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Securing Email Communications from Facebook
- Joeboy 11y agoI set up my first PGP key in 1998, and I have as yet never received a PGPed email from anybody except myself. So it's exciting that I might finally do so.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rogeryu 11y agoI use GPG/PGP to sign my mails, using PGP/Mime, not inline PGP, which creates an ugly mail header that will confuse many readers. My mail has a signature.asc file, and sometimes I get a question about this. Then I explain. The most surprising about this is that most people don't ask anything. Maybe they figure it out, but I doubt that. I do this to introduce the concept to other people.
- zz1 11y agoI sign emails too, for the same reason. I got the most different reactions, up to "Careful, you have a virus that put a lot of strange characters in your email". Do you have a standard text you use to explain what it is? I confess, I planned to write it, but it's still on my to-do list…
- unsignedint 11y agoI don't routinely do it anymore myself, but I had an one liner "May contain a digital signature to ensure integrity" and noone asked me any questions.
- ThatGeoGuy 11y agoNot my website, nor do I know the website owner, but I often use http://futureboy.us/pgp.html http://futureboy.us/pgp.html. Provides a good overview of PGP/GPG, and more or less gives enough instruction that someone could set it up on their own provided they were more technically inclined. Either way, if they were interested, this would be a good enough starting point I think.
- Joeboy 11y agoUpdate: Somebody just sent me a PGP'ed email! Encrypted to my 1998 key, to which I no longer have the private key :-(
- keehun 11y agoFor this reason, I've learned to encrypt my first-ever email keys (from 2013 -- hey, I'm young) into an encrypted disk image that I can mount from any computer sync'd on the cloud.
- zz1 11y agoDo you have a new PGP key? Provide us a fingerprint, short ID, link or whatever, and you'll get mail ;)
- Joeboy 11y ago66DB D820 C755 1E5E 2339 ABEC 98A3 E568 5745 0109 Edit: Achievement unlocked, thanks Iain and Seth.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Asparagirl 11y agoI know those feels; I had an old PGP key (private key and passphrase now both lost) linked to my old AOL account (long gone, of course) using my old surname (been married eleven years now), but registered with the MIT server back in 1997, so it's still visible to the world. It's like a digital version of some mysterious, unopenable time capsule.
- tomjen3 11y agoI have only ever sent one encrypted email, but that was by accident. Turns out Thunderbird + enigmail will default to encrypt the email if you have your recipients key.
- kub3ling 11y agoDo/will they support curve25519 keys?
- jakobegger 11y agoQuoting from the article: "we are investigating the addition of support for GPG's newer elliptic curve algorithms in the near future"
- kub3ling 11y agoMissed that. My bad
- TsukasaUjiie 11y agoNeato. The idea of Facebook acting as a "keyserver" worries me a bit though. I'm looking forward to when they inevitably (I hope) add support for visualising the Web of Trust
- Flimm 11y agoWhy does the idea of Facebook as keyserver worry you? How is it worse than using another keyserver?
- gtirloni 11y agoI don't need a MIT account to use MIT's key server. Facebook has the tendency to make things available only behind their wall.
- ceejayoz 11y agoWhy couldn't you use both?
- TsukasaUjiie 11y agoThere's perhaps the risk of it becoming the major anchor in the web of trust. That said, you're probably right with respect to the other keyservers being no better.
- higherpurpose 11y agoPrecisely why they should be adopting Google's End-to-End system. Yahoo is already supporting it. Also it would be better if everyone went with the same (solid) standard than doing their own thing.
- valevk 11y agoCan you tell me more about the state of End-to-End?
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- markild 11y agoIt's kinda cool that they're doing this, if not for anything else than to raise awareness about PGP. That being said, I'm trying my best, and coming up short, in figuring out what problem this would solve...
- jpp 11y agoI would guess that it will help (eventually) with email deliverability: phishing emails claiming to be from Facebook wouldn't have valid signatures. Yes, DKIM and other stuff already partly does this, but signed emails are much harder to forge!
- markild 11y agoYes, but they could just start signing the mail. There's no reason to encrypt the content if proof of origin is what they want to provide.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoSigned (and unencrypted) mails are vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks; in other words, it is possible (although not always feasible) to alter their content yet retain a valid signature.
- rakoo 11y agoThe cynic in me believes that both this and the official onion sites are baits to lure in those who typically care about privacy and thus don't want to use Facebook. By doing this Facebook allows them to gradually extend their medium of communication to FB, and thus gather more information on them.
- CWood1 11y agoPeople who care about privacy enough to stay away from Facebook in the past are going to know enough about privacy, I hope, that they'll continue to stay away in the future. If this truly is Facebook's intention, I somehow doubt it'll be very successful. I'd like to think it'll encourage more people to start encrypting and signing their emails, although somehow I doubt that as well.
- carlesfe 11y agoBesides the obvious "why care about security when Facebook has your data", this is a very positive move. One thing is giving your data to companies and another one is living on a country where there is not free speech, your beliefs/lifestyle/genetics are illegal, etc. More encryption is always a good thing. By the way, the article links to an official FB Onion site. Neat!
- pyre 11y ago> "why care about security when Facebook has your data" (not specifically responding to you, just a general response) Facebook and the NSA aren't the only threats to protect yourself from. Improvements to security aren't bad just because they aren't absolute 100% solutions.
- kpcyrd 11y agoThis could be an attempt to correlate gpg keys to facebook accounts. Also, make sure you're verifying the key out of band after you've pulled it from facebook. /paranoia
- mirimir 11y agoEach pseudonym needs its own GnuPG key. And there can't be any overlap in usage, signatures, etc. Just sayin'.
- Sami_Lehtinen 11y agoSo what, gpg keys are unlimited resource. Just generate new ones whenever required. I've been using that strategy. Just like you don't want to reuse your password everywhere. If you don't want to be anonymous anymore, you can sign nonce with your official and with your temporary key. Some seem to claim that OpenPGP doesn't support ephemeral keys, but it does. You just need to generate new keys and use those, when ever you want/need to.
- mike_hearn 11y agoThe point of this is to hide the data from gmail/hotmail/yahoo/other mail providers. Not Facebook themselves, obviously.
- higherpurpose 11y agoNext-up officially announced integration of Axolotl and ZRTP in both Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger?
- mike-cardwell 11y agoWhatsApp already implemented Axolotl - https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/
- StavrosK 11y agoIt's only used opportunistically, though (which is still much better than plaintext).
- sarciszewski 11y ago> Implying that opportunistic encryption is much better than plaintext Unless you have an active attacker, in which case they are equivalent.
- StavrosK 11y agoSo, overall, much better :P
- sarciszewski 11y agoNope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibF36Yyeehw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibF36Yyeehw
- lmm 11y agoNo security measure will 100% prevent attacks; any security measure is about increasing the cost to attackers. Forcing attackers to be active is a good thing on this measure (though of course if you can use a technique that is also effective against active attackers this is better still).
- 11y ago
- amelius 11y agoI tried using PGP in Thunderbird on Linux. It was a pain. E-mails suddenly didn't format properly, and I got weird error messages at unexpected moments. We need better user-agents for dealing with encrypted email.
- facepalm 11y agoI've been unable to get Enigmail to work in Thunderbird on OS X. Anybody else has that problem? It leaves "normal" mails alone, though. The issue I have is that it fails to discover my private key, even though gpg2 is clearly aware of it (and Engimail is configured to use gpg2).
- keehun 11y agoThat's interesting. I've had nothing but success on it. It discovered my key that I didn't have to do anything with.
- ThatGeoGuy 11y agoYou may be failing to start gpg-agent properly. Are you exporting GPG_AGENT_INFO? What does it say? I noticed this was somewhat of a sore spot for people when Enigmail started forcing gpg2 instead of letting the user choose. I don't disagree with forcing gpg2, but there were definitely some configuration changes that needed to be made on my system to cope with / reflect that choice.
- facepalm 11y agoThanks, I'll look into that. I don't think I ever explicitly configured gpg-agent, so there might be a lingering issue.
- StavrosK 11y agoI have the opposite experience. I installed Enigmail and everything just works.
- twothamendment 11y ago
- mike-cardwell 11y agoThey link to their key at: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x2F3898CEDEE958CF https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x2F3898CEDE... Surprised that nobody has generated a private key with a UID containing an abusive or self promoting real name/comment, signed Facebooks key with it and uploaded the signature to the keyservers yet. Tempted to sign it with a key with a real name of: "Software Developer / SysAdmin for hire. See https://mywebsite" https://mywebsite" I guess at that point I'd be permanently branded a spammer though. ;)
- jessaustin 11y agoHow would that be spam? Aren't the keyservers intended to act as repositories for signed keys?
- grhmc 11y agoHe'd be posting ads via signed keys. Not an actual usable signed key.
- jessaustin 11y agoIs that already a problem? If not, I don't see how FB having a key changes anything.
- grhmc 11y agoJust a high profile key which people are going to look at, that is all.
- grhmc 11y agoAaaand now pgp.mit.edu is down :)
- ihsw 11y agoWell, someone tried putting an ASCII goatse in there. I suppose that counts as "abusive."
- motters 11y agoSince notifications from Facebook will contain mostly predictable content won't these just become cribs for crackers?
- dionyziz 11y agoNot sure what you mean, but good encryption algorithms (including GPG's RSA and DSA) are not vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks. Even if you know the plaintext and the cryptotext shouldn't help you in cracking the key in any way.
- __z 11y agoI dont facebook very often so every few days they send me a notification email "myname you have notifications pending." even when i dont.
- lmm 11y agoModern crypto algorithms are considered broken if they're not secure against known-plaintext and even chosen-plaintext attacks.
- joosters 11y agoAny they encrypting the contents, or merely signing them? The article seems to imply one then the other.
- StavrosK 11y agoThat's a great move, and Facebook deserves props for this. Not only for making it easy for people to disseminate keys, or for making it hard for my email provider to read my email, but for also eliminating phishing. Now my email client will show me beyond a shadow of a doubt that a given email was sent by Facebook.
- benburwell 11y agoTotally agree. Going off of this, it would be kind of neat if they started signing all outgoing email by default, regardless of whether the recipient has uploaded their public key for encryption.
- kub3ling 11y agoDo they use --hidden-recipient ?
- unsignedint 11y agoDid they just kill pgp.mit.edu by linking from this page? I'm having problem retrieving keys from pgp.mit.edu, or it's just a coincidence...
- lucb1e 11y agoWorks for me (and quite fast, given I'm using the Tor browser).
- unsignedint 11y agoThe top page seems to be working but lookup part seems to choking. Getting one from gpg didn't work, too
- christianmann 11y agoIt's dead for me, too.
- lmm 11y agoIt's long been the least reliable keyserver I've used.
- tricolon 11y agoWhat are some better ones?
- lmm 11y agoHmm, I was about to suggest http://keyserver.eu/ http://keyserver.eu/ but they seem slow now as well. A sudden surge of interest in PGP?
- heypete 11y agopool.sks-keyservers.net is a round-robin pool pointing to several dozen synchronized keyservers (including the MIT server). It's usually the default option for most PGP clients. See https://sks-keyservers.net/ https://sks-keyservers.net/
- prajjwal 11y agoThis sounds like it's more about keeping Facebook data out of Google's hands. They must leak a lot of information about who did what on Facebook to them through notifications ending up in Gmail accounts? Does that impact either party in a significant way? Just a thought.
- icebraining 11y agoThe number of people who will actually upload their PGP key is so low that the loss for Google is negligible, and FB knows it. I find it more likely that they want to protect and to be seen to protect their users.
- cinquemb 11y agoThe number of people who will actually upload their PGP key is so low… So another act in "security" theater for most people. They must keep everyone guessing at what they will do next.
- mynameisvlad 11y agoWat. How is this security theater? It's providing an actual, useful service for those who choose to use it. If the majority of people choose not to, then the fault would lie primarily on the end user, not on Facebook.
- mike_hearn 11y agoIndeed. It's not theater - this really is more secure than before. It's just got painful usability. However that is not Facebook's fault: the security community has failed to produce any end-to-end encrypted email product that is easy to use. The good news is: a) This continues the momentum that the big Valley companies are creating around strong crypto b) This will motivate people to build better replacements for PGP, because now they know that they might actually receive encrypted emails if they can get sweis and others at Facebook on board. S/MIME would have been slightly better, IMO, but I understand why they didn't do it that way - Yahoo and Google are working on OpenPGP browser extensions, and "copy/paste your key" is easier than "upload your certificate". We badly need a modern, fresh take on email end-to-end crypto.
- pjc50 11y agoAs people have said in this thread, one instant advantage of this is an anti-phishing measure. Not only can you verify mails from Facebook, but they can send you password reset links to click on and know that your email account has probably not been compromised. Compromise or loss of the PGP key remains an ongoing problem. Maybe we could persuade Apple to add PGP functionality to their secure co-processor.
- wahsd 11y agoThere is absolutely zero reason to trust Facebook. Facebook is essentially a self-maintained government dossier on everyone that uses it and doesn't take adequate precautions. Who would have thought that in the future, 1985 would look more like people reporting everything they do and say and think to the government surveillance state rather than the government actually having to put any kind of effort into actually acquiring that information.
- Joeboy 11y agoOk, Facebook is a modern version of the Stasi, but it's still good that third parties can't snoop on my interactions with them. I don't see any reason to feel bad about this specific measure.
- fwn 11y agoYeah, right. Except for the rape prisons I guess. It's not against you personally, but I never understood how people compare a brutal, murderous gov. agency to something as mild as a social network.
- grhmc 11y agoSince the pgp.mit.edu site is down, here is their public key DEE958CF: https://gist.github.com/grahamc/efbebf4c05ff9e097731 https://gist.github.com/grahamc/efbebf4c05ff9e097731
- sarciszewski 11y agoI wonder if they're using PEAR Crypt_GPG to facilitate this, or if they wrote their own encryption wrapper? If it's the latter and anyone at Facebook wants someone to look over their implementation, let be know. ;)
- sweis 11y agoHi Scott. We're not using PEAR. If you are interested in looking at the implementation and other interesting security stuff, we have a lot of security openings: Security Software Engineer - https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0IA000000G2bGoMAJ&dept=it https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0IA000000G2... Open Source Security Engineer - https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0I1200000G4M4hEAF&dept=it https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0I1200000G4... PrivateCore Software Engineer - https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0I1200000G4babEAB&dept=it https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0I1200000G4... Security Infrastructure - https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0IA000000G40MFMAZ&dept=engineering https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?req=a0IA000000G4...
- Kunix 11y agoThe funny state of Facebook: the research side pushing for more privacy by promoting Tor/PGP, and the official side requiring you to upload your government ID if you want to keep your account. (see #MyNameIs)
- dmix 11y agoFun fact: one of the big reasons Tom created Myspace in 2003 was because of Friendster's real-name policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson#Career
- acdha 11y agoI applaud the sentiment but really wish we had something which wasn't a UX disaster. I tried to set this up on a Mac, which is what this looks like for someone who first started using PGP in the mid-90s: GPG Tools seems to be popular and has Mail.app integration. It loads, shows the secret key as valid in the GPG Keyring app, but any attempt to decrypt a message fails with “Secret key to decrypt the message is missing”. No diagnostic information is provided. Okay, I'll pretend it's still 1995 and run it on the command-line. "pbpaste | gpg --decrypt" needs a password, so I naively attempt to setup gpg-agent so I don't need to keep pulling my 30-character password from my password manager. "brew install gpg-agent" and it quickly turns out that it's just broken: pinentry doesn't get stdin for some reason and chews 100% CPU printing * as quickly as possible. So much for saving time in the future; let's just see if we can open one message. Save it to a temp file, run it through gpg --decrypt and … it's HTML so the URL needs to be unescaped, so make that "gpg --decrypt encrypted.asc | urlview". Open that URL and get … a server error from Facebook. So … another vote for http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/
- sweis 11y agoHi Chris. I worked on this and want to diagnose your server error. When you decrypted from the command line, did you notice the plaintext blob preceding the HTML message content? Look for "Content-Type: text/plain;" and see if there is an unmodified verification URL there. You might have only noticed the HTML one, which will be a pain to cut & paste. If it's still broken, please contact me. Incidentally, I've been using both GPGTools/Mail.app and Gmail/Mailvelope without trouble. The latter doesn't open clicked links in a new tab, though. I've had to "Copy as" and paste in another tab.
- TwoBit 11y agoThe point is that somebody shouldn't have to come in and diagnose the server error.
- mynameisvlad 11y agoYes, that's the point with all software. Everyone would love not ever getting errors and issues. But, just like with all other software out there, there will inevitably be bugs and corner cases which have to be diagnosed. I'd prefer someone from the product team actually caring about this and helping out rather than no support offered whatsoever, which is closer to the norm for big companies.
- satyajeet23 11y agoThings I didn't think I'd be doing today: adding my PGP key to my Facebook profile!
- Resilldoux 11y agoSo we're still sending messages with Facebook's public PGP key in between? Pseudo-security...
- bound008 11y agoOne of the engineers behind this is a YC Founder of this company: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/sendoid-finally-sharing-big-files-isnt-a-huge-pain/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/sendoid-finally-sharing-big... This is likely an attempt by motivated individuals inside an unstructured place like Facebook to get a feature they want out to the public, and less driven by some PM who wants to compete with others.
- wodenokoto 11y agoI was wondering if facebook wanted to hide more of their users activity from competitors. I know a lot of my friends get all notifications (or used to) as emails and auto archive those, essentially giving google insights into their entire Facebook presence. Something Facebook obviously don't want to give away. Your theory seems much more likely, given the probable adoption of this feature :)
- pr0zac 11y agoI'm the engineer mentioned here. Its nice people actually remember my startup. :) Facebook is definitely a place that lets engineers run with ideas, and it is that environment that allowed us build this out as something engineer created, designed, and driven. I will acknowledge the PMs on the relevant product teams were all great to work with at the points they became involved and understood the problem we were hoping to solve here.
- greyman 11y agoWhat is the easiest way to get a PGP key?
- zz1 11y agoGenerate one. Which OS are you on? Look up for a tutorial, you'll certainly find a good one. Edit: you either have to install GPGTools (for OS X, https://gpgtools.org/ https://gpgtools.org/), GPG4Win (https://gpg4win.org https://gpg4win.org) Windows, or gpg for linux. To use GPG in Thunderbird you'll also need Enigmail.
- dublinben 11y agoThis tutorial is very easy to follow, and will get you set up from scratch. https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/
- ForHackernews 11y agoThis might be mostly useless, but at the very least it will increase the volume of PGP-secured email floating around in the world. It will make encrypted email more common, and therefore less of a red flag for security services.
- 67uy 11y agoI wish my banks would do this.. I'd love to get account notices and PDF statements sent to me PGP signed/encrypted!
- hrjet 11y agoWonderful! I don't use Facebook that much, but I hope this helps make PGP more popular among users and services. In particular, I am hoping for banks to start PGP encrypting the reports they send to me via email.
- kkl 11y agoThis! I do not use Facebook but would love if this leads to increased interest in using asymmetric crypto to encrypt automated notification emails.
- moyix 11y agoWhat more or less sunk PGP for me was gmail. The various gpg-in-chrome plugins I've tried have been pretty uniformly terrible (including Google's own end-to-end), so the standard web interface is out. And unfortunately, by allowing me to store so much mail (~7.5GB at the moment), gmail has made it effectively impossible to use any other IMAP client – I've left Mail.app and Thunderbird running for days trying to do their initial sync, to no avail. The only client that actually works with the amount of mail I have, and has PGP support, is mutt, and even that takes ~5 minutes to read in its header index on startup. The end result is I pretty much just don't use PGP unless someone sends me something encrypted (which does happen! But probably this is just because I work in security), and then I break out mutt and resign myself to waiting around a bit for things to load.
- mpnordland 11y agoMy setup uses alot/notmuch with offlineimap doing sync. If you have offlineimap sync on cron, or put it in daemon mode, you don't have to wait at all.
- alooPotato 11y agocan you expand on what you found terrible about the chrome plugins that added decryption to gmail?
- moyix 11y agoDisclaimer: this was about a year ago, so some things may have changed. Specific comments mainly apply to Google's own end-to-end, since that's the one I remember best. In general, they tended to not mesh well with the gmail UI – you could decrypt, but the decrypted message would pop up in a new window. And sometimes it just wouldn't detect that a message was encrypted, so you'd have to select the encrypted text, find the context menu for it, etc. Composing was also more difficult than it needed to be – another extra set of steps to remember before hitting send, rather than something that would be triggered automatically if the recipient was in my keyring. Basically, the functionality offered usually ended up not being much better than selecting the message, opening a terminal, and doing `pbpaste | gpg --decrypt` (or --encrypt on the way out).
- mdavidn 11y agoHow about S/MIME? Most mail clients offer out-of-the-box support, including iOS. No additional software required. Requesting a free certificate from Comodo with a web browser is much easier than grokking PGP. But then exporting your private key and importing it on iOS ... Still a UX disaster, unfortunately.
- asztal 11y agoExactly. It seems perfect for this sort of email because the existing PKI handles trust.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- somerandomone 11y agoBug report: the add public key page doesn't recognize the public key exported by GnuPG which has the header -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) I figured out that the second line with version should be removed but the error message is not quite helpful.
- jonmillican 11y agoHi, engineer who worked on this here. Would you mind linking me to your key, including the version line, and letting me know the error message is? I'll try to see what the issue is.
- somerandomone 11y agoSure. Let's say I want to use the public key listed at here[0], like this[1]. This[2] is the error message. [0] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/Step_by_Step_Guide/s1-gnupg-export.html https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp... [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9kwqLwGBg_7NGd4QlRreU5hSFE/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9kwqLwGBg_7NGd4QlRreU5hSFE... [2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9kwqLwGBg_7WlpqUFlEWmRMY2c/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9kwqLwGBg_7WlpqUFlEWmRMY2c...
- jonmillican 11y agoThe key you linked to seems to have invalid CRC bytes at the end of its ASCII armor - this is why we can't accept it, as it's malformed. http://imgur.com/J1bp73V http://imgur.com/J1bp73V
- ronald_dregan 11y agomade by facebook = automatic danger zone alert, avoid at all costs
- keehun 11y agoI've started signing (not encrypt) every email I send, even to my friends and professors. The cost of this is that they see the ugly block of a signature. I hope to raise awareness.
- aw3c2 11y ago67uy, I hope you read this. Your account seems to have been falsely flagged as something bad immediately, you are "[dead]" ghosted. :/
- RMarcus 11y agoPerhaps this has already been said and I missed it, but Facebook has the capability to be a pretty neat public key repository. You could have a pretty high degree of confidence that the public key associated with a Facebook account belonged to the account owner. Hopefully they'll be come kind of API (if there isn't already). Either way, I hope http://keybase.io http://keybase.io lets me add my Facebook profile now!
- userbinator 11y agoAt first I misparsed the title, and since I do not use Facebook, thought it was about preventing them from reading your email...
- FlaceBook 11y agoThis sounds like another completely pointless PR stunt to fool people into thinking Facebook gives a shit about their privacy.