14 ms·

Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

565 points by cylo 13y ago

cottonseed 13y ago
Terrible name.
- kevmoo1 13y ago
  Agreed. The goal is great. The name implies malice.
- numbsafari 13y ago
  Agreed. One of the biggest issues with security-conscious systems is that people don't want to be seen as using something that only "people with something to hide" would be using. The average American watches a show like SVU and learns that TOR is how kiddie porn is traded, not that it is how dissidents in Iran or Russia communicate with Journalists. They hear about the "darknet" and assume that that is where illegal activity goes on. So "dark mail" gives the complete wrong connotation and basically means this is DOA unless they completely rebrand.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    They may as well have named it "Mobster Mail"
- devx 13y ago
  Also agreed. It's for the same reason I don't like the name darknet. The FBI was already lobbying Congress and saying the Internet is "going dark", implying that they thought that will scare congress into acting, and giving them more powers. It should be named the Private Mail Protocol, or something. If it stands up to scrutiny, as soon as there is a nice looking e-mail client for it, I'll start using it, and try to use Gmail as little as possible, or not at all. I know Google won't adopt it, so I won't even bother to ask them to adopt it. I'll just switch.
  - tg3 13y ago
    I think Google might adopt it. If it's decrypted in the client (i.e. the Gmail web interface) Google would still be able to inject ads based on your email. That allows them to maintain monetization while having the ability to claim end-to-end security.
- acomjean 13y ago
  I agree. This is a case where some marketing thinking would probably help. Lots of large businesses would probably like something like this (the ones that buy rsa keyfobs and use VPNs). My old company would strongly discourage email from the company system to non company email address for security reasons.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Having said that, many businesses have requirements for employee email that are startlingly close to what the NSA wants. We need info@, accounts@, support@ email addresses that can be read by many people. There also needs to be a way for someone other than Firstname Lastname to read the firstname.lastname@company.tld mail - either for oversight, vacation/illness covering, or hit-by-a-bus scenarios. There are probably certain businesses that have legal requirements about access to employee email. A shortsighted "secure/dark" email approach could easily be dead in the water in terms of corporate adoption if those requirements are not catered for. (I dont use my personal GPG key for any work related or firstname.lastname@company.tld mail, but have a separate GPG key – who's passphrase is in a sealed envelope in the company safe so it can be made available to the company if required without needing to reveal my personal private key. If I'm hit by a bus, or if lawyers/law-enforcemet come knocking on company business - they can have the keys to the encrypted mail in my company account. Mail encrypted to _me_ at nickname@company.tld or me@mydomain.tld is useless if I'm hit by a bus, and would require lawyers/leo/courts to convince me to reveal a passphrase stored only in my head if they wanted it. (Or, you know, for the NSA to rootkit any of my devices I type my personal passphrase into…))
- lhl 13y ago
  Like everyone else (with any common marketing sense), it seems like something like "security" or "privacy" would be much more positive connotations than "dark." A quick search shows SecureMail and PrivateMail are commercially used, but LockedMail and SignedMail aren't. I don't think it'd be too late to (eventually?) do a rebrand/cobrand for the product, especially if someone comes up w/ something particularly good. I think something that even a slight bit of spitballing would turn up something much better. Some thoughts on naming: * If the first word ends in e like securemail/privatemail you actually get email in the word * something that could be shortened like email, but will connote secure sending - "send me that via pmail/smail" * something that has familiar connotations of privacy/sealed delivery (registered mail?) or something might work as well
- redblacktree 13y ago
  I submit, "Envelope." It's a good analogy, since now we're essentially sending all of our email on postcards.
  - slig 13y ago
    But Envelopes leak metadata as well.
    - bediger4000 13y ago
      The NSA gets "mail covers" on every piece of US Postal Service mail: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai... the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States
      - ape4 13y ago
        Wow, that's a new one to me. We really have to defund the NSA.
  - MiguelHudnandez 13y ago
    An envelope is a good analogy for the 2.0 method described in the article. Contents are more secure but metadata is not.
  - peatmoss 13y ago
    I'd posit that the French already have our backs. A few years ago, the official body that governs standardized French attempted to wean French-speaking people from the borrowed English terminology. Et voila! "Courriel," a portmanteau of courrier and electronique was pilfered from the Quebecois for the benefit of francophones everywhere. Sadly however, if Google Translate is any indicator, then "courriel" never made the leap from official to commonplace. Now, the electronic part is a given. But what about the courier part? Here's what Wikipedia says: > Couriers are distinguished from ordinary mail services by features such as speed, security, tracking, signature, specialization and individualization of express services, and swift delivery times, which are optional for most everyday mail services. As a premium service, couriers are usually more expensive than standard mail services, and their use is typically restricted to packages where one or more of these features are considered important enough to warrant the cost. Speed, security, individualization, premium? Those all sound like adjectives that I like! Let's do the L'Académie française a solid. Let's adopt Courriel and apply the label only to our fast, secure, individualized, premium electronic communiques.
- r0muald 13y ago
  At least they didn't make the mistake of calling it "Secure Mail".
tylerkahn 13y ago
If you were interested in seeing any details whatsoever about the protocol there are none either in the article or on the official website.
- dochtman 13y ago
  They appear to be talking about this thing: https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ I thought we didn't want to use the NIST curves (like ECC-384?) anymore... seems something like Curve25519 might be better.
  - JshWright 13y ago
    We're working on moving away from NIST curves as a default. http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/this-one-goes-to-414/ http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/this-one-goes-t...
  - Tepix 13y ago
    According to the talk given at InboxLove they will use Curve3617
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
presty 13y ago
you can listen to more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk started at min 30 or so
r0muald 13y ago
"Stay connected with the Dark Mail Alliance [Enter your e-mail] "
- netgineer 13y ago
  And over an unencrypted channel no less, www.darkmail.info doesn't have ssl, so the NSA will know if you are interested.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmerrick 13y ago
    It is not a crime to be interested in something like this.
    - tzakrajs 13y ago
      You need not commit crimes to be persecuted by the government.
    - robertfw 13y ago
      No, but it probably triggers another flag on your dossier
    - e12e 13y ago
      Not yet it isn't. Remember what happened with "Anarchist's cookbook" and recipes for thermite and such that used to be readily available on the net, and relatively uncontroversial. It was just "information" after all. These days it seems knowing how to do some basic chemistry is considered intent to do harm or something.
  - JshWright 13y ago
    Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).
alexchamberlain 13y ago
As much as I hate promotion emails, I do hope they make sure that companies can still send mass "dark mails" securely, rather than sending the one by one...
- angersock 13y ago
  Wait wait wait! Requiring very strong encryption may help make spam email computationally infeasible. That alone might be worth it!
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I thought even extremely strong encryption was computationally quite light- it's cracking the crypto that takes computing muscle.
    - conductor 13y ago
      Maybe they are going to require "Proof of work" - https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        If only there was some way to make spammers do the work of Bitcoin miners....
  - wyager 13y ago
    See Bitmessage. It has two options. Either senders can spend a significant amount of time (~30 seconds) doing a proof-of-work calculation and send a message to a single person, or they can spend the same amount of time and send a message to an arbitrary number of people, but only if those people are subscribed to the person sending the message.
  - cdman 13y ago
    Nope, doesn't work. Most of spam today is sent trough compromised computers (botnets), so requiring more CPU work doesn't do anything (other than increase the world power consumption a tiny bit).
tocomment 13y ago
What's wrong with bitmessage?
- dochtman 13y ago
  Only solves a subset of the email problem, IIUC.
  - wyager 13y ago
    What's missing? I was very skeptical about Bitmessage, but it totally surpassed my expectations when I tried it.
    - boyter 13y ago
      The biggest issue is missing messages. You essentially have to have it running all the time to get your "mail", otherwise you miss out on all of the resend windows. I love the idea of bitmessage, but this issue is a major problem.
- nwh 13y ago
  Bitmessage doesn't scale, it's POW doesn't solve any spam problems, and it's largely insecure. There's been quite a lot of public discussion about just how hilariously insecure it is.
  - tocomment 13y ago
    I didn't know that. Is anyone working on an improved version? It seems like a great idea in principle.
    - nwh 13y ago
      There's room for improvement, but there's a lot of core issues that just can't be flushed out. The concept of the POW is to stop spam, as all addresses are inevitably public, it doesn't really work though, as spammers typically have access to botnets which can spam all day long. Normal users just have to wait minutes to send a message. The scale issue is a weird one, they plan to split the network into different "streams" with different address types, which just sort of muddles the entire setup. Ultimately the limit is how much CPU and bandwidth the network can survive with while mirroring the entire content of the entire network. There's lots of problems with timing attacks that have been "resolved" with random sleeps, though nobody is really convinced of that too much.
danielweber 13y ago
Anyone gone through the checklist yet? http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
- JshWright 13y ago
  What's the relevance? This isn't a spam fighting endeavor.
  - Tepix 13y ago
    When you go through the trouble of reinventing email to provide proper security, you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol. It would be great if the recipient could specify the amount of proof of work required for example. Or ask for a certain amount of bitcoin in exchange for accepting promotional material. Or a mail attribute that indicates it's a newsletter. Lots of interesting possibilities.
    - MiguelHudnandez 13y ago
      > you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol. I disagree. Different problems sometimes require mutually exclusive solutions. In fact, receiving lots of unsolicited mail provides some plausible deniability. So a spam free-for-all might actually be a useful part of the new network.
      - XorNot 13y ago
        Or you know, renders the system completely worthless because no one can sort through that much spam. Which also makes it completely trivial to DDoS into oblivion. And the problem gets worse then that: the more anonymous it is, the less it's possible to stop someone from spamming. Though I suppose you could attack this problem from the email address side: make it computationally expensive to general an email address, to make address-hopping as a spammer more difficult.
        deleted 13y ago
Tepix 13y ago
From the talk that just finished at Inboxlove, it appears they will use XMPP for transport, some JSON and encrypted cloud storage. You receive a message via XMPP that an email is waiting for you on the cloud storage (similar to MMS). This is also a good solution for the spam problem, I think. They have a working prototype, a whitepaper is forthcoming and the community is welcome to improve the new standard.
- scintill76 13y ago
  Sounds like the cloud storage could help solve the large attachment problem. Cool.
erikb 13y ago
I am definitely no security expert, but from my feeling it seems as if unsecure protocol + secure messaging layer is much more successful in practical applications than purely secure protocols. Therefore my believe would be that improving existing secure messaging layers would help the world much more than creating another secure protocol which nobody will use because it would require to replace the whole infrastructure. Especially Email seems to be something that is unlikely to go away, because of its long history, huge infrastructure and simplicity.
- alextingle 13y ago
  The problem with e-mail is that gathering the meta-data is almost as valuable as looking inside at the message contents. Secure messaging layers aren't going to help you there - unless everyone starts using something like Tor.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    Why Tor? We have had mix-nets for many years, and they do an excellent job of protecting metadata. Even old-fashioned cypherpunks remailers do a fine job at that.
    - e12e 13y ago
      Appologies for the spelling errors in this note below - it's an OCR of an old printout (I've been unable to find a current archive of cypherpunks going back this far): Cypherpunks archive-96.02.29-96.03.06: List of reliable remailers List of reliable remailers Anonymous Remail Service (nobody@vegas.gateway.com) Sun, 3 Mar 199609:18:03-0500 ( Messages sorted by: [date][ threa4][ subject][ author] ( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills" ( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers" ( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail" Thought that this was worth reposting: >1 attended last weeks "Information, National Policies; and International >Infrastructure" Symposium at Harvard Law School, organized by the Global >Information Infrastructure Commission, the Kennedy School and the >Institute for Information Technology Law & Policy of Harvard Law School. >During the presentation by Paul Strassmann, National Defense University >and William Marlow, Science Applications International Corporation, >entitled 'Anonymous Remailers as Risk-Free International Infoterrorists" >the questions was raised from audience (Professor Chaarles Nesson, >Harvard LAw School) - in a rather extended debate - whether the CIA and >similar government agencies are involved in running anonymous remailers >as this would be a perfect target to scan possibly illegal messages. >Both presenters explicitly acknowledged that a number of anonymous >remailers in the US are run by government agencies scanning traffic. >Marlow said that the government runs at least a dozen remailers and that >the most popular remailers in France and Germany are run by the >respective government agencies in these countries In addition they >mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed Systems to break >encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested >to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they themselves use 1024 >bit keys. >J ask Marlos afterwards if these comments were off or on record, he >paused then said that he can be quoted. >So I thought I pass that on. ft seems interesting enough, don 't you > think? >Best > Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger >Information Law Project >Austrian Institute for Legal Policy Groundfog@alpha.c2.org ( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills" ( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers" ( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail" I of 1 05.09.96 01:58
conroy 13y ago
I'm really interested in their solution for solving metadata leakage. I just looked over the SCIMP white paper, and it didn't mention anything about metadata.
- redblacktree 13y ago
  I think not sending all of the data in cleartext will still be a huge improvement.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings: Metadata includes such interesting things as "who has been sending messages to whom at what time" and potentially also from where (ip address). This is an avenue to reconstruct social networks and behavioral patterns, especially if you can crosslink the data with other public sources. I recommend this visualization of the movement profile only derived from the collected data of one german politician (sorry, german only but fairly easy to understand) http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
    - lucastx 13y ago
      English version: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/ http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
- Tepix 13y ago
  It appears they will use XMPP which offers encryption.. so the metadata that appears is encrypted XMPP messages being transmitted between servers to notify users about new messages. Then you'll see the (encrypted) access to the cloud storage.
ebbv 13y ago
The name "Dark Mail" is going to automatically be associated with the "Dark Net" which brings up thoughts of drug dealing and child pornography. This is their first problem. The second is their approach. Overcoming the install base of current email, no matter how much better your new offering, is practically impossible. So instead secure layers on top of existing email is your only feasible option.
chiph 13y ago
Not sure I understand. Both SilentCircle and Lavabit have ceased offering their services. Are they now combined in an advocacy group to design a new email protocol and get it adopted by the IETF?
- tptacek 13y ago
  IETF adoption is a red herring. The IETF does not matter. What matters is market uptake. Reputable providers will need to offer the protocol as a service, and popular client software will need to integrate it into their applications.
- fulafel 13y ago
  IETF has become less relevant of late, they don't get stuff adopted and have been taken over largely by architecture astronauts.
  - smoorman1024 13y ago
    What do you mean by architecture astronaut?
    - lucajona 13y ago
      See "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You" by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Silent Circle has ceased offering an email service, not all services.
dllthomas 13y ago
"Dark Mail" reminds me of Chrono Trigger...
- hmsimha 13y ago
  I was going to say something about it providing 5 points of magic defense :P
infocollector 13y ago
Can we not just do this with an open alliance and pick up a name ?
devx 13y ago
They mentioned having a "web of trust" to help fight spam. But if you use that, doesn't it mean someone like NSA, who can get everyone's public keys (which I assume is what they're going to use for this, just like for PGP), could then identify who are the people talking to each other, and essentially invalidate all their metadata gather protections? Or would that key be ephemeral, too?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I hope they are successful. For a long time I have wished that someone with the expertise and time would be motivated to create a new email system from the ground up, and make that system widely available and 'open' (in the sense of open protocols). There are many challenges, but if they can pull it off there are many benefits as well. And perhaps the nicest part is that it is hard to actively oppose such efforts without revealing an intent.
- SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
  I think the biggest barrier to entry of any new and secure email protocol will be GMail. GMail (and similar services) are what most people seem to use at this point. And GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what, since they want to be able to mine the data in your email, so they will still be storing it on their servers "in the clear." Which means the next time NSA hacks their servers, they'll still be able to read all the email. Best case is that email 3.0 will interoperate with 1.0, or GMail at least accepts 3.0, if only to unencrypt it on their servers. Short of that, it would take a compelling use case to convince people to leave GMail, so we'd be right back to where we are with email 2.0: No critical mass of adoption, meaning 98% of the email you receive and write is unencrypted.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    I agree with the barrier. I wonder if the NSA has made surmounting that barrier possible. If the friction to getting a 'secure' email experience is low enough, people will put up with having two for a while. As for connecting them. I could handle just being able to communicate with my security conscious friends on this platform. That might make it a niche play early on but so was email.
    - Semaphor 13y ago
      Call me cynical, but for all the public outrage worldwide I'm pretty sure that even that outcry comes from a minority.
natural219 13y ago
I appreciate the cheekiness of calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance", but from a purely PR perspective, it would make sense to reconsider your name if you are taking the position that encrypted end-to-end email is not solely an interest of those pursuing shady or deviant activities.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sandstrom 13y ago
  I totally agree, I really think you should change the name. Some suggestions: - Locke Mail [from John Locke] - Mill Mail [from John Stuart Mill] - Hobbes Mail - Liberty Mail
  - kenko 13y ago
    Hobbes Mail makes no sense; either you're in the condition of the war of all against all (no thanks) or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign (no thanks).
    - networked 13y ago
      >or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign Well, Bruce Schneier has argued that that's what security is becoming today: feudal (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...). If you wanted to, you could instead call most if not all currently existing email services "Hobbes mail".
      - gknoy 13y ago
        Yes, but it would seem that a system like this is intended to work counter that, by keeping your communications secure from all.
    - sandstrom 13y ago
      Haha, a valid point! :) I wasn't thinking of Leviathan, rather some of his thoughts on liberalism[1]. The right of the individual, that political power should represent the people etc. [1] Liberalism in it's classic and original sense (not the skewed meaning that it somehow has gotten here in the US). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States#American_versus_European_use_of_the_term_.22liberalism.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United...
speedyrev 13y ago
SPOILER: A year from now we find out this is an NSA black ops project.
- eruditely 13y ago
  Ladar is a hero. I would trust him over myself.
  - e12e 13y ago
    Which is why he would make such a great front for a black op... ;-)
frank_boyd 13y ago
Sounds like another reinvention of the wheel, the "email" part of http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
- mburns 13y ago
  Dismissing or deriding a project because it is not completely novel is unhelpful. Since 'retroshare' hasn't taken the world by storm, maybe that wheel needs to be reinvented.
  - frank_boyd 13y ago
    FYI, RetroShare has a solid and solidly growing community. Of course, if you want to talk about "taken the world by storm" as in "Microsoft Windows 95": You're right, no encryption software has ever taken the world by storm. And that has to do with the fact that the general public doesn't care about privacy, b/c they have no clue how it works and most of all what the mid- and long-term consequences of losing privacy will be for their lives.
zokier 13y ago
To everyone complaining about the name: it is just the name of the advocacy/development group. You don't call SMTP mail 'IETF mail', nor should you call call whatever they come up "dark mail alliance mail".
- jcc80 13y ago
  "Well, Bob, as your viewers may know, 'Smith Mail' came out of a group that calls themselves 'The Dark Mail Alliance'. This is a group of anti-government hackers that..."
  - gknoy 13y ago
    "... keep their software in a so called 'subversion' repository, clearly for nefarious ends."
    - bobsil1 13y ago
      "So we told them to git out of town. "
    - lazugod 13y ago
      "They are being charged with conspiracy to commit code."
    - kaeawc 13y ago
      If they do not comply we will be forced to rebase all your mails, they belong to us.
    - hackula1 13y ago
      "... it's worse than that. They used git. They can git your kids, git your job, git your family; all with one command. They can even clone you. These hackers will be pulling and pushing this country apart!"
      - dingaling 13y ago
        Interesting! I hadn't considered that connotation of git. To Euro-English speakers, 'git' is a rather coarse pejorative term for a person: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git It's fairly vulgar, of a similar coarseness to calling someone a 'stupid fucker' in US terms. The in-joke being that Mr Torvalds chose the name specifically to cause offense.
betterunix 13y ago
What exactly remains to be developed? We have Mixmaster, Mixminion, Sphinx, etc....
ps4fanboy 13y ago
Something like Secure Mail, Safe Mail, Trust Mail, Private Mail sounds better than Dark Mail
natch 13y ago
My Fucking Mail would be a better name. As in, it's mine, do fucking not read it. Sorry for the profanity but I think it fits how many people feel about this.
- krutulis 13y ago
  I do share your sentiment! The shorter "MyMail" makes the same point without needing the profanity, and your more emphatic name would then be available for the most desirable MyMail client...
  - ape4 13y ago
    MeMail
    - insickness 13y ago
      That's the Irish version, as in, "Do not read me mail."
  - a3n 13y ago
    MyMail sounds like a Microsoft product.
  - natch 13y ago
    I did think of that while posting, but edited it out of my comment as 1) too cheesy and 2) it doesn't really make the point, because it just sounds like your typical big-corp lame name. It's a bit late for the HN thread now, but how about MFM protocol, but pronounced as "My Mail" just as RTFM is sometimes pronounced as "Read The Manual."
- shazow 13y ago
  FMail has a cute ring to it. The next version after EMail.
  - jawr 13y ago
    Then full circle to GMail.
hafichuk 13y ago
Has anyone actually confirmed that Ladar Levison is behind this?
- jontas 13y ago
  Here he is on video discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk I guess I wasn't actually there in person to witness it so I can't confirm he wasn't one of those Tupac holograms[1]. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y
pekk 13y ago
Why did Lavabit ever need to have my messages in the clear? The problem is manufactured and the solution is missing the point.
tbfrench 13y ago
LinkedIn to announce Dark Mail support.
softworks 13y ago
Email is so broken from a security standpoint I doubt that email 3.0 would even make it off the ground. You would be better off taking something like IM which silent circl allready has a secure solution for and adding the store and forward capabilities that make email email. Then u could have email clients use that protocol. But asking the entire world to change / upgrade it's email servers and clients with a fundamentally different protocol. I don't see that being successful.
mikegirouard 13y ago
For those who didn't know already (I didn't, this is new territory for me), Silent Circle is co-founded by Phil Zimmermann (the PGP guy).
pixelcort 13y ago
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, OS X and iOS already support S/MIME encrypted email, and having the private keys live on users' devices and doing encryption of outgoing messages on users' devices is probably the safest setup.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Hmmm, I don't know if I'm being outrageously paranoid, but I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone - because it'd be _way_ too easy for Apple to extract the key/passphrase if they were coerced by someone powerful enough, and those "powerful enough" have shown that they consider a court order granting them the private key used to secure 400,000 people's email is an appropriate tool when targeting a single individual. Once that's known, is it really such a stretch to assume that an already complicit PRISM partner might be convinced/coerced to monitor downloads of crypto-capablea app from their respective app-stores, and provide or allow backdoors to their OS that leak private keys? Maybe that's being overly paranoid, but in the "post Snowden" era, it might just be a sensible and pragmatic view…
  - e12e 13y ago
    It's good to be paranoid - but if you don't trust Apple -- you'll have to be quite paranoid with your (and every other) iPhone you encounter. After all they might be recording all sound within range of the mic, for example. Or all text typed. Or both. AFAIK Apple is close to best in class when it comes to handling secure information (keys, pins etc) -- even if they're not perfect.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      My assumption is that if the NSA takes a specific interest in _me_ - then Apple and/or Google could be requested/coerced into making any iOS or Android device I was suspected of carrying do that. If I held a top security clearance in a country the US was interested in, or was a politician, diplomat, drug-dealer, or Occupy Movement organiser - I wouldn't be happy using a modern smart phone. As a "nobody", I doubt the NSA would burn those resources on monitoring me. On the other hand, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised to find the NSA take special interest in anybody who's downloaded a PGP/GPG app from the App Store or Google Play - and if I worked for the NSA I'd certainly have entertained the idea of working out how to subvert iOS/Android to expose private keys and passphrases using privileged vendor-provided OS access. And I doubt I'm anything like as smart/creative/evil as the best people working at the NSA… (And Apple definitely talk best-in-class talk about secure data handling, but there are some interesting questions about how your old passwords/iMessages/keys re-appear on a new iOS device when you replace them…)
theboss 13y ago
I hope to see this magic new mystery protocol as something similar to TextSecure, where we have forward secrecy from the OTR protocol. The current e-mail protocols are far too centralized, which doesn't make sense. Mail is delivered, and after that, it is no longer in possession of USPS. This is unlike how E-mail works (even though it kind of seems like that's what happens). I hope to see some kind of client being required to run on my computer to decrypt e-mails at rest and receive e-mails that are delivered to me from the central server.
- conroy 13y ago
  The protocol is based on SCIMP[0] which supports forward secrecy. [0]: https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/
  - theboss 13y ago
    Aha, very good find. Okay then I am pleased.
ad93611 13y ago
The site http://www.darkmail.info/ http://www.darkmail.info/ is served over http and not https. If someone has access to the pipe, it would be easy get the email addresses of people who submit their email addresses at that site.
- keehun 13y ago
  The marketing system they're using is Mailchimp which I'm sure is also easy to access for anyone who might've been able to snoop emails off the HTTPS version of DarkMail.info
computerhead 13y ago
"dark mail alliance" group, here is what you need to do... 1. get a new website, terrible design even from a 1995 point of view it is bad. Drop shadows on tag-lines are tacky. Not that tech people care, but if you want to take over the world. Try starting by having a decent designer on your team. 2. the only way to "truely" fix this for good is to not use email. instead, use a different form of communication (im thinking of...) 3. work with a few "enterprise companies" 4. get some capital 5. lastly, email is really still on 1.0, there was really no 2.0... unless you consider the time before the internet as 1.0 when the government used internal mail. But as we know mail today technically its still 1.0
aj 13y ago
And this is how committees fail to achieve results ;) The top 20 (?) comments (or at least the most voted comment thread) is a discussion/argument on just the name...
nherment 13y ago
I don't understand how anyone of you can say "it's never going to take over email 1.0". Success is a lot about realisation. We have to start somewhere and this is a good start as any. Having a standard is certainly a necessity. I definitely see secure email starting as a niche and if the user experience is at least as good as gmail I don't see any reason why a new email system would not take over. It's not going to happen overnight but there definitely is a need for it. Lavabit and Silent Circle are proofs that this need is real. There are major issues with replacing the current email: 1) there is no good open source email interface (if I'm wrong, please point me to this gem). Roundcube is good but not good enough when you come from gmail. I don't know of anything better than roundcube. 2) the threshold for a company to implement secure email is too high. Having a secure standard with secure libraries certainly lower that threshold 3) the current open source mails are GPL like licenses. This sucks for companies and individuals. Give them the ability to do what they want, including money. Replacing email is not going to happen without investment. Technology investments are mainly done by companies, only exceptionally by individuals. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a shot as implementing an easy to use & opinionated (ie standardisation vs customization) webmail, chime in: https://github.com/nherment/dolphyn https://github.com/nherment/dolphyn (edit: form & typos)
Cort3z 13y ago
This is very good news. An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost. Post means mail, so DigiMail. This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information. So you can ask to get your sensitive government stuff through DigiPost. My point being: There is already a big market for sending secure emails. If this Dark Mail, or whatever it is called, is secure enough for a government to use then the adoption will be huge. This probably means that it should be called something else than dark. "Normal people" don't know what encryption is, what NSA is or even why it is bad that companies like Google read and use their email. They won't know why or even that their email is insecure. They might have ssl in their Web browser showing a small lock, so they think they are already secure and don't need this "SecureMail". It is absolutely critical that the name of this thing is something that a normal person will feel that he/she needs. Something as simple as "New Email". Yes, the nerds will rage, but the nerds already knows why this is a big deal. The name does not need to cater to them. What is important is to get adoption of this new email platform. And naming it secure mail will probably not help. And having a dark alliance behind it all is the worst idea so far. Both words have negative annotations and sounds like a untrustworthy hacker group or even a terrorist organization. Needless to say, they need some serious re-branding, and fast.
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  "An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost." "This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information." "There is already a big market for sending secure emails." So there are already working solutions for the problem. I wonder - does it really have to be created some new group of "privacy innovators [that] have [to be] partnered to lead the charge to replace email as we know it today"? A descriptive alliance to measure the adherence to a new solution may be a useful thing, but some new group to reinvent some existing solution is just political in my view.
yaiu 13y ago
I wish they would give some sort of freebie to prorated Lavabit users that were were SOL due to the shutdown.
digitalengineer 13y ago
Can we stop with 'the name sucks' meta discussion and focus on the topic? I for one would love to see this work out. It'd be goddamntime someone clever did something about it and I could not imagine two better parties starting this.
shazow 13y ago
Maybe better yet, EncMail.
balabaster 13y ago
This is awesome, but will it be open sourced so that everyone can inspect the code and verify its sanctity?
xanth 13y ago
In all seriousness my opinion can be summed up as; Open Source Or GTFO

565 points by cylo 13y ago

cottonseed 13y ago

Terrible name.

kevmoo1 13y ago
Agreed. The goal is great. The name implies malice.
numbsafari 13y ago
Agreed. One of the biggest issues with security-conscious systems is that people don't want to be seen as using something that only "people with something to hide" would be using. The average American watches a show like SVU and learns that TOR is how kiddie porn is traded, not that it is how dissidents in Iran or Russia communicate with Journalists. They hear about the "darknet" and assume that that is where illegal activity goes on. So "dark mail" gives the complete wrong connotation and basically means this is DOA unless they completely rebrand.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  They may as well have named it "Mobster Mail"
devx 13y ago
Also agreed. It's for the same reason I don't like the name darknet. The FBI was already lobbying Congress and saying the Internet is "going dark", implying that they thought that will scare congress into acting, and giving them more powers. It should be named the Private Mail Protocol, or something. If it stands up to scrutiny, as soon as there is a nice looking e-mail client for it, I'll start using it, and try to use Gmail as little as possible, or not at all. I know Google won't adopt it, so I won't even bother to ask them to adopt it. I'll just switch.
- tg3 13y ago
  I think Google might adopt it. If it's decrypted in the client (i.e. the Gmail web interface) Google would still be able to inject ads based on your email. That allows them to maintain monetization while having the ability to claim end-to-end security.
acomjean 13y ago
I agree. This is a case where some marketing thinking would probably help. Lots of large businesses would probably like something like this (the ones that buy rsa keyfobs and use VPNs). My old company would strongly discourage email from the company system to non company email address for security reasons.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Having said that, many businesses have requirements for employee email that are startlingly close to what the NSA wants. We need info@, accounts@, support@ email addresses that can be read by many people. There also needs to be a way for someone other than Firstname Lastname to read the firstname.lastname@company.tld mail - either for oversight, vacation/illness covering, or hit-by-a-bus scenarios. There are probably certain businesses that have legal requirements about access to employee email. A shortsighted "secure/dark" email approach could easily be dead in the water in terms of corporate adoption if those requirements are not catered for. (I dont use my personal GPG key for any work related or firstname.lastname@company.tld mail, but have a separate GPG key – who's passphrase is in a sealed envelope in the company safe so it can be made available to the company if required without needing to reveal my personal private key. If I'm hit by a bus, or if lawyers/law-enforcemet come knocking on company business - they can have the keys to the encrypted mail in my company account. Mail encrypted to _me_ at nickname@company.tld or me@mydomain.tld is useless if I'm hit by a bus, and would require lawyers/leo/courts to convince me to reveal a passphrase stored only in my head if they wanted it. (Or, you know, for the NSA to rootkit any of my devices I type my personal passphrase into…))
lhl 13y ago
Like everyone else (with any common marketing sense), it seems like something like "security" or "privacy" would be much more positive connotations than "dark." A quick search shows SecureMail and PrivateMail are commercially used, but LockedMail and SignedMail aren't. I don't think it'd be too late to (eventually?) do a rebrand/cobrand for the product, especially if someone comes up w/ something particularly good. I think something that even a slight bit of spitballing would turn up something much better. Some thoughts on naming: * If the first word ends in e like securemail/privatemail you actually get email in the word * something that could be shortened like email, but will connote secure sending - "send me that via pmail/smail" * something that has familiar connotations of privacy/sealed delivery (registered mail?) or something might work as well
redblacktree 13y ago
I submit, "Envelope." It's a good analogy, since now we're essentially sending all of our email on postcards.
- slig 13y ago
  But Envelopes leak metadata as well.
  - bediger4000 13y ago
    The NSA gets "mail covers" on every piece of US Postal Service mail: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai... the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States
    - ape4 13y ago
      Wow, that's a new one to me. We really have to defund the NSA.
- MiguelHudnandez 13y ago
  An envelope is a good analogy for the 2.0 method described in the article. Contents are more secure but metadata is not.
- peatmoss 13y ago
  I'd posit that the French already have our backs. A few years ago, the official body that governs standardized French attempted to wean French-speaking people from the borrowed English terminology. Et voila! "Courriel," a portmanteau of courrier and electronique was pilfered from the Quebecois for the benefit of francophones everywhere. Sadly however, if Google Translate is any indicator, then "courriel" never made the leap from official to commonplace. Now, the electronic part is a given. But what about the courier part? Here's what Wikipedia says: > Couriers are distinguished from ordinary mail services by features such as speed, security, tracking, signature, specialization and individualization of express services, and swift delivery times, which are optional for most everyday mail services. As a premium service, couriers are usually more expensive than standard mail services, and their use is typically restricted to packages where one or more of these features are considered important enough to warrant the cost. Speed, security, individualization, premium? Those all sound like adjectives that I like! Let's do the L'Académie française a solid. Let's adopt Courriel and apply the label only to our fast, secure, individualized, premium electronic communiques.
r0muald 13y ago
At least they didn't make the mistake of calling it "Secure Mail".

tylerkahn 13y ago

If you were interested in seeing any details whatsoever about the protocol there are none either in the article or on the official website.

dochtman 13y ago
They appear to be talking about this thing: https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ I thought we didn't want to use the NIST curves (like ECC-384?) anymore... seems something like Curve25519 might be better.
- JshWright 13y ago
  We're working on moving away from NIST curves as a default. http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/this-one-goes-to-414/ http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/this-one-goes-t...
- Tepix 13y ago
  According to the talk given at InboxLove they will use Curve3617
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

presty 13y ago

you can listen to more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk started at min 30 or so

r0muald 13y ago

"Stay connected with the Dark Mail Alliance [Enter your e-mail] "

netgineer 13y ago
And over an unencrypted channel no less, www.darkmail.info doesn't have ssl, so the NSA will know if you are interested.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dmerrick 13y ago
  It is not a crime to be interested in something like this.
  - tzakrajs 13y ago
    You need not commit crimes to be persecuted by the government.
  - robertfw 13y ago
    No, but it probably triggers another flag on your dossier
  - e12e 13y ago
    Not yet it isn't. Remember what happened with "Anarchist's cookbook" and recipes for thermite and such that used to be readily available on the net, and relatively uncontroversial. It was just "information" after all. These days it seems knowing how to do some basic chemistry is considered intent to do harm or something.
- JshWright 13y ago
  Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).

alexchamberlain 13y ago

As much as I hate promotion emails, I do hope they make sure that companies can still send mass "dark mails" securely, rather than sending the one by one...

angersock 13y ago
Wait wait wait! Requiring very strong encryption may help make spam email computationally infeasible. That alone might be worth it!
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I thought even extremely strong encryption was computationally quite light- it's cracking the crypto that takes computing muscle.
  - conductor 13y ago
    Maybe they are going to require "Proof of work" - https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work https://bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      If only there was some way to make spammers do the work of Bitcoin miners....
- wyager 13y ago
  See Bitmessage. It has two options. Either senders can spend a significant amount of time (~30 seconds) doing a proof-of-work calculation and send a message to a single person, or they can spend the same amount of time and send a message to an arbitrary number of people, but only if those people are subscribed to the person sending the message.
- cdman 13y ago
  Nope, doesn't work. Most of spam today is sent trough compromised computers (botnets), so requiring more CPU work doesn't do anything (other than increase the world power consumption a tiny bit).

tocomment 13y ago

What's wrong with bitmessage?

dochtman 13y ago
Only solves a subset of the email problem, IIUC.
- wyager 13y ago
  What's missing? I was very skeptical about Bitmessage, but it totally surpassed my expectations when I tried it.
  - boyter 13y ago
    The biggest issue is missing messages. You essentially have to have it running all the time to get your "mail", otherwise you miss out on all of the resend windows. I love the idea of bitmessage, but this issue is a major problem.
nwh 13y ago
Bitmessage doesn't scale, it's POW doesn't solve any spam problems, and it's largely insecure. There's been quite a lot of public discussion about just how hilariously insecure it is.
- tocomment 13y ago
  I didn't know that. Is anyone working on an improved version? It seems like a great idea in principle.
  - nwh 13y ago
    There's room for improvement, but there's a lot of core issues that just can't be flushed out. The concept of the POW is to stop spam, as all addresses are inevitably public, it doesn't really work though, as spammers typically have access to botnets which can spam all day long. Normal users just have to wait minutes to send a message. The scale issue is a weird one, they plan to split the network into different "streams" with different address types, which just sort of muddles the entire setup. Ultimately the limit is how much CPU and bandwidth the network can survive with while mirroring the entire content of the entire network. There's lots of problems with timing attacks that have been "resolved" with random sleeps, though nobody is really convinced of that too much.

danielweber 13y ago

Anyone gone through the checklist yet? http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

JshWright 13y ago
What's the relevance? This isn't a spam fighting endeavor.
- Tepix 13y ago
  When you go through the trouble of reinventing email to provide proper security, you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol. It would be great if the recipient could specify the amount of proof of work required for example. Or ask for a certain amount of bitcoin in exchange for accepting promotional material. Or a mail attribute that indicates it's a newsletter. Lots of interesting possibilities.
  - MiguelHudnandez 13y ago
    > you should also solve the spam problem as part of the protocol. I disagree. Different problems sometimes require mutually exclusive solutions. In fact, receiving lots of unsolicited mail provides some plausible deniability. So a spam free-for-all might actually be a useful part of the new network.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      Or you know, renders the system completely worthless because no one can sort through that much spam. Which also makes it completely trivial to DDoS into oblivion. And the problem gets worse then that: the more anonymous it is, the less it's possible to stop someone from spamming. Though I suppose you could attack this problem from the email address side: make it computationally expensive to general an email address, to make address-hopping as a spammer more difficult.
      - deleted 13y ago

Tepix 13y ago

From the talk that just finished at Inboxlove, it appears they will use XMPP for transport, some JSON and encrypted cloud storage. You receive a message via XMPP that an email is waiting for you on the cloud storage (similar to MMS). This is also a good solution for the spam problem, I think. They have a working prototype, a whitepaper is forthcoming and the community is welcome to improve the new standard.

scintill76 13y ago
Sounds like the cloud storage could help solve the large attachment problem. Cool.

erikb 13y ago

I am definitely no security expert, but from my feeling it seems as if unsecure protocol + secure messaging layer is much more successful in practical applications than purely secure protocols. Therefore my believe would be that improving existing secure messaging layers would help the world much more than creating another secure protocol which nobody will use because it would require to replace the whole infrastructure. Especially Email seems to be something that is unlikely to go away, because of its long history, huge infrastructure and simplicity.

alextingle 13y ago
The problem with e-mail is that gathering the meta-data is almost as valuable as looking inside at the message contents. Secure messaging layers aren't going to help you there - unless everyone starts using something like Tor.
- betterunix 13y ago
  Why Tor? We have had mix-nets for many years, and they do an excellent job of protecting metadata. Even old-fashioned cypherpunks remailers do a fine job at that.
  - e12e 13y ago
    Appologies for the spelling errors in this note below - it's an OCR of an old printout (I've been unable to find a current archive of cypherpunks going back this far): Cypherpunks archive-96.02.29-96.03.06: List of reliable remailers List of reliable remailers Anonymous Remail Service (nobody@vegas.gateway.com) Sun, 3 Mar 199609:18:03-0500 ( Messages sorted by: [date][ threa4][ subject][ author] ( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills" ( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers" ( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail" Thought that this was worth reposting: >1 attended last weeks "Information, National Policies; and International >Infrastructure" Symposium at Harvard Law School, organized by the Global >Information Infrastructure Commission, the Kennedy School and the >Institute for Information Technology Law & Policy of Harvard Law School. >During the presentation by Paul Strassmann, National Defense University >and William Marlow, Science Applications International Corporation, >entitled 'Anonymous Remailers as Risk-Free International Infoterrorists" >the questions was raised from audience (Professor Chaarles Nesson, >Harvard LAw School) - in a rather extended debate - whether the CIA and >similar government agencies are involved in running anonymous remailers >as this would be a perfect target to scan possibly illegal messages. >Both presenters explicitly acknowledged that a number of anonymous >remailers in the US are run by government agencies scanning traffic. >Marlow said that the government runs at least a dozen remailers and that >the most popular remailers in France and Germany are run by the >respective government agencies in these countries In addition they >mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed Systems to break >encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested >to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they themselves use 1024 >bit keys. >J ask Marlos afterwards if these comments were off or on record, he >paused then said that he can be quoted. >So I thought I pass that on. ft seems interesting enough, don 't you > think? >Best > Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger >Information Law Project >Austrian Institute for Legal Policy Groundfog@alpha.c2.org ( Next message: Adam Shostack: "Re: NYT on Crypto Bills" ( Previous message: Raph Levien: "List of reliable remailers" ( Next in thread: Black Unicorn: "Re: your mail" I of 1 05.09.96 01:58

conroy 13y ago

I'm really interested in their solution for solving metadata leakage. I just looked over the SCIMP white paper, and it didn't mention anything about metadata.

redblacktree 13y ago
I think not sending all of the data in cleartext will still be a huge improvement.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings: Metadata includes such interesting things as "who has been sending messages to whom at what time" and potentially also from where (ip address). This is an avenue to reconstruct social networks and behavioral patterns, especially if you can crosslink the data with other public sources. I recommend this visualization of the movement profile only derived from the collected data of one german politician (sorry, german only but fairly easy to understand) http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
  - lucastx 13y ago
    English version: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/ http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
Tepix 13y ago
It appears they will use XMPP which offers encryption.. so the metadata that appears is encrypted XMPP messages being transmitted between servers to notify users about new messages. Then you'll see the (encrypted) access to the cloud storage.

ebbv 13y ago

The name "Dark Mail" is going to automatically be associated with the "Dark Net" which brings up thoughts of drug dealing and child pornography. This is their first problem. The second is their approach. Overcoming the install base of current email, no matter how much better your new offering, is practically impossible. So instead secure layers on top of existing email is your only feasible option.

chiph 13y ago

Not sure I understand. Both SilentCircle and Lavabit have ceased offering their services. Are they now combined in an advocacy group to design a new email protocol and get it adopted by the IETF?

tptacek 13y ago
IETF adoption is a red herring. The IETF does not matter. What matters is market uptake. Reputable providers will need to offer the protocol as a service, and popular client software will need to integrate it into their applications.
fulafel 13y ago
IETF has become less relevant of late, they don't get stuff adopted and have been taken over largely by architecture astronauts.
- smoorman1024 13y ago
  What do you mean by architecture astronaut?
  - lucajona 13y ago
    See "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You" by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
StavrosK 13y ago
Silent Circle has ceased offering an email service, not all services.

dllthomas 13y ago

"Dark Mail" reminds me of Chrono Trigger...

hmsimha 13y ago
I was going to say something about it providing 5 points of magic defense :P

infocollector 13y ago

Can we not just do this with an open alliance and pick up a name ?

devx 13y ago

They mentioned having a "web of trust" to help fight spam. But if you use that, doesn't it mean someone like NSA, who can get everyone's public keys (which I assume is what they're going to use for this, just like for PGP), could then identify who are the people talking to each other, and essentially invalidate all their metadata gather protections? Or would that key be ephemeral, too?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I hope they are successful. For a long time I have wished that someone with the expertise and time would be motivated to create a new email system from the ground up, and make that system widely available and 'open' (in the sense of open protocols). There are many challenges, but if they can pull it off there are many benefits as well. And perhaps the nicest part is that it is hard to actively oppose such efforts without revealing an intent.

SomeCallMeTim 13y ago
I think the biggest barrier to entry of any new and secure email protocol will be GMail. GMail (and similar services) are what most people seem to use at this point. And GMail won't update to 3.0 in any meaningful way, no matter what, since they want to be able to mine the data in your email, so they will still be storing it on their servers "in the clear." Which means the next time NSA hacks their servers, they'll still be able to read all the email. Best case is that email 3.0 will interoperate with 1.0, or GMail at least accepts 3.0, if only to unencrypt it on their servers. Short of that, it would take a compelling use case to convince people to leave GMail, so we'd be right back to where we are with email 2.0: No critical mass of adoption, meaning 98% of the email you receive and write is unencrypted.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I agree with the barrier. I wonder if the NSA has made surmounting that barrier possible. If the friction to getting a 'secure' email experience is low enough, people will put up with having two for a while. As for connecting them. I could handle just being able to communicate with my security conscious friends on this platform. That might make it a niche play early on but so was email.
  - Semaphor 13y ago
    Call me cynical, but for all the public outrage worldwide I'm pretty sure that even that outcry comes from a minority.

natural219 13y ago

I appreciate the cheekiness of calling it the "Dark Mail Alliance", but from a purely PR perspective, it would make sense to reconsider your name if you are taking the position that encrypted end-to-end email is not solely an interest of those pursuing shady or deviant activities.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sandstrom 13y ago
I totally agree, I really think you should change the name. Some suggestions: - Locke Mail [from John Locke] - Mill Mail [from John Stuart Mill] - Hobbes Mail - Liberty Mail
- kenko 13y ago
  Hobbes Mail makes no sense; either you're in the condition of the war of all against all (no thanks) or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign (no thanks).
  - networked 13y ago
    >or you've surrendered everything to a single sovereign Well, Bruce Schneier has argued that that's what security is becoming today: feudal (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...). If you wanted to, you could instead call most if not all currently existing email services "Hobbes mail".
    - gknoy 13y ago
      Yes, but it would seem that a system like this is intended to work counter that, by keeping your communications secure from all.
  - sandstrom 13y ago
    Haha, a valid point! :) I wasn't thinking of Leviathan, rather some of his thoughts on liberalism[1]. The right of the individual, that political power should represent the people etc. [1] Liberalism in it's classic and original sense (not the skewed meaning that it somehow has gotten here in the US). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States#American_versus_European_use_of_the_term_.22liberalism.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United...

speedyrev 13y ago

SPOILER: A year from now we find out this is an NSA black ops project.

eruditely 13y ago
Ladar is a hero. I would trust him over myself.
- e12e 13y ago
  Which is why he would make such a great front for a black op... ;-)

frank_boyd 13y ago

Sounds like another reinvention of the wheel, the "email" part of http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

mburns 13y ago
Dismissing or deriding a project because it is not completely novel is unhelpful. Since 'retroshare' hasn't taken the world by storm, maybe that wheel needs to be reinvented.
- frank_boyd 13y ago
  FYI, RetroShare has a solid and solidly growing community. Of course, if you want to talk about "taken the world by storm" as in "Microsoft Windows 95": You're right, no encryption software has ever taken the world by storm. And that has to do with the fact that the general public doesn't care about privacy, b/c they have no clue how it works and most of all what the mid- and long-term consequences of losing privacy will be for their lives.

zokier 13y ago

To everyone complaining about the name: it is just the name of the advocacy/development group. You don't call SMTP mail 'IETF mail', nor should you call call whatever they come up "dark mail alliance mail".

jcc80 13y ago
"Well, Bob, as your viewers may know, 'Smith Mail' came out of a group that calls themselves 'The Dark Mail Alliance'. This is a group of anti-government hackers that..."
- gknoy 13y ago
  "... keep their software in a so called 'subversion' repository, clearly for nefarious ends."
  - bobsil1 13y ago
    "So we told them to git out of town. "
  - lazugod 13y ago
    "They are being charged with conspiracy to commit code."
  - kaeawc 13y ago
    If they do not comply we will be forced to rebase all your mails, they belong to us.
  - hackula1 13y ago
    "... it's worse than that. They used git. They can git your kids, git your job, git your family; all with one command. They can even clone you. These hackers will be pulling and pushing this country apart!"
    - dingaling 13y ago
      Interesting! I hadn't considered that connotation of git. To Euro-English speakers, 'git' is a rather coarse pejorative term for a person: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=git It's fairly vulgar, of a similar coarseness to calling someone a 'stupid fucker' in US terms. The in-joke being that Mr Torvalds chose the name specifically to cause offense.

betterunix 13y ago

What exactly remains to be developed? We have Mixmaster, Mixminion, Sphinx, etc....

ps4fanboy 13y ago

Something like Secure Mail, Safe Mail, Trust Mail, Private Mail sounds better than Dark Mail

natch 13y ago

My Fucking Mail would be a better name. As in, it's mine, do fucking not read it. Sorry for the profanity but I think it fits how many people feel about this.

krutulis 13y ago
I do share your sentiment! The shorter "MyMail" makes the same point without needing the profanity, and your more emphatic name would then be available for the most desirable MyMail client...
- ape4 13y ago
  MeMail
  - insickness 13y ago
    That's the Irish version, as in, "Do not read me mail."
- a3n 13y ago
  MyMail sounds like a Microsoft product.
- natch 13y ago
  I did think of that while posting, but edited it out of my comment as 1) too cheesy and 2) it doesn't really make the point, because it just sounds like your typical big-corp lame name. It's a bit late for the HN thread now, but how about MFM protocol, but pronounced as "My Mail" just as RTFM is sometimes pronounced as "Read The Manual."
shazow 13y ago
FMail has a cute ring to it. The next version after EMail.
- jawr 13y ago
  Then full circle to GMail.

hafichuk 13y ago

Has anyone actually confirmed that Ladar Levison is behind this?

jontas 13y ago
Here he is on video discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk I guess I wasn't actually there in person to witness it so I can't confirm he wasn't one of those Tupac holograms[1]. 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y

pekk 13y ago

Why did Lavabit ever need to have my messages in the clear? The problem is manufactured and the solution is missing the point.

tbfrench 13y ago

LinkedIn to announce Dark Mail support.

softworks 13y ago

Email is so broken from a security standpoint I doubt that email 3.0 would even make it off the ground. You would be better off taking something like IM which silent circl allready has a secure solution for and adding the store and forward capabilities that make email email. Then u could have email clients use that protocol. But asking the entire world to change / upgrade it's email servers and clients with a fundamentally different protocol. I don't see that being successful.

mikegirouard 13y ago

For those who didn't know already (I didn't, this is new territory for me), Silent Circle is co-founded by Phil Zimmermann (the PGP guy).

pixelcort 13y ago

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, OS X and iOS already support S/MIME encrypted email, and having the private keys live on users' devices and doing encryption of outgoing messages on users' devices is probably the safest setup.

bigiain 13y ago
Hmmm, I don't know if I'm being outrageously paranoid, but I'm resisting the temptation to put my PGP private key on my iPhone - because it'd be _way_ too easy for Apple to extract the key/passphrase if they were coerced by someone powerful enough, and those "powerful enough" have shown that they consider a court order granting them the private key used to secure 400,000 people's email is an appropriate tool when targeting a single individual. Once that's known, is it really such a stretch to assume that an already complicit PRISM partner might be convinced/coerced to monitor downloads of crypto-capablea app from their respective app-stores, and provide or allow backdoors to their OS that leak private keys? Maybe that's being overly paranoid, but in the "post Snowden" era, it might just be a sensible and pragmatic view…
- e12e 13y ago
  It's good to be paranoid - but if you don't trust Apple -- you'll have to be quite paranoid with your (and every other) iPhone you encounter. After all they might be recording all sound within range of the mic, for example. Or all text typed. Or both. AFAIK Apple is close to best in class when it comes to handling secure information (keys, pins etc) -- even if they're not perfect.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    My assumption is that if the NSA takes a specific interest in _me_ - then Apple and/or Google could be requested/coerced into making any iOS or Android device I was suspected of carrying do that. If I held a top security clearance in a country the US was interested in, or was a politician, diplomat, drug-dealer, or Occupy Movement organiser - I wouldn't be happy using a modern smart phone. As a "nobody", I doubt the NSA would burn those resources on monitoring me. On the other hand, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised to find the NSA take special interest in anybody who's downloaded a PGP/GPG app from the App Store or Google Play - and if I worked for the NSA I'd certainly have entertained the idea of working out how to subvert iOS/Android to expose private keys and passphrases using privileged vendor-provided OS access. And I doubt I'm anything like as smart/creative/evil as the best people working at the NSA… (And Apple definitely talk best-in-class talk about secure data handling, but there are some interesting questions about how your old passwords/iMessages/keys re-appear on a new iOS device when you replace them…)

theboss 13y ago

I hope to see this magic new mystery protocol as something similar to TextSecure, where we have forward secrecy from the OTR protocol. The current e-mail protocols are far too centralized, which doesn't make sense. Mail is delivered, and after that, it is no longer in possession of USPS. This is unlike how E-mail works (even though it kind of seems like that's what happens). I hope to see some kind of client being required to run on my computer to decrypt e-mails at rest and receive e-mails that are delivered to me from the central server.

conroy 13y ago
The protocol is based on SCIMP[0] which supports forward secrecy. [0]: https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/ https://silentcircle.com/web/scimp-protocol/
- theboss 13y ago
  Aha, very good find. Okay then I am pleased.

ad93611 13y ago

The site http://www.darkmail.info/ http://www.darkmail.info/ is served over http and not https. If someone has access to the pipe, it would be easy get the email addresses of people who submit their email addresses at that site.

keehun 13y ago
The marketing system they're using is Mailchimp which I'm sure is also easy to access for anyone who might've been able to snoop emails off the HTTPS version of DarkMail.info

computerhead 13y ago

"dark mail alliance" group, here is what you need to do... 1. get a new website, terrible design even from a 1995 point of view it is bad. Drop shadows on tag-lines are tacky. Not that tech people care, but if you want to take over the world. Try starting by having a decent designer on your team. 2. the only way to "truely" fix this for good is to not use email. instead, use a different form of communication (im thinking of...) 3. work with a few "enterprise companies" 4. get some capital 5. lastly, email is really still on 1.0, there was really no 2.0... unless you consider the time before the internet as 1.0 when the government used internal mail. But as we know mail today technically its still 1.0

aj 13y ago

And this is how committees fail to achieve results ;) The top 20 (?) comments (or at least the most voted comment thread) is a discussion/argument on just the name...

nherment 13y ago

I don't understand how anyone of you can say "it's never going to take over email 1.0". Success is a lot about realisation. We have to start somewhere and this is a good start as any. Having a standard is certainly a necessity. I definitely see secure email starting as a niche and if the user experience is at least as good as gmail I don't see any reason why a new email system would not take over. It's not going to happen overnight but there definitely is a need for it. Lavabit and Silent Circle are proofs that this need is real. There are major issues with replacing the current email: 1) there is no good open source email interface (if I'm wrong, please point me to this gem). Roundcube is good but not good enough when you come from gmail. I don't know of anything better than roundcube. 2) the threshold for a company to implement secure email is too high. Having a secure standard with secure libraries certainly lower that threshold 3) the current open source mails are GPL like licenses. This sucks for companies and individuals. Give them the ability to do what they want, including money. Replacing email is not going to happen without investment. Technology investments are mainly done by companies, only exceptionally by individuals. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a shot as implementing an easy to use & opinionated (ie standardisation vs customization) webmail, chime in: https://github.com/nherment/dolphyn https://github.com/nherment/dolphyn (edit: form & typos)

Cort3z 13y ago

This is very good news. An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost. Post means mail, so DigiMail. This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information. So you can ask to get your sensitive government stuff through DigiPost. My point being: There is already a big market for sending secure emails. If this Dark Mail, or whatever it is called, is secure enough for a government to use then the adoption will be huge. This probably means that it should be called something else than dark. "Normal people" don't know what encryption is, what NSA is or even why it is bad that companies like Google read and use their email. They won't know why or even that their email is insecure. They might have ssl in their Web browser showing a small lock, so they think they are already secure and don't need this "SecureMail". It is absolutely critical that the name of this thing is something that a normal person will feel that he/she needs. Something as simple as "New Email". Yes, the nerds will rage, but the nerds already knows why this is a big deal. The name does not need to cater to them. What is important is to get adoption of this new email platform. And naming it secure mail will probably not help. And having a dark alliance behind it all is the worst idea so far. Both words have negative annotations and sounds like a untrustworthy hacker group or even a terrorist organization. Needless to say, they need some serious re-branding, and fast.

userulluipeste 13y ago
"An interesting not here: In Norway the official postal service, Posten, has introduced something called DigiPost." "This is essential a secure way of sending information and it is approved by the Norwegian government for sending and receiving sensitive information." "There is already a big market for sending secure emails." So there are already working solutions for the problem. I wonder - does it really have to be created some new group of "privacy innovators [that] have [to be] partnered to lead the charge to replace email as we know it today"? A descriptive alliance to measure the adherence to a new solution may be a useful thing, but some new group to reinvent some existing solution is just political in my view.

yaiu 13y ago

I wish they would give some sort of freebie to prorated Lavabit users that were were SOL due to the shutdown.

digitalengineer 13y ago

Can we stop with 'the name sucks' meta discussion and focus on the topic? I for one would love to see this work out. It'd be goddamntime someone clever did something about it and I could not imagine two better parties starting this.

shazow 13y ago

Maybe better yet, EncMail.

balabaster 13y ago

This is awesome, but will it be open sourced so that everyone can inspect the code and verify its sanctity?

xanth 13y ago

In all seriousness my opinion can be summed up as; Open Source Or GTFO