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Show HN: GPG emails for everyone, from everywhere – open sourced
- aedocw 13y agoLooks like an interesting idea, but why choose a trademarked name? Any amount of popularity will bring attention and you'll have to change the name, thus diluting at least some of your early exposure.
- dreamdweller 13y agothe name is Japanese for safe box
- snoonan 13y agoA name change is in order due to the fact that Fedex owns the Kinko's trademark for email service.
- radiospiel 13y agoI thought kinko is fedex'es defunct parcel delivery business? Will check that, thank you.
- dmix 13y agoNo it was their very popular printing stores before they renamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Office
- justin66 13y agoFor decades they were a popular photocopying and printing place in the US. For a while after that they were owned by Fedex but did basically the same stuff. Five or six years ago they lost the "kinko" but it's still very recognizable as the name of a printing service. So I guess what I'm saying is you could probably use something hipper and less trademark-infingey. How about "an expression of support or encouragement" from Jamaica? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=big%20ups http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=big%20ups Instead of "kinko me" and kinkoing one another the kids could give one another "BIG UPS." I see nothing that could go wrong with this plan.
- radiospiel 13y agobig ups, I like that, but speaking of parcels: isn't UPS just around the corner ;)
- banpei 13y agofinally something that will protect me from the NSA ;) but yeah, accessing email from everywhere and with a sufficient degree of security is something that people stopped believing in
- radiospiel 13y agoThen it is high times to do something about that, isn't it?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nycmattw 13y agoWould love to get some access codes :)
- radiospiel 13y agoCan you send us an email at contact at kinko.me? You will get one, promise :)
- nycmattw 13y agoI've actually sent you two emails, one directly through email and one through the website.
- conn23 13y agonice box!
- radiospiel 13y agoThanks
- kzrdude 13y agointeresting. The FAQ has 'lose' misspelled five times. Loose: opposite of tight. Lose: Opposite of find. Good luck with your product!
- nycmattw 13y agoLose: Opposite of win.
- radiospiel 13y agous germans :) We'll run the FAQ to our friendly spell checking native speaker..
- macavity23 13y agoNice project. A year ago I would have said that there was no market for this; it'll be interesting to see if that has changed in the post-Snowden world. I have one reservation. From https://kinko.me/faq/ https://kinko.me/faq/ : The box receives the email and checks that it knows all GnuPG encryption keys needed to forward an encrypted version of the mail. If it does not it rejects the email. Otherwise it encrypts your email and sends it to the receivers’ email accounts. This makes it sound like a user can only send email to recipients whose GPG keys they have. If this is the case, this is a huge red flag; the past two decades of encrypted email usage has proved conclusively that the huge majority of users do not care about privacy. If as a kinko user I have to get GPG keys for all my friends, this will never take off. I'd strongly recommend encrypting where possible, but allowing unencrypted copies to be sent where no gpg key is found. Perhaps there could be a warning and resend, eg 'Some of the recipients for this mail have no gpg keys. Please reply to this message to confirm you understand that this message will be sent unencrypted to those recipients'? Also, if you can solve the user experience problem with generating and using GPG keys, you will be doing the world a great service. Good luck! Will be following the project with interest.
- radiospiel 13y agoYou are right, the FAQ is probably not right at this point, In fact, the box uses keys it knows about, and tries to get keys when receiving encrypted mail. But of course you can send unencrypted email. (Otherwise you would have to use a specific email not only for contacts that don't use GnuPG, but also for registration with 99% of all the websites out there.)
- radiospiel 13y agoAs for the business case: yes, it probably is really hard to do something open source on everyday hardware. I don't see big business here - but something to make the world a more private place.
- emmelaich 13y agoLooks good. FWIW, GNU Anubis (an MTA) can do gpg signing. Of course, there's a big gap between 'can do' and actually does, which is where this (Kinko) comes in. http://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/manual/anubis.html#SEC64 http://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/manual/anubis.html#SEC64
- freemefromthis 13y agosounds very interesting!
- pjc50 13y agoDoing this in hardware is IMHO a great step forward; general purpose computers are just too easy to compromise. Of course, the box has to be secure itself ..
- radiospiel 13y agoThe box is built around an open sourced ARM board. The current prototype is a Olimex LIME. And yes: moving crypto in a separate box should improve security - when you install something on your desktop it doesn't get root there!
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI assume this could run on a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard?
- radiospiel 13y agoYes and no. The first version was on a Raspi, but this didn't perform too well. A beagle board should be fine though. (Also: debian support for Raspi is kind of lacking, though)
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAwesome! Thanks for the reply!
- joe_the_user 13y agoI disagree. Isolating this on a separate piece of hardware might be a good idea. But getting your code on the hardware seems like an obvious and fairly fatal flaw. The possibility of the NSA forcing the single maker to insert some hidden code or even some hidden extra hardware makes this a "single point of failure". They sell servers the size of "wall-warts" - you could run Linux or BSD on that and run your secure email on top of that. Keeping a general purpose computer secure is always going to be a problem but recent experience seems to pretty say "if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anyone".
- kc99 13y agoWhen will it be available?
- radiospiel 13y agoHmm, we have a working prototype, but the software is not release-ready yet, and we also need to secure funding to have the hardware produced. For this we are going to crowd fund in a couple of weeks.
- unfamiliar 13y agoAnswering your own questions from different accounts. Classy.
- fharper1961 13y agoThe faq has nothing to say about spam filtering. How does that work?
- radiospiel 13y agoThe box syncs emails from your mail vendors IMAP server, say, at imap.gmail.com, and decrypts it in the process. In that process we are able to check for spam.
- dramatise 13y agoFool-proof plug-and-play GPG mails for everyone, nice!
- jebus989 13y agoThe 6th new account (made in the last hour) to make a positive comment on this particular post, nice.
- Darkpandemic 13y agoGeile Scheisse!!!
- SanktKlaus 13y agoin English please! ;)
- slug 13y ago"Emails are synced from the users’ email accounts via IMAP to the box and are stored in plaintext in a secure storage area on the box" I've seen a better (opensource) approach to use gpg to securely store email: upon receiving a message, if not already encrypted, use the public key of the account recipient to encrypt it. This way, all email is encrypted with your pgp key. The downside , which this box is trying to solve, is that the (imap) client will need to do the decryption, so it's not transparent to the user. There's also filters for well known MTA (exim,postfix,etc) that will encrypt/decrypt using pgp or s/mime (user/host) keys upon connection. I see another problem with the 'box' approach, it will need the plain-text passphrase, so if someone steals or has access to your (mail)box, all your email is plain-text and you will have to revoke the pgp key. Not only that, if you are not aware of the intrusion, someone can impersonate you, since they can sign any message/document with those credentials. How about redundancy/backups? If the net connection goes down or box/house stops working, what happens to the emails?
- radiospiel 13y agoThe assumption about this box is that it is in a reasonably safe place. Also, everything on the box is stored encrypted, you need a master key to unlock the box and get it running. Note: This is not spy stuff. This is a reasonably secure environment for your email (and as secure as the average's persons desktop is)
- slug 13y agoMy point was that for a non-pgp aware imap client to read the encrypted emails, the passphrase needs to be somewhere, probably in RAM all the time, making it a target, so if there's an exploit, having it encrypted or not is moot. It solves the 'steal box' problem and since it's not spy stuff, we don't have to worry about cold boot attacks ;) On a desktop, the pgp credentials either exists momentarily (user input) or through an agent, so at first sight it would seem that would be safer, although then we could also argue that a desktop is probably not as safe as this box due to all the other software that is run by the user.
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- jerknextdoor 13y agoMaybe I'm the only one, but the wiggling "Early Birds" on this page and the "Top Ten Facts" along with the marquee scroll on the homepage made it difficult for me to concentrate on reading.
- radiospiel 13y agoThanks for the feedback. Things like these should help us to improve our website :)
- biot 13y agoThe astroturfing on this article is incredible: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dreamdweller https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dreamdweller https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=banpei https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=banpei https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dramatise https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dramatise https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kc99 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kc99 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=conn23 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=conn23 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Darkpandemic https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Darkpandemic https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SanktKlaus https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SanktKlaus https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=freemefromthis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=freemefromthis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SimonJester89 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SimonJester89 It's possible that this one article caused all the above users to sign up at the same time just to add their one and only HN comment. Occam's razor suggests a different conclusion, however.
- erikb 13y agoNot trying to defend anybody but it is really likely that people just learn to know about HN through linking this page in a facebook status update, which is what they did. And Occam actually would support this, considering it's a much simpler solution than people going about creating accounts, logging in and out of them, to fake positive feedback on a website that matters for technical discussion but not much for marketing value (outside the US).
- biot 13y agoThat's a valid point, but even still if the link was shared on Facebook then why wouldn't those people comment on Facebook instead of going to the trouble of signing up for some site they've never been to and don't plan to participate in? Unless they were asked to sign up and add a comment of support, which isn't much better.
- e12e 13y agoInteresting project, but I'm not convinced it solves the right problem. If you trust "magic configuration" to secure your email, you can already have (a lot of) that with just smtp+tls. As far as I can tell there's no way to know if the email you send will be encrypted or not. So there's no way to know if it can be considered secure or not? Secondly, it appears as if though if the receiver has a public key listed, the email will be encrypted, regardless of whether of the recipient uses gpg normally. Finally all off-line storage an backup is still plain-text, so if someone, say, gets access to your laptop that you use for reading mail, it's all stored in plaintext on that machine, because it's been retrieved in plaintext from the kinko box. Fundamentally though, this doesn't help with managing trust, and making trust visible. I agree that is hard, and inconvenient -- but without it I'm not really sure I see the point? Worse than that, I can't see how this won't give a false sense of security.