some scalability issues. Using RetroShare would be another approach.
vishal0123 13y ago
> He doesn’t have the technological capability to decrypt his customer’s data but if someone could intercept the communication between the Lavabit’s Dallas-based servers and a user, they could get the user’s password and then use that to decrypt their data. Is it really what I understand from this or LL is trying to say something else.
- marcioaguiar 13y ago
  Does not make sense to me. Lavabit claims that it cannot decrypt customer's data, but if someone else could read what goes through Lavabit server and a client it could decrypt the data?? So, how come Lavabit can't do tha same thing?
  - seszett 13y ago
    Because Lavabit doesn't keep passwords in the clear, presumably.
  - taway2012 13y ago
    I don't know a lot about Lavabit's arch. But my guess is he's referring to replacing the login page's Javascript code with a malicious one that phones back the plaintext password. Kinda like a keylogger.
  - e12e 13y ago
    Lavabit's original architecture only store's an encrypted version of the private key needed to decrypt the messages. The private key is encrypted with the users password, and they don't store this password in plain text. However; if you could intercept this password, and already got a copy of the encrypted private key as well as the encrypted data from lavabit, you could then decrypt the data. Presumably lavabit didn't want to back door their services, by either storing a copy of the session keys, the password, or the plain text -- and chose to shut down instead.
- gonzo 13y ago
  ""The way we encrypt messages before storing them is relatively unique. We only know of one commercial service, and one commercial product that will secure user data using asymmetric encryption before writing it to disk. Basically we generate public and private keys for the user and then encrypt the private key using a derivative of the plain text password. We then encrypt user messages using their public key before writing them to disk. (Alas, right now this is only available to paid users.)" http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html
mtgx 13y ago
He should contest the NSL gag orders. They've already been declared unconstitutional at least 3 times, but they managed to trick the justice system by changing a few random words in the law (with the help of Congress), in effect creating a "new" law that was wiped clean of any "unconstitutionality" ruling. The NSL is still unconstitutional in principle, it's just that it needs to be contested every time they change the law to escape the ruling. Hopefully this time Congress will stop playing along and creating new laws for them. Watch this and you'll get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT2fQu50sMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT2fQu50sMs
- a3n 13y ago
  Kind of like how pharma companies change a tiny little thing about a drug at the end of its patent term, and then have an entirely "new" patented drug to sell.
bengrunfeld 13y ago
“In America, we’re not supposed to have to worry about watching our words like this when we’re talking to the press,” Binnall said. (from article) I am a new immigrant to America. I came with my wife from Australia 8 months ago. All my life I heard about how the US supported the freedom and rights of its people, and now that I'm here, I find that that was a sick joke. This place is a KGB state on the brink of happening.
- chasing 13y ago
  Many Americans (and recent immigrants) are so spoiled, they don't even know what a lack of freedom looks like.
  - bengrunfeld 13y ago
    chasing, when I was living abroad, I had a Palestinian friend who worked with me. One day he told me his neighbors had disappeared in Gaza because they were vocal against Arafat. I might be spoiled, but I've seen where a lack of freedom leads. I just thought America was a place where this stuff wouldn't happen, and where the people were protected by the Constitution. Guess I was being naive and idealistic.
    - chasing 13y ago
      Assuming everything is great and assuming everything is horrible are two sides of the same naive coin.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    Yes, but we're pretty sure we don't want to find out, so we'd rather start worrying while we're on the brink rather than over the edge.
    - chasing 13y ago
      Oh, I agree that we need to push back against this crap. But let's keep some perspective.
dombili 13y ago
I'm not a programmer so this might be a stupid question and I apologize in advance but, why not open source the service?
- ssimpson 13y ago
  He probably wants to see how the case works out in court first. if all else fails, and he cannot reopen his business, he could do that as a big FU.
- noahc 13y ago
  It's not a stupid question, but often times open sourcing something involves one or more of the following: 1. Documenting everything so it's actually usable. At a minimum, "here is how to install the dumb thing" should probably be documented. 2. Often times there are hard-coded values that would need to be extracted out for security reasons or to simply allow someone to install it on a system not quite like yours. 3. Often times there are other dependences that would also have to be open sources such as modifications to libraries, internal libraries released, shell scrips, cron jobs, messaging queues, delayed job worker tasks, etc that the system may rely on. These all need to be packaged up, documented and/or released. In short it is a ton of work to take something that is running in our way on our hardware and generalize it enough that anyone else can run it. On the other hand, you wouldn't need their service to give you the protections they offered. Essentially, encrypted email storage. You can get that mostly off the shelf using any linux distro if you run your own mail service.
  - dombili 13y ago
    I see. Obviously it's easier said than done. I didn't use Lavabit because I mostly don't use email, but I'm guessing Lavabit was an easier service to use rather than setting up your own email service. I think @ssimpson has a point though. I don't think he [Ladar Levison] would be turned off by the difficulty of the task of open sourcing his project, but he may be waiting to see how the case works out first. Thanks for your explanation.
- e12e 13y ago
  They have already described the significant part: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit... As far as I can tell it is a service that suffers from many of the same things as other services, especially concerning email that is sent to a recipient in clear text: 1) The email can be intercepted in clear text 2) If the service is compromised; a plain text copy can be made 3) If the service is compromised; a copy of the session key can be stored 4) If the service is compromised; a predictable/insecure session key can be used 5) They store a copy of the secret key; if the service is compromised - all session keys can be recovered when the user logs in (provides the password). I've thought about engineering a similar system; but one based around GPG -- have users upload/associate a public key with their account, and if they receive unencrypted email encrypt it to them using their public key. 1,2,3 and 4) remain though -- and 4) may be the worst as it is almost impossible to detect/defend against AFAIK. An alternative would be to set up a service that detects whether or not incoming mail is encrypted, and rejects it if it is not (along with information of where/how to install and set up GPG). As others have mentioned this would not help with the who talks to who meta-data problem.
Keyframe 13y ago
Maybe it's time for a new type of email service. Something along the lines of two way auth, private key on cell phone, public on server. Cell phones have cameras now, so you could generate a QR code or something which your auth app could look at and generate a response in order to generate a unique token to gain access to your message(s). On the server side guys could have a deadman switch which would purge all data if not heard from administrators for 12 hours. That way they could delete data and not be in jeopardy of obstructing any government or whomever is seeking to gain access. Bonus points could be had for not hosting in US too.
- tootie 13y ago
  I don't think the encryption thing is the problem. I honestly have a hard time accepting that he was unable to provide decrypted content even with a warrant. That pretty much makes this a Swiss bank account for data and you better believe criminals would be all over it. I'd rather go through legal channels to end violations of due process.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I've tried reading: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html But I'm still not entirely clear on what lavabit used to do to encrypt email once it arrived on its servers. As far as I can tell, they still store an encrypted version of the private key, that they can't decrypt with the other data they store: but would be able to decrypt as soon as a user logs in, and supplies them with the password (again). So while they don't store enough information to decrypt information, at any point when you log in; you provide enough information for them to decrypt all the stored emails. Additionally, they could store a plaintext copy of all new email. If the mail you receive is already encrypted with something like GPG, the cannot read it, of course.
- sigkill 13y ago
  The whole problem with email is the asynchronous thing. You want to be secure, then it needs to be in such a way that there's minimum reliance on a central server. But in that case, what happens if your local machine (which is both your mailserver and an end client) is offline? Should the email bounce around in the network (like bitmessage does)? Or should you notify the sender with the standard "Mail Subsystem Delivery failure" that we all know and love. Actually after reading this, I want to seriously sit down and write a spec but if I include the assumption that there is a chance for the end-server/recipient to be offline, it throws everything into chaos.
malandrew 13y ago
Once you've been contacted the first time under an NSL letter, what stops you from choosing to broadcast the entire duration of the ordeal. government: "Here's an NSL." recipient: "Cool deal. I will respect it and not mention it to anyone, but be aware that from this point forward I will always have a device that will broadcast every interaction verbal or electronic that anyone has to me publicly live in real-time to the Internet. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand? Anything you say may be used against you in the court of public opinion. Do you understand? If you wish to continue to communicate with me, be aware that any statement that you or anyone from your office makes to me will instantly and irreversibly become part of the public record." On top of that you can hand them a special email address for their use only and you can delete your own personal email. You can also wear a shirt with friends and family that informs them in big bold letters that everything is a matter of the public record. This would essentially serve to shield you entirely from secret communication by placing a "force field" of publicity around you. There might be some law somewhere that prohibits this tactic, I cannot imagine how they would counteract this tactic legally so long as you always greet them with disclosure that your are recording everything. I imagine that they could try to force you somehow to interact with them in a location that prohibits recording devices.
- nilved 13y ago
  Courts are made of people, not computers; and they care about the bottom line, not the reasoning behind the loophole. What you describe -- and every other thought experiment, like warrant canaries -- is a good way to spend the rest of your life in jail for contempt of court. If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country.
  - hluska 13y ago
    > If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country. This sentence (and the fact it is so hard to argue with) is one of the most chilling things I've read this year. Great work! (I guess?)
  - ansgri 13y ago
    Are you sure they'll allow you to leave the country in this case? They have no-fly list and border control after all.
ezl 13y ago
email is a tool. you can use it for what it works for. it doesn't have to be used for all communication. assume a world where all your emails are archived in publicly accessible databases. you've lost privacy, but could it still be a useful tool? send birthday emails. send your friends funny cat videos. you don't have to use email for everything you used it for before -- you can just use it in different ways. i would still like to be able to near-instantly communicate with relatives across the world. i know bacon clogs my arteries and making bacon has a terrible environmental footprint relative to eating only grains, but i love it.
- samstave 13y ago
  OK cool - bdays and cats.... now where do I do anything serious where I need/desire privacy?
  - pearjuice 13y ago
    You speak to people in real life.
  - tomrod 13y ago
    Sneakernet.
  - ezl 13y ago
    you're missing the point: maybe email is not good for privacy. the article is about not using email. no tool is perfect. you know what would be great? if hammers cured cancer. they don't though, so we just use them to hammer nails into wood. speaking to people in public places is also a way to communicate, though equally bad for privacy. if there's nothing you can do to change the privacy attribute of "speaking to people in public places", does that mean you should never do it again? or: use codes that only you and the other person know, hold hands and tap morse code into each others palms, find secure rooms. people get upset when one tool doesn't do all the things they want, but its a weirdly tech centric thing. "your startup doesn't do X so i'll criticize it". you can play the "need more features" game ad infinitum -- but nobody criticizes cast cups for their failure to keep drinks cold indefinitely or couches for failing to give them back massages. Because a feature makes a tool better doesn't make it a requirement for its usage.
ibejoeb 13y ago
Zimmermann on the shut-down and elimination of Silent Circle email: "It’s not obstruction of justice if you do it before justice comes calling." I'm sure he and his lawyers aware, but we've got this cool new thing called Anticipatory Obstruction. It'd probably be a pretty far reach, but stranger things have happened. See http://www.perkinscoie.com/files/upload/LIT_11_06FunkFeatureMay.pdf http://www.perkinscoie.com/files/upload/LIT_11_06FunkFeature....
- lisper 13y ago
  > It'd probably be a pretty far reach That doesn't make much of a difference. The prosecutor only has to make the charge remotely plausible in order to coerce a guilty plea to a lesser charge. (This is what they did to Aaron Swartz.) With a 20-year maximum sentence, anticipatory obstruction is a mighty powerful lever.
- j_baker 13y ago
  Far reaches are what the White House and DOJ lawyers excel at. Particularly during the Bush era.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  From the URL that ibejoeb posted above (italics are mine): Unceremoniously titled “Destruction, Alteration, or Falsification of Records in Federal Investigations and Bankruptcy,” and part of § 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, § 1519 provides: Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
  - ibejoeb 13y ago
    That's absolutely the best part, and that's why Zimmermann's comment almost seems naive. "...before justice comes calling" is exactly what they're talking about here. What is contemplation, and when does it begin? I learned from Hanni Fakhoury of EFF that a proposed defense in this kind of action is to have had in place a strict data retention policy. For example, prior to beginning operations, the policy would state something like "we will retain all data aged 6 weeks or less; older data will be destroyed." Now, you adhere to that policy, perhaps with some activity record around the procedure itself, and your argument is something like, "it is not obstruction and not anticipatory obstruction because we defined and abided by the policy before anything happened, before any event warranting an investigation could occur, and, therefor, before contemplation of an investigation could occur."
enupten 13y ago
Why don't all these tech companies form a coalition and release the details together ? The government would never dare going after a dozen companies at once, that would in essence spell doom for Silicon valley (and Obama's liberal rhetoric, such as it is). Surely there are times when breaking the law is the right thing ?

386 points by DanielRibeiro 13y ago

mvkel 13y ago

So why doesn't he share with everyone? If he's willing to shut down his service in the spirit of security, why not expose details in the spirit of transparency? I can't imagine all of it would be subject to a lawsuit.

ukandy 13y ago
I guessing he doesn't really want the hassle that would involve. Fair play to the guy.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
I'd imagine that it's because under the current law he's gagged. Disclosing an NSL to the public (i.e. anyone that's not his lawyer or a judge) is something that will send him to jail. Rather than go to jail (where less useful and free), he's using his standing to try to have a legal precedent set that being gagged by an NSL is unconstitutional. Hence him asking for help with legal costs.
alan_cx 13y ago
Well, presumably because he doesn't want to end up in jail or Russia. I very appreciate his actions, what he has felt able to say publicly and his dilemma in general. Part of me wants to call him a coward, but I can not say I would do better. I can't criticize. What this does show is how brave and "heroic" people like Snowden, Bradley, and the like really are. What would be interesting is to see if he tries to get his story heard via routes acceptable to government, and if so, what happens.
- icambron 13y ago
  Right. Snowden's path was a brave one, but that kind of martyrdom can't reasonably be expected of anyone.
jafaku 13y ago
> I can't imagine all of it would be subject to a lawsuit. Where have you been all this time? Have you not read the news recently? Basically every US IT company is being NDA'd and backdoored/taped. Lavabit is the first one in choosing a different option: closing the business.

beedogs 13y ago

My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks and ship unencrypted communications directly to the NSA. The conversation probably went something like this: USG: Install this machine in your datacenter. Route all traffic through it. Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to configure this new router. You do not need to know where this traffic is going. If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. If you tell anyone about this, we will slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. LL: Get fucked. I'll shut everything down instead. The truly terrifying thing about this scenario is that they're likely already doing this elsewhere on a huge scale.

sneak 13y ago
It's called PRISM.
- uxp 13y ago
  For the umpteenth time, PRISM is just a database, it's not the program that siphons data from all the telcos. PRISM only contains data that is retrieved via NSLs, Subpoenas, warrants, cooperating parties and possibly data siphoning if it's found useful and has been tagged/organized. If we want to fight the government on this, we'd better know what we're fighting against.
  - nilved 13y ago
    No, PRISM is the facility that allows them to take data directly from backdoors in Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's complemented by upstream, which allows them to collect disorganized data on a much larger scale. PRISM and upstream are the two data siphoning programs that have names.
    - dobbsbob 13y ago
      XKeyscore is the PRISM db search plugin/front end. There's a giant vacuum of everybody's personal data and XKeyscore allows you to see it in real time while it's archived into PRISM or look it up afterwards. http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/security-experts-on-the-nsas-real-problems/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/security-experts-on-the-nsas-... Bruce Schneier: First, be careful with names. PRISM is a specific NSA database, just a part of the overall NSA surveillance effort. The agency has been playing all sorts of games with names, dividing their efforts up and using many different code names in an attempt to disguise what they’re doing. It allows them to deny that a specific program is doing something, while conveniently omitting the fact that another program is doing the thing and the two programs are talking to each other. So I am less interested in what is in the specific PRISM database, and more what the NSA is doing overall with domestic surveillance.

chmike 13y ago

What is problematic with mail ? It's because it's in clear text most of the time and easy to tap with MITM attack? What about an alternate messaging system addressIng these issues ?

kintamanimatt 13y ago
Email is more or less sent in clear text for a significant portion of its journey in most cases. Sender ----> SMTP ---*unencrypted*---> SMTP ----> Recipient I'm leaving out a lot of transport detail for brevity, but that's the essence. Also, email is generally stored unencrypted at rest. Even if you take precautions to secure your own mailbox, the recipient might just have it floating around in plain text in their Gmail account, just waiting for it to be nabbed by whoever can get a court order, or whatever. Also, even if your email is encrypted, the metadata isn't. So you can figure out who is talking to whom, when, and usually from where (by the IP address). Also, there are a lot of headers indicating details about your computer (if you used a fat client rather than webmail), such as the user-agent header which indicates what software you're running (e.g. Thunderbird, version x, on Linux/Windows/OS X for x architecture, etc) which can give clues about how to attack that client with some 0day exploit.
- welterde 13y ago
  Actually the MTA can use opportunistic TLS to transfer the mail. And in a lot of cases my mail server actually does. So it's only not encrypted in 20% of the time (depending on who you communicate with).
spyder 13y ago
As you can see from the news the safer alternatives are getting shut down.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well, shutting themselves down since they can't deliver perfectly safe and secure email because the problem is technically impossible. SilentCircle's other services are still up and running, for example, because they can be made secure. Ironic in SilentCircle's case (if you're an HNer) is that PZ noted to the BBC how important his service was because it protects Navy SEALs deployed to areas fighting terrorism where they might otherwise be detected.

digipaper 13y ago

One the companies closed and deleted all their paying customers emails? That's bad imo.

phpnode 13y ago
better to delete it than hand it over if privacy was your selling point in the first place. if i were a customer, i'd be ok with this.
- iaskwhy 13y ago
  Also, if I understand this correctly, his customers most probably had a copy of the emails on their computers so their loss was only the email address (and emails eventually received after the closedown).
  - digipaper 13y ago
    If that's the case it would be fine with me too.
  - orblivion 13y ago
    They might have lost roughly a day's worth, depends how often they connect via IMAP.
    - pdonis 13y ago
      What if they're not using IMAP?
  - pdonis 13y ago
    his customers most probably had a copy of the emails on their computers Based on the fact that a number of them are talking about having lost data, I suspect that at least a significant number of customers only used webmail to access their accounts, so they never had a local copy of their data.
    - 13y ago

kintamanimatt 13y ago

For those without showdead on, there's an insightful comment from beedogs: My guess (and he intimates this in his comment about backdoors in Chinese products) is that the US government asked him to basically break his entire system so they could do MitM attacks. The conversation probably went something like this: USG: Install this machine in your datacenter. Route all traffic through it. Accept installation of this new fiber demarc and allow us access to configure this new router. You do not need to know where this traffic is going. If you refuse, we'll slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. If you tell anyone about this, we will slap you with a contempt order and throw you in federal prison. LL: Get fucked. I'll shut everything down instead. ----- Why beedogs is shadowbanned is beyond me. A quick glance through his comment history doesn't indicate he's done anything to deserve it. ---- Hey beedogs: I can't reply to you directly because you're hellbanned. Send an email to PG. I'm not usually a fan of posting people's contact information, but in this case it's everywhere anyway - pg [at] ycombinator.com

beedogs 13y ago
Yeah, I'd like to know why I'm shadowbanned, too. This is the first I'd heard of it. Can someone at least let me know what the hell I did?
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  Welcome back!
  - beedogs 13y ago
    thanks -- and to whoever sorted this out: thank you as well.
phpnode 13y ago
replying to beedogs because I can't directly: You made this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183189 and one of the admins arbitrarily decided that you needed silent punishment. nice eh?

gst 13y ago

There are already some existing Bitmessage gateways such as http://bitmsg.cc/ http://bitmsg.cc/. Looks like using something like this would be a better solution for a Lavabit-successor: Use a secure messaging protocol and then only use gateways to send messages between the traditional email world and your own secure protocol. Of course, the gateway could still log your messages, but the same security issue applied to Lavabit. The main advantage is that once the gateway has forwarded your message, no one can force the operator to retroactively decrypt the message. Bitmessage sounds like one potential solution for this, but it has some scalability issues. Using RetroShare would be another approach.

vishal0123 13y ago

> He doesn’t have the technological capability to decrypt his customer’s data but if someone could intercept the communication between the Lavabit’s Dallas-based servers and a user, they could get the user’s password and then use that to decrypt their data. Is it really what I understand from this or LL is trying to say something else.

marcioaguiar 13y ago
Does not make sense to me. Lavabit claims that it cannot decrypt customer's data, but if someone else could read what goes through Lavabit server and a client it could decrypt the data?? So, how come Lavabit can't do tha same thing?
- seszett 13y ago
  Because Lavabit doesn't keep passwords in the clear, presumably.
- taway2012 13y ago
  I don't know a lot about Lavabit's arch. But my guess is he's referring to replacing the login page's Javascript code with a malicious one that phones back the plaintext password. Kinda like a keylogger.
- e12e 13y ago
  Lavabit's original architecture only store's an encrypted version of the private key needed to decrypt the messages. The private key is encrypted with the users password, and they don't store this password in plain text. However; if you could intercept this password, and already got a copy of the encrypted private key as well as the encrypted data from lavabit, you could then decrypt the data. Presumably lavabit didn't want to back door their services, by either storing a copy of the session keys, the password, or the plain text -- and chose to shut down instead.
gonzo 13y ago
""The way we encrypt messages before storing them is relatively unique. We only know of one commercial service, and one commercial product that will secure user data using asymmetric encryption before writing it to disk. Basically we generate public and private keys for the user and then encrypt the private key using a derivative of the plain text password. We then encrypt user messages using their public key before writing them to disk. (Alas, right now this is only available to paid users.)" http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html

mtgx 13y ago

He should contest the NSL gag orders. They've already been declared unconstitutional at least 3 times, but they managed to trick the justice system by changing a few random words in the law (with the help of Congress), in effect creating a "new" law that was wiped clean of any "unconstitutionality" ruling. The NSL is still unconstitutional in principle, it's just that it needs to be contested every time they change the law to escape the ruling. Hopefully this time Congress will stop playing along and creating new laws for them. Watch this and you'll get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT2fQu50sMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT2fQu50sMs

a3n 13y ago
Kind of like how pharma companies change a tiny little thing about a drug at the end of its patent term, and then have an entirely "new" patented drug to sell.

bengrunfeld 13y ago

“In America, we’re not supposed to have to worry about watching our words like this when we’re talking to the press,” Binnall said. (from article) I am a new immigrant to America. I came with my wife from Australia 8 months ago. All my life I heard about how the US supported the freedom and rights of its people, and now that I'm here, I find that that was a sick joke. This place is a KGB state on the brink of happening.

chasing 13y ago
Many Americans (and recent immigrants) are so spoiled, they don't even know what a lack of freedom looks like.
- bengrunfeld 13y ago
  chasing, when I was living abroad, I had a Palestinian friend who worked with me. One day he told me his neighbors had disappeared in Gaza because they were vocal against Arafat. I might be spoiled, but I've seen where a lack of freedom leads. I just thought America was a place where this stuff wouldn't happen, and where the people were protected by the Constitution. Guess I was being naive and idealistic.
  - chasing 13y ago
    Assuming everything is great and assuming everything is horrible are two sides of the same naive coin.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Yes, but we're pretty sure we don't want to find out, so we'd rather start worrying while we're on the brink rather than over the edge.
  - chasing 13y ago
    Oh, I agree that we need to push back against this crap. But let's keep some perspective.

dombili 13y ago

I'm not a programmer so this might be a stupid question and I apologize in advance but, why not open source the service?

ssimpson 13y ago
He probably wants to see how the case works out in court first. if all else fails, and he cannot reopen his business, he could do that as a big FU.
noahc 13y ago
It's not a stupid question, but often times open sourcing something involves one or more of the following: 1. Documenting everything so it's actually usable. At a minimum, "here is how to install the dumb thing" should probably be documented. 2. Often times there are hard-coded values that would need to be extracted out for security reasons or to simply allow someone to install it on a system not quite like yours. 3. Often times there are other dependences that would also have to be open sources such as modifications to libraries, internal libraries released, shell scrips, cron jobs, messaging queues, delayed job worker tasks, etc that the system may rely on. These all need to be packaged up, documented and/or released. In short it is a ton of work to take something that is running in our way on our hardware and generalize it enough that anyone else can run it. On the other hand, you wouldn't need their service to give you the protections they offered. Essentially, encrypted email storage. You can get that mostly off the shelf using any linux distro if you run your own mail service.
- dombili 13y ago
  I see. Obviously it's easier said than done. I didn't use Lavabit because I mostly don't use email, but I'm guessing Lavabit was an easier service to use rather than setting up your own email service. I think @ssimpson has a point though. I don't think he [Ladar Levison] would be turned off by the difficulty of the task of open sourcing his project, but he may be waiting to see how the case works out first. Thanks for your explanation.
e12e 13y ago
They have already described the significant part: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit... As far as I can tell it is a service that suffers from many of the same things as other services, especially concerning email that is sent to a recipient in clear text: 1) The email can be intercepted in clear text 2) If the service is compromised; a plain text copy can be made 3) If the service is compromised; a copy of the session key can be stored 4) If the service is compromised; a predictable/insecure session key can be used 5) They store a copy of the secret key; if the service is compromised - all session keys can be recovered when the user logs in (provides the password). I've thought about engineering a similar system; but one based around GPG -- have users upload/associate a public key with their account, and if they receive unencrypted email encrypt it to them using their public key. 1,2,3 and 4) remain though -- and 4) may be the worst as it is almost impossible to detect/defend against AFAIK. An alternative would be to set up a service that detects whether or not incoming mail is encrypted, and rejects it if it is not (along with information of where/how to install and set up GPG). As others have mentioned this would not help with the who talks to who meta-data problem.

Keyframe 13y ago

Maybe it's time for a new type of email service. Something along the lines of two way auth, private key on cell phone, public on server. Cell phones have cameras now, so you could generate a QR code or something which your auth app could look at and generate a response in order to generate a unique token to gain access to your message(s). On the server side guys could have a deadman switch which would purge all data if not heard from administrators for 12 hours. That way they could delete data and not be in jeopardy of obstructing any government or whomever is seeking to gain access. Bonus points could be had for not hosting in US too.

tootie 13y ago
I don't think the encryption thing is the problem. I honestly have a hard time accepting that he was unable to provide decrypted content even with a warrant. That pretty much makes this a Swiss bank account for data and you better believe criminals would be all over it. I'd rather go through legal channels to end violations of due process.
- e12e 13y ago
  I've tried reading: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com/secure.html But I'm still not entirely clear on what lavabit used to do to encrypt email once it arrived on its servers. As far as I can tell, they still store an encrypted version of the private key, that they can't decrypt with the other data they store: but would be able to decrypt as soon as a user logs in, and supplies them with the password (again). So while they don't store enough information to decrypt information, at any point when you log in; you provide enough information for them to decrypt all the stored emails. Additionally, they could store a plaintext copy of all new email. If the mail you receive is already encrypted with something like GPG, the cannot read it, of course.
sigkill 13y ago
The whole problem with email is the asynchronous thing. You want to be secure, then it needs to be in such a way that there's minimum reliance on a central server. But in that case, what happens if your local machine (which is both your mailserver and an end client) is offline? Should the email bounce around in the network (like bitmessage does)? Or should you notify the sender with the standard "Mail Subsystem Delivery failure" that we all know and love. Actually after reading this, I want to seriously sit down and write a spec but if I include the assumption that there is a chance for the end-server/recipient to be offline, it throws everything into chaos.

malandrew 13y ago

Once you've been contacted the first time under an NSL letter, what stops you from choosing to broadcast the entire duration of the ordeal. government: "Here's an NSL." recipient: "Cool deal. I will respect it and not mention it to anyone, but be aware that from this point forward I will always have a device that will broadcast every interaction verbal or electronic that anyone has to me publicly live in real-time to the Internet. You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand? Anything you say may be used against you in the court of public opinion. Do you understand? If you wish to continue to communicate with me, be aware that any statement that you or anyone from your office makes to me will instantly and irreversibly become part of the public record." On top of that you can hand them a special email address for their use only and you can delete your own personal email. You can also wear a shirt with friends and family that informs them in big bold letters that everything is a matter of the public record. This would essentially serve to shield you entirely from secret communication by placing a "force field" of publicity around you. There might be some law somewhere that prohibits this tactic, I cannot imagine how they would counteract this tactic legally so long as you always greet them with disclosure that your are recording everything. I imagine that they could try to force you somehow to interact with them in a location that prohibits recording devices.

nilved 13y ago
Courts are made of people, not computers; and they care about the bottom line, not the reasoning behind the loophole. What you describe -- and every other thought experiment, like warrant canaries -- is a good way to spend the rest of your life in jail for contempt of court. If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country.
- hluska 13y ago
  > If you get an NSL, shut down your business and leave the country. This sentence (and the fact it is so hard to argue with) is one of the most chilling things I've read this year. Great work! (I guess?)
- ansgri 13y ago
  Are you sure they'll allow you to leave the country in this case? They have no-fly list and border control after all.

ezl 13y ago

email is a tool. you can use it for what it works for. it doesn't have to be used for all communication. assume a world where all your emails are archived in publicly accessible databases. you've lost privacy, but could it still be a useful tool? send birthday emails. send your friends funny cat videos. you don't have to use email for everything you used it for before -- you can just use it in different ways. i would still like to be able to near-instantly communicate with relatives across the world. i know bacon clogs my arteries and making bacon has a terrible environmental footprint relative to eating only grains, but i love it.

samstave 13y ago
OK cool - bdays and cats.... now where do I do anything serious where I need/desire privacy?
- pearjuice 13y ago
  You speak to people in real life.
- tomrod 13y ago
  Sneakernet.
- ezl 13y ago
  you're missing the point: maybe email is not good for privacy. the article is about not using email. no tool is perfect. you know what would be great? if hammers cured cancer. they don't though, so we just use them to hammer nails into wood. speaking to people in public places is also a way to communicate, though equally bad for privacy. if there's nothing you can do to change the privacy attribute of "speaking to people in public places", does that mean you should never do it again? or: use codes that only you and the other person know, hold hands and tap morse code into each others palms, find secure rooms. people get upset when one tool doesn't do all the things they want, but its a weirdly tech centric thing. "your startup doesn't do X so i'll criticize it". you can play the "need more features" game ad infinitum -- but nobody criticizes cast cups for their failure to keep drinks cold indefinitely or couches for failing to give them back massages. Because a feature makes a tool better doesn't make it a requirement for its usage.

ibejoeb 13y ago

Zimmermann on the shut-down and elimination of Silent Circle email: "It’s not obstruction of justice if you do it before justice comes calling." I'm sure he and his lawyers aware, but we've got this cool new thing called Anticipatory Obstruction. It'd probably be a pretty far reach, but stranger things have happened. See http://www.perkinscoie.com/files/upload/LIT_11_06FunkFeatureMay.pdf http://www.perkinscoie.com/files/upload/LIT_11_06FunkFeature....

lisper 13y ago
> It'd probably be a pretty far reach That doesn't make much of a difference. The prosecutor only has to make the charge remotely plausible in order to coerce a guilty plea to a lesser charge. (This is what they did to Aaron Swartz.) With a 20-year maximum sentence, anticipatory obstruction is a mighty powerful lever.
j_baker 13y ago
Far reaches are what the White House and DOJ lawyers excel at. Particularly during the Bush era.
greenyoda 13y ago
From the URL that ibejoeb posted above (italics are mine): Unceremoniously titled “Destruction, Alteration, or Falsification of Records in Federal Investigations and Bankruptcy,” and part of § 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, § 1519 provides: Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
- ibejoeb 13y ago
  That's absolutely the best part, and that's why Zimmermann's comment almost seems naive. "...before justice comes calling" is exactly what they're talking about here. What is contemplation, and when does it begin? I learned from Hanni Fakhoury of EFF that a proposed defense in this kind of action is to have had in place a strict data retention policy. For example, prior to beginning operations, the policy would state something like "we will retain all data aged 6 weeks or less; older data will be destroyed." Now, you adhere to that policy, perhaps with some activity record around the procedure itself, and your argument is something like, "it is not obstruction and not anticipatory obstruction because we defined and abided by the policy before anything happened, before any event warranting an investigation could occur, and, therefor, before contemplation of an investigation could occur."

enupten 13y ago

Why don't all these tech companies form a coalition and release the details together ? The government would never dare going after a dozen companies at once, that would in essence spell doom for Silicon valley (and Obama's liberal rhetoric, such as it is). Surely there are times when breaking the law is the right thing ?