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Lavabit gets new crypto key, gives users 72 hours to recover e-mails
- junto 13y agoSo he hadn't deleted everything? I presumed he had not only shuttered the service, but also that he had deleted everything.
- robhu 13y agoPresumably the court might interpret that as equivalent to destroying the evidence they're seeking? Maybe if he destroyed everything apart from the one user account they claim they want access to?
- tedunangst 13y agoDestroying everything is kind of permanent. Even if he wins the court battle, he loses.
- JshWright 13y agoI suspect he would have deleted everything if he could (when we shut down our mail service at Silent Circle, we deleted everything specifically because we still could). If he did it after this whole show got started, it would very likely have led to even more significant contempt (or even obstruction) charges. Destroying everything does indeed cause some pain, but it also sets a very definite upper bound on just how much pain is possible (especially for your customers).
- Qantourisc 13y agoThey could also already have copies... making the point moot.
- robhu 13y agoThe new certificate does not offer Forward Secrecy https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=liberty.lavabit.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=liberty.lavab... Does this not mean that the NSA could patiently log all the traffic going in and out of the site over the next few days, then get a court order for this new SSL private key, then decrypt the traffic they collected? I may have misunderstood, but doesn't that make this something of a trojan horse? Many users will login and try to download all their email, and for everyone who does, when the NSA (very likely) get a court order for the new SSL key, they'll have that large amount of private email everyone tried to copy from the site?
- koenigdavidmj 13y agoDestroy the key immediately after the 72 hours? EDIT: And hope the relevant courts are not running during those 72 hours?
- gentoomenpls 13y agoMaybe weasel wording on the warrant? They only ordered him to disclose the old ssl key, maybe it doesn't apply to the new one?
- robhu 13y agoPerhaps... but does it not seem rather a little odd that someone so knowledgeable about security who had Forward Secrecy on before would now /accidentally/ get a new certificate without it? This doesn't make sense, he would have had forward secrecy on unless there was some reason not to do so (like he was compelled not to, or if he isn't even the one doing all this).
- ge0rg 13y agoThis is something that striked me as missing in the Lavabit key warrant discussion: was Forward Secrecy merely an option on the server before the shutdown, or was it enforced on all connections, regardless of client support? If not all connections used it, FBI / NSA are probably now in the position to decrypt earlier recordings of user sessions, thus recovering the passwords, email contents etc... From reading the ssllabs report, it looks like even with the current setup, sessions by IE and Safari (also Android?) users can be recovered once the new key is obtained via court order.
- anologwintermut 13y agoBefore they came back up, I ran SSL labs test on their site. It did support forward security for some browsers. Now it supports none. No idea about before the warrant, but I don't see any good reason to think it changed it changed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518430
- drraoulduke 13y agoI wouldn't trust this. The government could be running the site now. It's happened before.
- throwit1979 13y agoOccam's razor, for once, actually supports the conspiracy theory. It's far more likely that Levison has been bullied into 72 hours of snooping to avoid contempt than that he's suddenly decided, months after shutting down, for no reason at all, to open up a window for users to grab their emails.
- gentoomenpls 13y agowut. Occam's razor says he replaced the compromised ssl key (the one the court ordered him to hand over) Ladar shut down his servers than accept snooping on all his users, I certainly doubt he just decided after all this fighting to just give up.
- throwit1979 13y agoSo then he suddenly, after all this time, woke up and decided, "hey, you know all those hosts I shut down and mothballed? I'm going to fire them up NOW, spend some time restoring backups, reconfiguring things where necessary, while facing possible contempt charges, for an arbitrary number of hours, with a new keypair, signed by a US certification authority, without ephemeral keys, and invite everyone who has been avoiding snooping by state entities to log in with their private credentials!" ? He could have done this a while ago, but he didn't. He could have relaunched fully, under a new entity, but he didn't. He chose NOW, to relaunch for only 72 hours. Why?
- gentoomenpls 13y agoThe warrant that was given to him only asked for the ssl keys. The court records were just unseal on October 2nd. >He could have done this a while ago, but he didn't. Maybe he's been working on it since the 2nd? >He could have relaunched fully, under a new entity, but he didn't. Why would that change anything? This would only serve to hurt his existing customers. >He chose NOW, to relaunch for only 72 hours. Why? Again, maybe he's been working on it since the 2nd?
- RRRA 13y agoIt's a trap?
- aleksis 13y agoOk, RTFM
- quink 13y agoWith Forward Secrecy disabled when it wasn't before, it only being a quick configuration change to re-enable it (I'm talking two or three lines in Apache or nginx), and no discernible gain in disabling it other than to make it easier for people to look through the traffic after the fact... it's almost the only explanation. Either that or there's an amount of incompetence here that should might as well amount to the same degree of stay away. However, the server is probably not actively compromised, because if it was they could use PFS and still listen in. It is still required, however, that they'll need either to own this key pair being used at some point to listen in to the traffic. But that would mean that they can likely change the key pair on the server but for some reason they can't enable PFS, even though once they have access to the server in production, PFS is useless... so... who knows on that part. tl;dr: If they get the key pair later (even if years later through brute forcing or whatnot) and don't have access to the server, then PFS disabled is a bad thing. If they have control over the server or the server logs all the session keys and they receive these at some point in time, then PFS enabled is, of course, a useless thing. If they don't get the key pair at any point, then it's fine, but I'd consider that unlikely. Edit: The proper way forward is to estimate the chance they will get the key, which might as well call at 50-50, multiply that by the losses you would incur where they to gain access to these emails (and that's likely to amount to $0 for the vast majority, sorry if I'm being presumptuous and devaluing privacy) and compare that to the losses incurred if you didn't have access to these emails. Counter-intuitively arising from that, for some it might even make sense to connect assuming that traffic is intercepted, to show that they are boring and are using Lavabit for very mundane reasons.
- rietta 13y agoThis has got to be an FBI orchestrated trap!
- swalkergibson 13y agoHypothetically speaking, could you download the files over Tor from public wifi and be protected? Or, is Tor now considered insecure due to exit node monitoring?
- chimeracoder 13y agoThis is orthogonal to Tor. SSL protects an adversary from seeing what you're talking about, not who you're talking to. Tor will prevent an adversary from seeing who you're talking to, but not (in itself) what you're talking about[0]. Here, the topic of concern is an adversary (in this case, the government) finding out what you're talking about, so Tor isn't relevant. [0]Because the last step is unencrypted and sent in plain text, even though intermediate steps are encrypted.
- swalkergibson 13y agoThank you for the explanation. I guess my previous thought was made under the assumption that this was not some sort of law enforcement honeypot. If in fact they are just listening for your username/password on the server, there ain't no way around it.
- FiloSottile 13y ago> Since the SSL certificates formerly used to protect access to Lavabit have been compromised, we recommend manually validating the serial number and fingerprint your computer received before using this website. [https://liberty.lavabit.com/ https://liberty.lavabit.com/] What? If an active attacker is changing certificates on the fly, he's also surely able to change the values in the HTML content of the page. This will add absolutely no security for the users, only false sense of security via complex-looking measures, and he should know this.
- sil3ntmac 13y agoHopefully liberty.lavabit.com uses a new uncompromised cert?
- dublinben 13y agoPresumably, but not an EV one. It might as well have been generated by the NSA at this point, for all we know.
- FiloSottile 13y agoThe point is that if it is uncompromised we are safe, if it isn't writing the fingerprint in the HTML will be of no help at all.
- nullc 13y agoThis really makes little sense. The service was designed so that the data was encrypted. He could just let people download their data and decrypt it locally. Instead the site is prompting you for a password which it could freely capture.
- tuananh 13y agohow do you authenticate the said person so you could allow she/he to download her/his data?
- levosmetalo 13y agoActually this makes the most sense. When users type their passwords online in order to recover the data, NSA gets those passwords the same moment. I'm pretty sure Lavabit was forced to try to trick its users into giving their passwords one more time.
- gonzo 13y agoThe original key was revoked by the CA. Lavabit couldn't operate with the original key even if they wanted to.
- glasz 13y agogiven the government is behind all this (which, after all, isn't too unlikely) at least some thug at some agency is now furious because of us here and commenters all over the web warning people. the question arising in their minds, and certainly meetings, is "what to do about people talking?". now, you'll just wait what happens and be as surprised by the outcome as you've been with the surveillance revelations this year. brave new world.
- borplk 13y agoIt's a trap.
- kyboren 13y agoDid anyone else take a look at the site source code? For a trap, it's pretty damn obvious. The form submits the user name and password in plain text over the "secured" connection--the one that doesn't support forward secrecy, operated by a provider who's already known to be compelled to disclose SSL private keys. Further, I can't imagine Ladar willingly set this up. This means that not only can they compel Ladar to hand over his private SSL keys, but they can apparently compel him to take positive action to fuck over his users. <s> Talk about a free country! </s>