4 ms·

Maybe what we need is a new email standard that is incompatible with the old one deliberately. One designed by people who understand all the issues. Sure it's a

Maybe what we need is a new email standard that is incompatible with the old one deliberately. One designed by people who understand all the issues. Sure it's a pain in the butt to change everything and require all new apps but it seems like email has reached the end of its lifetime.

LoganCale 13y ago
There are several different secure asynchronous messaging protocols in existence or being worked on. The ones I'm aware of: - Bitmessage (https://bitmessage.org https://bitmessage.org) - Retroshare (http://retroshare.sourceforge.net http://retroshare.sourceforge.net) - Pond (https://pond.imperialviolet.org https://pond.imperialviolet.org)
- onli 13y ago
  Bitmessage is pretty neat. Have a look. And the community around it is capable enough to offer some nice services like a bm-mail-gateway [1] (and the software to host that yourself, if you want to). [1]: https://bitmessage.ch/ https://bitmessage.ch/
- junto 13y ago
  The problem with all of these is that it needs a buy in from the biggest providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. With a wide consortium, working towards an open standard that didn't have any insecure backwards compatibility, was just as easy to use, was decentralised, and was open source for all to see, this could work. The beauty of such a move is that there would be a huge economic benefit, as companies across the globe would start building server and client software to sell to as massive growing market.
zokier 13y ago
The problem is more multifaceted than just "email is broken". One fundamental problem currently is webmail. People are accustomed to that but providing secure comms over web is currently tricky if not impossible. So even if we had a new fancy email standard, it wouldn't help if anyone cant't access it securely because current web standards are not up to it. Another problem would be key management. I find it difficult to believe that we could build any sort of secure system without some keys, and those keys need managing. I'd love to see widespread adaptation of HSMs, but to accomplish that it would need support from the hardware all the way to the browser (or what ever client software). Even something like TPM would be nice if actually adopted (and made trustable). Then relating to key management is the issue of trust. How do we verify the keys? The current CA system definitely seems bust, so we need something different no matter what's the email standard.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  I think key management is a really big problem, as I say in my blog post 'I shouldn’t be trusted with anything as precious as my own private key'. http://kybernetikos.com/2013/06/22/how-do-we-make-encryption-more-accessible/ http://kybernetikos.com/2013/06/22/how-do-we-make-encryption... I'm not so sure about the problems with webmail. I don't see why they would be significantly different from the problems associated with serving a web banking site, and there are plenty of those.
  - zokier 13y ago
    > I don't see why they would be significantly different from the problems associated with serving a web banking site, and there are plenty of those. With web banking usually the bank has legitimately access to all information they are presenting to you via web. In email your email-provider shouldn't have access to your unencrypted mail.
    - Retric 13y ago
      Presumably you could use client site JavaScript to decode your message. However, that brings up key management issues.
      - zokier 13y ago
        I don't believe that would be good enough. Encryption/decryption should be done by the browser in a way that JS has no access to either the keys or the cleartext. There should be also clear indications in the browser chrome when accessing such elements.
    - kybernetikos 13y ago
      I suppose the key point is that you can't trust whomever is storing your data with storing your email app code - it's far too easy for them to serve you backdoored app code if they're required to by the government.
  - adestefan 13y ago
maaku 13y ago
Have you looked at pond?
kabdib 13y ago
Microsoft has been trying to do that for well over a decade :-)
- SEJeff 13y ago
  He said one designed by people who understand the issues. MAPI/NSPI are quite awful protocols. The openchange[1] team has reverse engineered pretty much all of it. I helped edit the very first release doc a few years ago as Julien (the lead openchange dev) is French and not a native English speaker. [1] www.openchange.org

LoganCale 13y ago

There are several different secure asynchronous messaging protocols in existence or being worked on. The ones I'm aware of: - Bitmessage (https://bitmessage.org https://bitmessage.org) - Retroshare (http://retroshare.sourceforge.net http://retroshare.sourceforge.net) - Pond (https://pond.imperialviolet.org https://pond.imperialviolet.org)

onli 13y ago
Bitmessage is pretty neat. Have a look. And the community around it is capable enough to offer some nice services like a bm-mail-gateway [1] (and the software to host that yourself, if you want to). [1]: https://bitmessage.ch/ https://bitmessage.ch/
junto 13y ago
The problem with all of these is that it needs a buy in from the biggest providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. With a wide consortium, working towards an open standard that didn't have any insecure backwards compatibility, was just as easy to use, was decentralised, and was open source for all to see, this could work. The beauty of such a move is that there would be a huge economic benefit, as companies across the globe would start building server and client software to sell to as massive growing market.

zokier 13y ago

The problem is more multifaceted than just "email is broken". One fundamental problem currently is webmail. People are accustomed to that but providing secure comms over web is currently tricky if not impossible. So even if we had a new fancy email standard, it wouldn't help if anyone cant't access it securely because current web standards are not up to it. Another problem would be key management. I find it difficult to believe that we could build any sort of secure system without some keys, and those keys need managing. I'd love to see widespread adaptation of HSMs, but to accomplish that it would need support from the hardware all the way to the browser (or what ever client software). Even something like TPM would be nice if actually adopted (and made trustable). Then relating to key management is the issue of trust. How do we verify the keys? The current CA system definitely seems bust, so we need something different no matter what's the email standard.

kybernetikos 13y ago
I think key management is a really big problem, as I say in my blog post 'I shouldn’t be trusted with anything as precious as my own private key'. http://kybernetikos.com/2013/06/22/how-do-we-make-encryption-more-accessible/ http://kybernetikos.com/2013/06/22/how-do-we-make-encryption... I'm not so sure about the problems with webmail. I don't see why they would be significantly different from the problems associated with serving a web banking site, and there are plenty of those.
- zokier 13y ago
  > I don't see why they would be significantly different from the problems associated with serving a web banking site, and there are plenty of those. With web banking usually the bank has legitimately access to all information they are presenting to you via web. In email your email-provider shouldn't have access to your unencrypted mail.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Presumably you could use client site JavaScript to decode your message. However, that brings up key management issues.
    - zokier 13y ago
      I don't believe that would be good enough. Encryption/decryption should be done by the browser in a way that JS has no access to either the keys or the cleartext. There should be also clear indications in the browser chrome when accessing such elements.
  - kybernetikos 13y ago
    I suppose the key point is that you can't trust whomever is storing your data with storing your email app code - it's far too easy for them to serve you backdoored app code if they're required to by the government.
- adestefan 13y ago

maaku 13y ago

Have you looked at pond?

kabdib 13y ago

Microsoft has been trying to do that for well over a decade :-)

SEJeff 13y ago
He said one designed by people who understand the issues. MAPI/NSPI are quite awful protocols. The openchange[1] team has reverse engineered pretty much all of it. I helped edit the very first release doc a few years ago as Julien (the lead openchange dev) is French and not a native English speaker. [1] www.openchange.org