Stop Using Encrypted Email - <AUTHOR> https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html <comment><USER2> Hey 'tptacek and 'lvh. You definitely make valid points. But your arguments here on HN could perhaps be reduced if you adequately framed the problem:

RFC 822/2822/5322 e-mail, on top of RFC 5321 SMTP and RFC 3501 IMAP, can't be secure. (And more RFCs I'm probably forgetting).

To most people in the target audience (LARPers, technologist, and others), "email" isn't necessarily that. It's whatever Google/Outlook/... does for them. It isn't a concete set of protocols. But a _type_ of messaging. A particular set of ergonomics.

When framing it from that perspective, people (programmers?) will go "well duh". Then we can move on from the unproductive discussion about semantics and move on to defining new standards, clarifying threat models, and building a real replacement people and companies will adopt. It'll take a lot of coordination and cooperation that can't happen until we've convinced enough people what the real problem is. And as long as we're using vague, subjective terms like "email", I don't think we can.

<comment><USER3> Nobody is going to adopt a new email standard that lacks the problems SMTP has. People will instead build new secure messengers that come closer and closer to the ergonomics of email, and that's what people who see a future for "secure email" should be looking towards, not some doomed effort to get the Internet to migrate to a new email protocol.

<comment><USER2> Hmmm perhaps. But while we keep calling "email" the problem, we limit ourselves to creating "not-email". That's an admittedly large box, but when $politician and $businessperson is still addicted to "email" and asks for it by name, you can argue as much as you want, but not get 100% traction. It is a people problem. A naming problem. A publicity problem.

IMO, better to leave "email" open as a generic term, with the hopes that one of these new messengers (hopefully, Signal) can eventually be standardized and opened to other implementations for adoption inside $bigcorp.

But what do I know?

<comment><USER3> I don't know what you know, but I can say that Signal and Signal Protocol have protected so many more messages than PGP that, by comparison and to a rough first approximation, we could say that PGP has protected effectively no messages. Signal isn't even the most popular messenger with end-to-end encryption, and its uptake so far outstrips that of PGP email that the two aren't even comparable.

So appeals to the email userbase aren't especially interesting to me. My concern is that nerds are continuously trying to convince normal people that they _should_ be encrypting email. That's dangerous, and wrong.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know what you know, but I can say that Signal and Signal Protocol > have protected so many more messages than PGP that, by comparison and to a > rough first approximation, we could say that PGP has protected effectively > no messages

I can believe it about Signal protocol, since it's implemented on Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. But, if you talk just about Signal proper, are you sure it protected more messages and more people than PGP?

I see this claim fairly often, but no data to back it up

<comment><USER5> Anecdotally I've received e-mails from two people with S/MIME or PGP _signatures_ and zero encrypted e-mails. There are about a dozen people in my contact list with Signal, some of whom I exchange messages with regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OP has an extravagant threat model. Yeah if I were trying to hide communications from some dictator where even the metadata of recipient and timestamp is damning then of course email is out.

PGP is a good way to communicate under the right circumstances. Say I'm writing to someone I trust and have verified their key fingerprint via a secure channel (in person, over the phone, etc). If I were sending them login credentials for a shared site, or bank info for setting up a payment, or even just wanted to block general corporate snooping then what's wrong with PGP? It's "pretty good privacy."

It's nice that I can apply the cryptography on a local machine and then send the result over email. I don't need to sign up for the paranoid chat app du jour.

( In fact PGP is useful for more than signing/encrypting mail, see [https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-11-05-advanced-intro- gnupg.h...](https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-11-05-advanced-intro-gnupg.html) )

<comment><USER7> Have you read the article?

The problem isn't just the metadata leak, far from it. Some problems mentioned:

1\. PGP is old and broken and messages can potentially be decrypted without access to private key

2\. Because email's default is plain-text, in real world conversations you end up with people replying in plain text with your whole message being quoted

3\. Archived messages will leak. An e2e channel needs to have a way to inform receivers that messages should be deleted after some time

4\. Private keys eventually leak, therefore it is important that when it happens, the system makes it hard to decrypt old messages (by combining it with ephemeral keys).

So if you have login credentials to send to someone, if you value that info and I assume you do, otherwise you wouldn't use PGP, then this is precisely the use case that encrypted email is terrible for.

PGP usage is also very user unfriendly so you're not losing anything really,.

<comment><USER8> > 1\. PGP is old and broken and messages can potentially be decrypted without > access to private key

GPG works.

> 2\. Because email's default is plain-text, in real world conversations you > end up with people replying in plain text with your whole message being > quoted

Don't quote

> 3\. Archived messages will leak. An e2e channel needs to have a way to > inform receivers that messages should be deleted after some time

Don't archive

> 4\. Private keys eventually leak, therefore it is important that when it > happens, the system makes it hard to decrypt old messages (by combining it > with ephemeral keys).

Delete them before they do.

The "new wave" of encryption like on from the guy calling himself Moxi Marlinspike is the prime definition of an unproven technology.

The screaming headline is because he wants to make noise, and get cred for his crowd.

His argument: GnuPG — a proven, and well reviewed technology is broken because some minor bugs were found, despite the fundamental crypto behind it still being more sound than anything else.

He then follows to say that a fundamentally less sound, complex unproven system, is a better alternative. And that even when the novel crypto messengers themselves are dogged with daily minor security bugs being found.

If I met the man in person, I would've said some warm words to him.

<comment><USER9> Your messages are only as secure as the least careful person you correspond with.

<comment><USER10> But that's true no matter what methods you use. When you send a message, you don't enjoy any security at all from the _recipient_. If they decide to leak your messages, your messages will leak. If the way they decide to do it is by being incompetent, your messages will still leak.

Look at the HackerOne reward policy for Snapchat: [https://hackerone.com/snapchat](https://hackerone.com/snapchat)

Among many less notable findings that aren't considered security issues, you can see that "screenshot detection avoidance" is a non-qualifying "bug". It's not really a bug. It doesn't qualify for a reward because _your messages cannot be secured against people who are supposed to read them_. Security against the recipient is (or was; I don't know the current marketing) a major marketing point for Snapchat, but it's never been something they actually offer.

How is "your messages are only as secure as the least careful person you correspond with" more of an argument against PGP than it is against Signal?

<comment><USER11> The parent is focusing on carefulness, and not malicious intent. If being careful requires you to be knowledgeable in computer security or cryptography, we're never going to have a secure communication system because people aren't going to spend years learning those things to simply talk to people. Secure defaults matter, and not being able to configure and use GPG correctly is hardly "incompetence."

<comment><USER9> Exactly this. tptacek's article talks about issues like someone replying (with the messages quoted) in cleartext by mistake, or leaking their keys. In a messenger like Signal, there's no easy way to accidentally reply in cleartext, and key management is handled for you so it's not possible to accidentally send the private key instead of the public key. It's not enough for _you_ to never do those things, you have to trust your correspondent to be capable to do those things without error (which is different than trusting them to not intentionally disclose).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to say the same thing I said last time this came up -- so what should we use instead, then? What do we use if we want secure messaging, _but with the (social) affordances of email_? There still doesn't seem to be any answer to that!

No, Signal is not an acceptable answer; it replicates text messaging, not email. In more detail:

1\. Email is potentially long-form. I sit down and type it from my computer. Text-messaging is always short, although possibly it's a series of short messages. A series of short emails, by contrast, is an annoyance; it's something you try to avoid sending (even though you inevitably do when it turns out you got something wrong). Similarly, you don't typically hold rapid- fire conversations over email.

2\. On that point, email says, you don't need to read this immediately. I expect a text message will be probably be read in a few minutes, and probably replied to later that day (if there's no particular urgency). I expect an email will be probably read in a few hours, and probably replied to in a few days (if there's no particular urgency).

3\. It's OK to cold-email people. To text someone you need their phone number; it's for people you know. By contrast, email addresses are things that people frequently make public specifically so that strangers can contact them.

So what am I supposed to do for secure messaging that replicates that? The best answer I've gotten for this so far -- other than PGP which is apparently bad -- is "install Signal on your computer in addition to your phone and just use it as if it's email". That's... not really a satisfactory answer. Like, I expect a multi-page Signal message talking about everything I've been up to for the past month to annoy its recipient, who is likely reading it on their phone, not their computer. And I can't send someone a Signal message about a paper they wrote that I have some comments on, not unless they're going to put their fricking phone number on their website.

So what do I do here? The secure email replacement just doesn't seem to be here yet.

(I'm guessing in case (3), the authors would suggest just using unencrypted email, but what about problems (1) and (2)?)

<comment><USER13> I was going to write the same thing, but less eloquently!

The solution seems simple. Create something much like signal, but with the user-interface of e-mail! This addresses your points 1 and 2 perfectly. I'd want my UI to include actual working archives. None of this 'this message will be deleted automatically after x days'. Because e-mail is non-ephemeral communication. Hence I want to be able to access it.

However, point 3 introduces a relevant technical difference between signal and e-mail that affects the user experience.

Federation.

This is what makes cold e-mailing possible. It is what allows anyone who controls a domain to start accepting e-mails at that domain without needing permission, or any central service.

I don't have enough of the infrastructure of signal's ephemeral key pre- sharing front of mind. But I really hope there is some way to get this to work in a federated system. I could eventually see this replacing e-mail.

Point 3 has one more side-effect that hurts any e2e encrypted form of communication: spam-filtering. Because content-based spam filtering essentially requires access to the plain text. And for it to be effective, you want to base your filtering on a large dataset. Even if you were to move applying the spam filter to the endpoints (ignoring compute and trade-secret issues), you still need access to plain-texts to train your spam-filter.

Sure, you could probably share any false negatives back to some aggregator to train the spam filter. Because generally spam sent to you doesn't need to remain confidential. However, false-positives i.e. emails that are wrongfully marked as spam, are not things you'd want to share back to some aggregator. I suppose MPC could be of help here, but that would 1) fix the algorithm used and 2) have huge computational overhead.

In summary, if we can federate e2e encryption _and_ get spam-filtering to work, we could and should replace the entire user experience of e-mail with an e2e encrypted protocol.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _I don 't have enough of the infrastructure of signal's ephemeral key pre- > sharing front of mind. But I really hope there is some way to get this to > work in a federated system._

Well, there's one major hurdle: multiple devices. Pre shared keys (and one time keys, and ratchet keys) are generated on the user's computer. If there's several of them, say a Wintel desktop and an Android palmtop, messages sent with the desktop's pre-shared keys can't be decrypted by the palmtop¹.

So we need a need to synchronise those keys between the devices. The easiest way to do it is to store the private half on the recipient's server. But then you need to encrypt them to prevent the server from breaking forward secrecy. The encryption key must then be shared across both desktop and palmtop. (UI wise, it's pretty easy: connect both devices to the server, then manually type on the new device some low-ish entropy secret the old device is displaying on screen.)

[1] Commonly misnamed "phone"

<comment><USER14> In theory, both Matrix and XMPP+OMEMO handle multiple devices. In practice, I've found it to be less than smooth.

<comment><USER15> Matrix has gotten much better about this. Most scenarios where device lists get out of date are caused by the device list cache for federared homeservers being out of date. But with synapse 1.10 (released a few weeks ago), homeservers will refresh the device list much more aggressively in circumstances where it's clear that the cache is old (such as receiving a new message from a federated user on an unknown device).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sort of just generally, to word this post more simply: whenever the point is made that encrypted email is cryptographically inferior to secure messengers, people respond with a litany of ergonomic reasons why secure messengers aren't viable: they don't have the right platform support, nobody wants to type on their phones, people want decentralized platforms, nobody wants to install new software, and on and on.

The problem with these arguments is that they have nothing to do with security. There's simply no case that can be made that encrypted email is as secure as a modern secure messenger. People tolerate shoddy encryption in email because ergonomics are more important to them than security.

The problem here is that there are real people who depend on the security of their messages who would be taking unreasonable risks in trying to get an encrypted email workflow going. Rather than telling these people to read a GPG tutorial or install Enigmail or whatever, we should be telling them either to use a secure messenger, or not to put themselves at risk at all.

<comment><USER16> > There's simply no case that can be made that encrypted email is as secure as > a modern secure messenger.

\-- BEGIN SCRATCH THIS

Of course there is. I can send an encrypted email to anyone and be guaranteed that only that person has access to it, even if I have to give them instructions on how to decrypt it.

I can't do that with Whatsapp because it's closed source. I can't do that with Signal because nobody has Signal. Everyone has email.

\-- END SCRATCH THIS

There's also the problem that messengers like Whatsapp and Signal are tied to my phone and so to my identity. With email I can make a free, new email account with almost any provider and send an anonymous, encrypted email from a public Wifi with a spoofed MAC.

You can't get that level of anonymity that easily from using a phone. Every phone provider I know will at least want to keep a record of your ID before giving you a new SIM card.

EDIT: I concede my first argument sucked.

<comment><USER17> > _I can send an encrypted email to anyone and be guaranteed that only that > person has access to it, even if I have to give them instructions on how to > decrypt it._

Genuine question: how would you send me an encrypted email, and give me instructions for how to decrypt it? I have no published public keys; you'd have to send me a keypair that you yourself generated - how would you do that part securely?

<comment><USER18> You could associate your public key with a DNS record that you control?

e.g. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929)

<comment><USER16> The MitM problem is not with sending the public key. They can just email it. The MitM problem is with intercepting the instructions from person A, having the MitM person generate them, and provide the pair to person B while impersonating A.

<comment> dane-pgp If you know you want to email firstname.lastname@example.com and if you trust DNSSEC, then fetching the public key for firstname.lastname@example.com from the DNS should be at least as secure as visiting [https://example.dk](https://example.dk) in your browser.

(If you don't trust that Alice's email address is email@example.com then you shouldn't send an email for her to that address regardless of MitM attacks.)

<comment><USER19> You're omitting the part that example.dk could create a fake key for email@example.com, publish that, decrypt a copy for themselves, and reencrypt it for firstname.lastname@example.com's public key.

<comment> dane-pgp Well, I said it's at least as secure as visiting [https://example.dk](https://example.dk) in your browser, where your attack is equivalent to the hosting company or DNS provider generating a new TLS certificate for that domain without the knowledge of Alice, the nominal registrant. (The web PKI also has the problem that any CA can issue a certificate for any domain).

<comment><USER19> The catch is that the primary reason to choose encrypted email is to prevent your hosting email provider from reading your email, so the inability of encrypted email to provide that guarantee kind of renders it worthless.

<comment> dane-pgp Of all the attackers you could worry about, I wouldn't put your own email hosting provider at the top of the list. MTA-STS is nice, but it's hard for an email client to guarantee that the hop-to-hop links between itself and the recipient's inbox are going to be protected with TLS. Passive snoops between mail providers seem like a much more realistic threat.

Also, by putting a public key in the public DNS, it means that Alice can catch her mail provider's DNS server giving false information about her public key, which would come with cryptographically signed proof of which entities were involved in that lie. Ideally there would be an equivalent to the Certificate Transparency system for keys that are used or protected by DNSSEC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of my suppliers sends me PGP encrypted email invoices using an automated system. It works perfectly well for my threat model. Security vulnerabilities in processing this may exist, but so they might in every other system; there's no special vulnerability in email or PGP here.

I understand that this article is _for the secure human-to-human messaging use case_. That's fine; I have no argument with this. But outside that context, it makes no sense, yet generic claims like "encrypted email is bad" are being made. This is too broad.

I understand that the majority of perceived demand* for encryption may be for secure messaging. On that basis, maybe you think it's OK to disparage encrypted email because a win in getting universal secure personal messaging with the modern desired properties would be worth the cost. But isn't this a strawman? Who exactly is a proponent of encrypted email for secure personal messaging anyway? Who is using PGP for personal encrypted communications today who is being harmed?

* Because most people don't care; it's only a minority of advocates who, rightly or wrongly, believe that everyone should.

<comment><USER21> > It works perfectly well for my threat model.

What threat model is this?!

(In all honesty, I don't believe you. I presume you're _paying_ those invoices, in which case whatever attacker you have in mind can just follow the money and monitor the metadata to learn everything they need to know about those invoices. Or, more likely, your threat model is "nobody's seriously gonna snoop on my payments to this supplier; I just think it's fun to play with PGP.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Typical security industry contrarianism.

"Stop using that thing that mostly works as intended and is integrated into lots of email clients and systems, and has a number of independent implementations, and has the decentralized properties that match email."

"What should we use instead?"

" _shrug_ You can send encrypted stickers in Signal, isn't that neat?"

If you're going to advocate for everyone to stop using something that they rely on, make sure there's a viable alternative for them to switch to first (or throw your weight behind making/enhancing one). Otherwise you're just telling people to stop using plastic straws and giving them shitty paper straws in exchange. People know they're bad but the alternatives are worse _to them_ so they stick with the bad thing.

<comment><USER23> If you consider PGP something that mostly works, and Signal the fringe contrarian view, then we have wildly different experiences around usability, and the relative popularity of those tools.

I couldn't get any of my friends or family on PGP to save my life, and some of them are programmers. I am now at a 50/50 split in volume on Signal v WhatsApp, and most people I never even suggested it to. And they use it correctly (because that's the only way you can).

Seriously: how is PGP something that mostly works, and how is Signal contrarianism? Isn't it the other way around by now?

<comment><USER24> Signal is non-federated. That, alone, is a showstopper as an email replacement.

Open and federated protocols and services should be our target. It is hard designing them, but if we could do that in the past, we should be able to do so today.

<comment><USER23> Two replies about email replacement; I feel like we're getting off track. Signal is for secure, end to end encrypted communication. Ideally that would be all communication, but that isn't realistic in today's world.

TFA merely says: if you were gonna use PGP, use Signal instead. It's a trade off. While we target these open and federated protocols, let's not throw people who actually need encryption today under the bus.

So to the question of replacing email: unless all your email is currently PGP encrypted, you don't need to drop your email just yet.

<comment><USER24> > So to the question of replacing email: unless all your email is currently > PGP encrypted, you don't need to drop your email just yet.

You don't need to drop email at all. If you trade protocol openness for encryption, you are acquiring technical debt. How long are going to do this dance of switching between instant messenger protocols? ICQ -> AIM -> MS Messenger -> Hangouts -> WhatsApp -> Signal -> ???.

Open protocols (open in specs and federated in access) are the only way to stop this madness.

<comment><USER25> IMHO, Matrix currently has the best shot at becoming the standard for the open internet.

Those who value the freedom of choice should push for Matrix before Signal becomes the de-facto standard and is acquired by one of the tech giants looking to lock down control of communication.

<comment><USER26> Matrix is too dependent on it's only vendor in existence, their only server in existence has performance issues. Also, a monolith standard is hardly viable for federated networks, where all nodes can't upgrade all at once.

<comment><USER27> > [...], their _only server_ in existence has performance issues.

This is either misinformed or disingenuous: [https://www.hello- matrix.net/public_servers.php](https://www.hello- matrix.net/public_servers.php)

<comment><USER26> All these server instances use the same server software, provided by the same vendor.

<comment><USER27> Ah, I did not realize you were referring to the software. In that case, there is also Construct[^1]. There are other implementations in the works, though progress is somewhat slow.

Synapse is much better with regards to resource usage these days, though. The RSS of my instance is 355M right now and the CPU usage is hovering around 0-10% (15-min server load ~0.5).

[^1]: [https://github.com/matrix- construct/construct](https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with the points made here but based on my experiences I've not yet seen anything that could replace archaic solutions like email and SMS for me. Here's what I've tried and why it's failed:

(Note: This is an "everything sucks" type of comment but it's solely based on my opinion and my experiences. I'm not trying to devalue the work of the people who made the respective solutions and I'm not trying to frame this as general truths. I'm sure a lot of what's listed here just comes down to my specific circumstances.)

\- Signal: Afaik it requires a smartphone (Android or iOS) and a phone number which are two things I don't wanna be bound to. Additionally, last time I tried it, messages got noticably delayed and I didn't recieve any notifications. I assume this is because I don't have the Google Services Framework installed even though I checked and Signal should (?) work without it.

\- WhatsApp: Metadata falls rights into Facebook's hands so no thanks.

\- Matrix+Riot: Message delivery was kinda wonky and slow when I tried it. Also it looks incredibly complex which means someone I communicate with will inevitably screw up just as described in the article.

\- XMPP+Conversations: This actually looked like it works for a while. What drove me away from it in the end was that file transfer didn't work for some reason in my environment as well as push notifications for some people I talked to. Presumably they ran a version of Android that mandates Firebase Cloud Messaging and Conversations doesn't use that. We did not want to delve into debugging this further.

\- other (mostly "decentralized web") solutions: Message delivery was either unreliable, slow or it straight up didn't work. (No hate on the dweb though.)

Email is kinda bad but so is everything else. What kind of solutions do y'all use and why? Is there some "promised land" I've missed?

<comment><USER29> I send an SMS every few months, the vast majority of my messaging happens through Signal or iMessage.

And yeah, Signal isn't exceptionally reliable, I've had messages go missing for hours and even days. I hope it gets better, I'm willing to put up with it for security's sake.

I'm not sure I understand what SMS can do that Signal can't, the difference can't possibly be that Signal requires a phone number, can it? And SMS does nothing to indicate delivery and used to lose my messages all the time back when I relied on it.

<comment><USER29> Oh, right, Keybase. How did I forget Keybase?

Don't use it as much as the others because of network effects, but it works just fine. Requires a user account but no phone number.

<comment><USER28> Keybase might be worth a look. The only complaint I have is that there seems to be no way to self-host it (which is an option I'd like to have.) And the server source seems to be hidden from public which is not great for trust.

The network effect doesn't really concern me. For communication with strangers I'll have to fall back to email anyways since WhatsApp is virtually the only thing that has presence in my area.

<comment><USER29> It's true that as things stand you're pretty much stuck with Keybase the company.

But they're going to some lengths to make sure it doesn't stay that way:

[https://keybase.io/docs/client/client_architecture](https://keybase.io/docs/client/client_architecture)

I'm bullish on Keybase, even after the obnoxious Stellar Lumen airdrop fiasco. It seems like they're doing most things right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Y'know, you can have all the valid points in the world and still come on a _bit_ too strong.

I get the point the author is making re: LARPing, but this kind of attitude and tone is bordering (or, bluntly: is) condescending to anyone who doesn't know as much as you. It's a huge shame because the general discussions surrounding privacy/security are absolutely rampant with paranoid bullshit, and stuff like this just doesn't help. The people you consider to be LARPing might honestly just be new to the idea of security/privacy/encryption/(insert your label here) and would be better served by a tone where you're not talking down to them, especially if you're an established authority.

Personally speaking, I use encrypted email for my personal account - but I'm under no big illusions about it, and at this point it's partly out of laziness as I find moving email providers to be a useless exercise in wasting time. My original use case was my wife and I wanting to send documents back and forth easily, have it encrypted and retained somewhere that's (relatively) easily searchable, and isn't one of the bigger email services. Email is a workflow that goes back decades, and I'm not particularly interested in changing that mental mapping in my brain (a feeling I suspect many would echo).

It's email. It's not encrypted or 100% private if I email my buddy who's using Gmail/etc. It does jack all for my bills, newsletters, and so on. I'm not worried about the metadata not being encrypted because if I needed that level of security, I'd use Signal or some other tool.

You're probably right that it can't be "fixed", but there's also nothing wrong with attempting marginal improvements until an eventual replacement comes along. It remains a convenient "it just fucking works" and until something replaces that, and interoperates with the rest of the way the world actually works, it's probably not changing.

My 2c, at least.

<comment><USER3> We are condescending† somewhat deliberately. It's time to start shaking proponents of encrypted mail by the shoulders. We need analyses that spell out the concerns starkly and don't equivocate, because the issues themselves are stark, and a nuanced discussion (if one exists) cannot be effectively communicated to ordinary nonspecialist users.

In a world where encrypted email was popular and no reasonable alternatives existed, the equation would be different. But modern secure messengers have lapped PGP and S/MIME a practically uncountable number of times. I don't know what large power of ten the multiple is of messages protected by Signal Protocol compared to PGP, but I do know that it's large. The risk is not that people will naturally gravitate towards encrypted email (which is in practice a nightmare to use), but that well-meaning but poorly-informed technologists will try to talk them into doing that and adding encrypted email to the basket of tools ordinary people use. That can't be allowed to happen.

I also want the analysis to be somewhat bracing for technologists. I'm not making fun of PGP users when I say they're LARPing. I'm describing reality directly and meaningfully. I don't think proponents of encrypted email have really thought through _why_ they're using PGP and S/MIME, and _why_ they're not terrified of metadata collection and the occasional plaintext reply. Their risk profile is not the risk profile of the public at large; when you're LARPing, it doesn't matter if you get hit on the head with the sword.

† _Not the term I would choose, but let 's stipulate_.

<comment><USER31> I use Signal on my phone, and I like it for the common situation where I'm close enough with the person to share my personal phone number.

I'm still looking for a solution for the situation when I'm trying to communicate without revealing my identity to the person I'm talking with. Signal's reliance on phone numbers means I'd need to get a bunch of burner phones or something, which is beyond what I'm willing to do: I'm not talking about an ultra-high-risk situation, just I'd rather not announce who I am when I'm interacting with people I don't know that well.

What do you think is the most promising tool for this sort of communication? I've been hearing about Riot/Matrix; do you think that's a good option for people to use?

<comment><USER32> For a specific, common usecase, what should be used for submitting security bugs for software?

Another concern I have with the proposed replacments is many (Signal, Keybase, etc.) depend on a single centralized service.

<comment><USER33> The idea with Keybase (can't speak for signal) is that your client doesn't need to trust the server. You only need to trust that your client isn't compromised, which is easier to verify.

<comment><USER32> Sure (and that's true for signal as well), that's not my point. My point is you have to rely on that service being available. And you need to trust it to deliver and (at least with keybase) persist your encrypted data. And if that service becomes as prevalent as email, that gives the organization that controls it a lot of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's with all these articles dissing the very idea of encrypting email? It used to be that hardly anyone cared. Now there seems to be some effort to discourage something that any reasonable person interested in privacy would enthusiastically support.

This is a pretty typical example from the article of the sort of important sounding but ultimately bogus argument presented in such articles:

>So, for example, it recently turned out to be possible for eavesdroppers to decrypt messages without a key, simply by tampering with encrypted messages.

By failing to actually specify the actual attack the writer hopes to prevent a rebuttal. I am pretty sure they are talking about EFAIL. EFAIL was itself a weird slander of the idea of encrypted email but ultimately did not show any weakness of either PGP or S/MIME. It was instead a cautionary tale about the use of HTML for email.

The article attempts to promote Signal as superior to PGP email. That is unlikely as Signal initially trusts the phone system for identity. It is also quite a lot more complex than PGP so the odds of an exploit are not in Signal's favour.

<comment><USER35> > By failing to actually specify the actual attack the writer hopes to prevent > a rebuttal. I am pretty sure they are talking about EFAIL. EFAIL was itself > a weird slander of the idea of encrypted email but ultimately did not show > any weakness of either PGP or S/MIME. It was instead a cautionary tale about > the use of HTML for email.

What you said there can't be stressed enough. Despite that almost no email client in the past decades defaults to allowing active or remote content. But because you could turn all that on with _some_ clients... it somehow means PGP and S/MIME were impossibly insecure.

"Weird" is a good word to describe things.

<comment><USER15> Efail worked with the default settings on almost all clients except Mutt. Most email clients do not have a "plain text" mode. They all display emails as HTML and apply some formatting to make the "plain text" mode be monospaced.

Also, one of the Efail exploits (the CDC gadget) _was_ a cryptographic vulnerability. The fact you could manipulate the ciphertext to inject HTML tags such that GPG wouldn't scream bloody murder (because the MDC wasn't required and had very odd semantics, where GPG would output data to the caller before it had been authenticated and clients showed it as a warning and still rendered the HTML exploit) was definitely at its core a cryptographic bug.

All of this was explained in significant detail in the CCC talk about Efail[1].

[1]: [https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to- end_email_...](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9463-attacking_end-to- end_email_encryption)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I understand the points of the article and somehow agree with them.

But I still think that PGP can and should be used in certain scenarios: think of how Snowden interacted initially with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

That particular scenario was about anonimity (I don't want to reveal the sender persona just yet) and temporary "validity" of the messages: if down the line, one or two years later, the message gets decrypted, no harm is done.

Potentially, Snowden could have used a burner phone, install signal and get hold of the journalists phone number - more difficult that email, but not impossible. In Europe it's not so simple to get a sim card in a complete anon way: not impossible, but if one need several sim cards it may get cumbersome and expensive.

<comment><USER14> Today, you would use SecureDrop[1] for that particular use case (talking to journalists with an established organization). But you're still right for the general case.

[1]: [https://securedrop.org/](https://securedrop.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Agree with pretty much everything in the article. Encryption is not a property of email, and will never be. And if you manage to add a perfect encryption solution on top, it stops being email.

The most that can be done at this point is to build a new closed "email v2" which cannot interoperate with any existing client out there, but because of that it will inevitably be dead at launch.

<comment><USER38> I could imagine Signal Desktop adding a mail-like UI that still interops with Signal.

<comment><USER3> Something like that will eventually happen, because lots of people want a good desktop mail-like experience for secure messaging. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as the backplane for such a system isn't SMTP email.

It's not the core email UX that's the problem; it's SMTP email that's the problem.

<comment><USER39> _It 's not the core email UX that's the problem; it's SMTP email that's the problem._

You're article seems to argue the opposite to me. For example, the following quotes are all related to the email UX:

1\. _In any group of people exchanging encrypted emails, someone will eventually manage to reply in plaintext, usually with a quoted copy of the entire chain of email attached._

2\. _Every archived message will eventually leak._

My understanding is that it would be possible to create an alternative app that is compatible with the Signal protocol that would provide a different UX. This alternative UX could, for example, offer the ability to save all messages onto google docs, eliminating the benefits of secure messaging.

<comment><USER3> There is nothing about the core UX of email that requires plaintext as an option; you can straightforwardly imagine, and probably even readily implement, a secure messenger with the same UX as Outlook in which it's not possible to plaintext-reply a message, or send plaintext at all.

Archival is a problem. But you can also imagine something with the UX of Outlook that implements the same advisory-level disappearing messenger feature that modern secure messengers have; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me Outlook already has that feature (but that it only works for Outlook users).

The problem is the legacy of SMTP. It's not what the UI looks like.

<comment><USER40> Pretty hard to block PrintScreen though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! But a screenshot is trivial to forge anyway, and even if you block PrScrn, people can always taddle. The goal is to get the message safely to the recipient, not prevent the recipient from disclosing anything afterwards. (Non-repudiation is a common goal, but screenshots being easy to forge solves that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm surprised no one has mentioned Delta Chat yet. It solves some of the problems, as it's based on email but adds automatic encryption. See [https://delta.chat/](https://delta.chat/) and [https://autocrypt.org/](https://autocrypt.org/)

For me this is a good compromise and a great alternative to messengers like Whatsapp and Telegram. This is a first step towards decentralization while relying on the existing email infrastructure.

<comment><USER42> And Delta Chat encrypts not only messages but also metadata, right?

Although only when used properly - again, there's no point in relying on Delta Chat if your correspondent is going to forward your messages to people on gmail.

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core- rust/issues/1032](https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core- rust/issues/1032) implies that the most important metadata (who sent and who received the message) is not encrypted.

<comment><USER43> well, at least the issue says, they can be removed from the easily visible header, so they could also be encrypted.

but smtp will know anyway.

i think, this is a general issue with "who is messaging whom" \- also signal, whatsapp, whatever have to deliver the message and cannot know this afaik when these delivery data are end-to-end-encrypted. so this is not only an email problem.

but with email, at least, there is no "global" server that sees everyhing (no, also not gmail outside us :) and can draw a huge social graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Email+PGP may have some usability flaws, but it far surpasses the security of Signal against powerful adversaries, especially concerning metadata. Signal leaks your phone number which can easily be traced back to your physical location and identity, while email+PGP can be used over Tor or a similar anonymization network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you describe how Signal leaks your phone number and what capabilities and adversary needs to get it? (I know the answer, I am asking rhetorically, because I don't think that someone who knows the answer would make that case.)

<comment><USER44> An adversary could compromise the signal server and observe how messages are routed. Applying pressure or coercion to achieve this is well within the capabilities and willingness of state-level adversaries. An adversary could also compromise the person you are communicating with, not to mention cases where you don't want to leak your physical identity to a someone you are messaging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Somebody has had a really bad weekend in a muddy field apparently. Also real LARPers don't want sharp swords, the whole point is that it's not actually dangerous - no edges, no points, nobody is supposed to get actually hurt.

I'm more optimistic than this blog post allows for. I see email's trajectory over my lifetime and it looks like incremental improvements really do work, they just aren't fast. And I think just as Signal lacks an "Encrypt" button because that's the wrong UX (everything is always encrypted, no need for a button) that's email's future too. You aren't going to install "Really good privacy" and have encrypted email. Just one day perhaps many years from now you'll be debugging a weird problem and you'll discover that without ever noticing it your email is actually encrypted end-to-end and you're not actually sure when then started happening or how.

<comment><USER3> Candidly: I've never LARPed or even watched anyone LARP. I just assume they're swinging foam swords at each other's tin-foil armor. That's as sophisticated as the analysis behind my choice of words is.

<comment><USER46> Surely you've seen the lighting bolt, lightning bolt meme video. It's implied in making dumb LARP jokes!

<comment><USER3> I have not! Whose sentences are you calling "jokes" and whose jokes are you calling "dumb"?

<comment><USER46> Strictly in the Pickwickian sense, of course.

Anyway, this is it. Its stratigraphy is in the layer above All Your Base but below Leeroy Jenkins. An important, if transitional fossil.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw)

<comment><USER3> Well, that's definitely the image I was trying to evoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Good points, but the adversary for my encrypted email is corporations casually collecting data, not nation-states targeting me. Plus, most of these are one- way notifications coming to me, not threads. For my case, ProtonMail works fine.

</comment><comment><USER48> Okay, so what would a secure email alternative look like?

Can we design a system such that sending a message from firstname.lastname@example.com to firstname.lastname@example.com is reasonably secure and private? How does Signal/NOISE solve this? Why can those not be applied to non-messaging systems (or, at least more traditionally structured messaging systems - which is itself a questionable definition since email threads are a hack, its mostly just independent blobs)?

I guess I'm off to read the whitepapers for NOISE and Signal tonight to see how the models differs.

<comment><USER49> I would love to see a protocol added, so that when alice composes an email a request is sent to email@example.com with a special header to retrieve bob's private key. This in turn would be signed with a cert from bar.com, which in turn is signed by one of the same trusted CA's used for HTTPS traffic.

Is there anything like this currently implemented / standardized?

<comment><USER50> ActivityPub will bootstrap public keys from WebFinger (over TLS/HTTPS).

Keybase has an even more complicated key escrow-based system (that works for any of their "Proof" types, not just domain ownership) if you trust their clients, where your client generates an ad hoc key for the recipient and essentially a "for bob's ears only" claim and on verifiable Proof from Bob securely exchanges the ad hoc key to Bob's new public key. Which is interesting because it allows for people that haven't yet setup keys to eventually receive them so long as you trust Keybase's clients and their Proof infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I really want to use Signal but having a centralized server and requiring my phone number turn me off. I'd love to be able to self-build the iOS [0] and desktop [1] apps, and self-host the server [2]. Has anyone tried any of that, are any of them even possible?

[0]: [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- iOS](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS)

[1]: [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Desktop](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop)

[2]: [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Server](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server)

<comment><USER52> On iOS you'd have to constantly redo it via TestFlight or Jailbreak. You could build and install on Android. But "your" binaries won't connect to Signal servers.

Yes, you can host your own _Signal server and have your own singed apps but it will have to be your own _Signal network, not Moxie/Signal Foundation's Signal. Search around. Here's one - [https://gist.github.com/aqnouch/9a371af0614f4fe706a951c2b976...](https://gist.github.com/aqnouch/9a371af0614f4fe706a951c2b97651e7).

Some context:

[https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/282#issue...](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/282#issuecomment-21763403)

[https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/127#issue...](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/127#issuecomment-13335689)

[https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...](https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165)

<comment><USER53> > Yes, you can host your own _Signal server and have your own singed apps but > it will have to be your own _Signal network, not Moxie/Signal Foundation's > Signal.

I don't think that's quite true. You might[0] be discouraged from running your own self-built binaries, but given that Signal Android has reproducible builds[1], I don't think that there's any actual technical barrier. The context of your links is about having (unofficial) third-party packages for Signal, not about somebody building the binary for their own use, and since these are obviously two different things, from a _social_ perspective, I don't think that the Signal foundation would complain much about the latter (given reproducible builds and the fact that you wouldn't be distributing the binaries, they probably wouldn't even know about it).

For Signal-iOS, it seems that you won't get push-notifications if you build by yourself.[2]

[0] I'm not 100 % convinced that "We would not recommend that anyone use an unofficial binary build" was meant to refer to building for yourself, by yourself.

[1] [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/blob/master/Repr...](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/blob/master/ReproducibleBuilds.md)

[2] [https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- iOS/blob/master/BUILDING...](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- iOS/blob/master/BUILDING.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> As a side note any messenger relining on the phone number is to some degree fundamental flawed, too.

No idea why many recent secure messenger thing using the phone number for anything is a good idea. You don't need the phone number to have locally stored contacts.

Also how trustable your local Google/Samsung/... provided address book is is another question (I'm not saying Google/... is hacking you but they probably would love to collect statistics about your contact book and sell them, at least if you, maybe accidentally, allow syncing of your contacts with your Google account. Does anyone here know if their terms of service would allow that?)

</comment><comment><USER16> > encrypted email is LARP security

LARP here is a link to Google and from the results I can only assume that it expands to "Live Action Role-Playing (Game)". I don't get how that's related. What is "Live Action Role-Playing Security"?

> most people who encrypt emails are LARPing

They're role-playing what?

<comment><USER55> Just replace it with 'pretending'.

LARP Security = Pretend Security

LARPing has a connotation of nerds ineffectually playing pretend warrors. Going through an immense amount of effort in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The post would be better if it clarified what threat model they have in mind.

For tampering, PGP-signed email is helpful.

For protecting secret communication contents, PGP-encrypted email can be helpful to some degree.

For preventing a surveillance from knowing who you talk to, when, from where and what type of content you likely exchange, email cannot become secure.

I suspect it is the combination of the three the author has in mind.

</comment><comment><USER57> Want to send a truly secure message? Write it out by hand in a concrete enclosed room and then set it on fire. Boom. No interception. I mean, of course, that's not a very useful message - but it's extremely secure!

It's kind of like the ideal way of securing a computer - encase it in concrete and drop it in the marianas trench. A volcano would probably work too in a pinch.

The issue that some security folk, such as the author, don't comprehend is that people want to actually _use_ their tools and maybe, just possibly, have a decent experience in doing so.

Sure, encrypted email isn't perfect. It's probably a step better than letting Google scan _every_ email and instead only let them scan the ones that hit a gmail account. Likewise, two people are capable of having a reasonably secure conversation over encrypted email.

Calling people who move towards being more secure, even imperfectly, as LARPers is rather insulting. If anything, the author is LARPing as a security professional.

</comment><comment><USER58> Fine, I'll bite.

A phone number is far more identifying than 10+ years' worth of email metadata. Anonymous email is still possible (if difficult); anonymous phone numbers largely are not. And if your adversaries are state-level then your phone number gives them not only your name and address, but also a direct and easy way to track your location in realtime.

OpenPGP's key rotation remains the closest thing to a practical approach that actually exists. No supposedly "secure" messenger has managed to do better: either your contacts' keys sometimes change for reasons that you don't understand and you occasionally get told to "press OK to continue", or they don't change at all. That is not a sustainable approach for real security.

As the article points out, snake-oil encryption products are everywhere. How can you be sure you're not using one? Because tptacek posted saying this one is secure? At a minimum the product needs to be an open-source implementation of a published, established, reviewed standard with multiple independent implementations. Especially any random number generator it uses needs to be open-source, as that is the easiest way to backdoor an encryption product. And the way its cryptosystem provides security - the algorithms that it uses, the assumptions they rely on, the model and reasoning that turns those into guarantees - need to be simple enough that you can understand them, not rely on vague handwaves like "the proprietary intermediary server can't do anything except during the initial handshake, or if the client ends up redoing the initial handshake, but don't worry about what circumstances might cause that to happen".

Signal is unsafe and cannot be made safe. Stop using Signal.

(If you want something more constructive, work on better UI to make OpenPGP key rotation easier (using subkeys, they're right there in the protocol), better implementations of OpenPGP (i.e. more usable libraries), or non-email OpenPGP messengers to avoid the metadata issues)

<comment><USER59> Maybe you didn't get the memo, but you're not allowed to criticize Signal anymore. And any time it's mentioned you have to draw phony comparisons between it and something that is on the naughty list (PGP as of late).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> You want signal to replace email?

1\. Federate it.

2\. Don't tie it to phones/phone numbers.

<comment><USER61> Oh, so you mean like XMPP?

<comment><USER62> Why did we ditch XMPP again?

<comment><USER61> I often wonder. I still run my own server for a small group of friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Sounds like security absolutism again. Encrypted email, even using a weak algorithm, is more secure than unencrypted email and will deter some percentage of attackers.

Yes, PGP is weak, metadata is exposed, email wasn't designed for any of this, and people will fuck it up.

It tickles me that plaintext replies are submitted as an argument against encrypted email. The reply being in plaintext is an example of _UN_ encrypted email. If you oppose a thing, let it be because of what it is, not its opposite. You don't sell your failed useless car because of that one time it broke down and you had to take the bus. Hopefully in my view, you sell it because of what it does when it _works_ \- it burns money, stinks, is loud, and kills people. (Car hater here, so I personally know the difference with this particular analogy.)

Actually to me "encrypted email" isn't even a thing. There's encryption and then there's email. If you have a secret, you encrypt it, and if you're OK with sending it publicly (i.e. via email) then you _attach_ this encrypted secret thing to the email. And get the key to the person somehow privately. I dunno what the big deal is. No matter how earnestly and ferociously you declare yourself the mom and dad of the world, they all still keep messing up, murdering each other etc. and nobody cares, so take a vacation.

</comment><comment><USER64> As someone who has very crude high level understanding of encryption, I think this post has opened my eyes, I always used to think that End-to-end Secure email is possible, just not widely available right now due to lack of support, and they will get picked up as with wide company support like when Gmail will adopt them. Now I know that it is futile to build them, May be some email alternative from Signal or Matrix will be better. All points made by OP makes total sense.

</comment><comment><USER65> The article comes on so strong that many will be inclined not to believe it.

One point. The encrypted systems are many and not inter-operable. That's a problem for me and many others.

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't see a single argument in the article why, conditional on:

1\. Me deciding to send a given message

2\. Me deciding to use email for that message

... I should send it over an unencrypted email rather than encrypted one.

I see arguments for using other systems like Signal. I see arguments for a false sense of security — i.e. if I didn't assume the email was secure, I'd write a different message.

But, again, for a given message being sent over an email, I just don't see any reason not to encrypt it if it provides at least some protection (and saying it doesn't would probably be too much hyperbole even for latacora). The authors sort of just declare out of nowhere:

> But email cannot promise security, and so shouldn't pretend to offer it.

And if "pretending" meant rot13, I would agree. But even despite all its flaws, there's a sea of difference between rot13 and PGP. If I can publish the encrypted contents of my email publicly, and not even tptacek can decrypt it, then it's not pretending.

So, what is the downside of encrypting an email compared to not encrypting it? I can't think of any, and apparently the authors can't either, despite trying very hard.

</comment><comment><USER67> Am I missing something? I thought the PGP vulnerability wasn't in the Cryptography but the mail client rendering the HTML like a browser and allowing it to be outgoing. Still a dumb move but fixable via going plain text everything.

Granted the metadata and backlog issuss are themselves serious issues for the format.

It is more a "stop using email even if encrypted" than "stop encrypting email".

<comment><USER3> This claim about Efail is essentially false. Efail was possible because PGP uses an archaic message authentication scheme, one designed more or less before the dawn of authenticated encryption, which can be stripped off messages, and which is in a real sense an "add-on" as far as the core of PGP is concerned. PGP will release unauthenticated plaintext to its callers and count on them to check out-of-band errors to see that the plaintext isn't safe; mailers failed to reliably perform this check.

There is a technical sense in which mailers are responsible for mitigating this vulnerability, but it's a vulnerability that can't exist in the first place in a well-designed cryptosystem.

In the context of this post, this is basically a nit; the point the post makes is that even if you replace PGP with something like Age, encrypted email is still too risky to use, and is intrinsically inferior to modern secure messengers. (Encrypted email is not a use case Age is pursuing, and I do like Age).

<comment><USER34> Claiming that EFAIL somehow showed a weakness on the part of PGP and S/MIME is like saying that a caretaker that lets burglars into their tenant's apartment is an example of bad lock design. Sure the lock maker could of removed the ability to use a master key but that is simply not a reasonable thing to suggest.

<comment><USER3> I can't follow this analogy. Claiming that Efail showed weakness on the part of PGP is like claiming that cryptosystems should be designed not to release unauthenticated plaintext to callers, and that the "authenticated/unauthenticated" status of a message shouldn't be communicated out of band. You know, like how all modern AEAD cryptography works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> >If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext.

I don't buy that argument. There's definitely ways to fix this, and the best example right now is Signal.

I use Signal as my SMS app as well. This gives me a single interface for all my messages: For contacts without Signal, messages get exchanged as SMS. But for contacts with Signal, the conversations become end-to-end encrypted automatically. There are UI hints (Signal conversations have padlocks beside messages and a blue send button, vs a grey one) but overall it's seamless and transparent.

This is totally possible with email too: look up if the receiving end has a PGP key published (PKA[1], SKS[2]) and auto-encrypt if they do. It'd be nice if we had an email client that did this.

[1] [https://keyserver.mattrude.com/guides/public-key- association...](https://keyserver.mattrude.com/guides/public-key-association/)

[2] [https://sks-keyservers.net/](https://sks-keyservers.net/)

</comment><comment><USER69> > Ordinary people don't exchange email messages that any powerful adversary > would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email is LARP > security.

Point of order: Can we go back to using adult words like "performative" or "artificial" or "mimicry" etc, instead of accusing everyone of being a LARPer? It really just smacks of an immature 4chan insult.

</comment><comment><USER15> > There are, of course, web email services that purport to encrypt messages. > But they store encryption keys (or code and data sufficient to derive them).

While I assume they are talking about things like Protonmail here, there is a case where PGP is better than nothing here. Mailbox.org allows you to provide a PGP public key which they will encrypt all incoming messages to. I have Mutt configured to auto-encrypt emails saved in my sent folder.

Now, obviously this doesn't help if Mailbox.org becomes malicious or gets attacked. But it does protect my personal email archive. If someone managed to access my email account, they couldn't read any old emails (but they could disable it for new emails).

Maybe I'm LARPing and I don't know it, but I think it's a neat feature which is worth more than nothing. But I do agree with the rest of the points the article makes -- though I think Matrix is a better secure messaging replacement than Signal because it's federated -- especially now that it has E2EE by default.

</comment><comment><USER70> I read this more as a condemnation of email itself, and less about PGP.

PGP aligning with how email actually works and the author not liking the effects is a pity, but by comparison it's a whole other dichotomy from something like a mediated end-to-end crypto scheme. Those kind of systems have the exact oppose set of problems from PGP conceptually, and note this ignores the geriatric architecture of PGP to some extent.

Assuming PGP were re-invented right now, I'd still like it to mostly stay the same. That is to say, I'd like to be able to have private/public keys stored in something conceptually similar. I'd like to see slight ease-of-use improvement in signing objects, encrypting objects, etc... but the basic functionally be the same. Finally I'd like to see integration with other transports made more modular and around an API versioning system that moves forward. That is to say, If I sign my emails, I'd like to be able to communicate that the other end should be on an API above some level, or similar setup.

Finally, there would bee some more thought put into people who want to advertise their keys on public directories. The aforementioned API versioning and modular remarks head into this direction. People want to communicate their keys, and it should be easy for social networks, or whatever directory lookup providers that would be created can be accommodated. This is key

People like things like the signal protocol, but they want to manage all the stuff in the middle themselves, or whatever that entails. Some people may want to fly bellow the radar, and not have anything to do with an automated system, or run sneaker-nets like some old school cloak-and-dagger stuff from KGB or CIA.

Anyways, email is terrible. But to conflate the problems of email over to PGP is a bit weird, but it's nice to recognize the real issue of using both.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've written both versions of that argument: PGP and email. This one focuses on problems that a better GPG could not fix. (Discounting my own "pathological examples" from a different thread.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> There's a lot of evidence of careless skimming in the comments here. The article didn't say "don't use email." It said "don't use email for encrypted communication." Because it can not and will never meet the minimum standards for such. Keep using email! Just not for sensitive/secret/confidential communication

</comment><comment><USER72> Here's my counter example:

[https://github.com/zachaysan/toolies/blob/master/wallet.dat....](https://github.com/zachaysan/toolies/blob/master/wallet.dat.gpg)

That's my original wallet from 2011 that I uploaded to GitHub a couple years later when the amount of money it had in it became non-trivial. GPG works great[0]. I emptied the wallet near the top of the last Bitcoin run up, but honestly even if I still had money in there I wouldn't worry about commenting about how it's public.

As for the rest of it, he's right about metadata and right about human failures like following up with plaintext responses. But on the other hand if your email box leaks then at least most actors are not going to be able to break encrypted messages, which are arguably the most important.

[0] And yes I know the difference between symmetric / asymmetric encryption, but I'd trust it if I'd done it with keys too.

<comment><USER73> 404? GitHub link seems broken...

<comment><USER72> Sorry for the late reply, apparently I made the repo private after putting in some aliases in my bashrc file that would have leaked information I didn't want to leak.

But it had nothing to do with the wallet file. That thing was public for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> While we are at suggesting encrypted IM, I'm wondering something: I'm not using Whatsapp or Signal, but I have the feeling that for UX reason the users never have to validate a fingerprint (or QR code or anything similar). How is this working? They are using TOFU right (there will be a notice if the fingerprint change)? What happens if a user gets a new device? Can anybody with experience with those apps explains how it works?

Because e2ee doesn't really makes sense without proper authentication (we're talking about protecting against malicious server, right? So what happens if a server add a fake device or change fingerprint).

Conversations use Blind Trust Before Verification, that means that until a first fingerprint is checked, everything is accepted, so e2ee only protect against server archive/passive attacks, but not again an actually malicious server.

note: I'm a XMPP dev and I'm wondering how it's done in other apps as a point of comparison.

<comment><USER34> Signal basically trusts on first connection where you trust the Signal company to do something with an SMS to link your identity with your phone number. After that you have a fingerprint (they call it a "safety number") if you want to check to see if you are still talking to the same entity. It will warn you if the number changes.

So how different that is from Conversations depends on how much you trust the Signal company and the phone company. In either case you really have to check the fingerprint, just like with everything. The issue is inherent to secure communications and can not be avoided with any sort of improved user interface.

<comment><USER74> I see, so you can verify but it's not by default. What happens if you add a new device (e.g. a tablet so a new fingerprint, which is different from changing main device where the original fingerprint changes)? Is the new fingerprint accepted without user validation?

My point is that e2ee makes sense when you don't trust the server (here Signal company, or FB for whatsapp), so if most people don't check the fingerprints (and I assume it's the case), what's the real value of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a core difference between Signal and eg WhatsApp. The Signal UX clearly shows who's verified, and the UX clearly earns you when the safety number changes. Additionally, the secondary device model (eg Signal Desktop) goes to great lengths not to break that. With WhatsApp, you're trusting WhatsApp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> The author is presenting a binary view of email security.

It's true that email as a protocol has inherent insecurities ; and it's also true that dedicated, rich spies are probably able to exploit many of them even with encrypted message bodies.

But most of us are facing the problem of __MASS SURVEILLANCE __, which statistically is more serious.

So:

1\. Stop using spied-upon email servers:

1.1 Drop your Gmail, Yahoo mail, Microsoft etc. mail accounts, in favor of non-US and/or non-huge-corporation mail service providers.

1.2 Try to get your friends and family to drop theirs. Yes, I know this is extremely hard...

1.3 Try to get your workplace / NGOs you volunteer in to drop use of those servers (and also of Google Apps, Office 365, Skype etc. which have strong tie-ins with the email services).

2\. Use mail clients which auto-encrypt messages to recipients with known keys - like EnigMail for Thunderbird.

The more of that is normalized, the harder

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're going to do 1.2 and 1.3 and get everyone to make massive changes to how they operate, why not just use a secure messenger instead of trying to shoehorn privacy onto a protocol designed for when the Internet had like five computers on it and all the people knew each other?

<comment><USER75> Because email and secure messaging are not the same thing, and the latter does not replace the former. Now, there could be a distributed infrastructure for "email" that's not SMTP-and-IMAP/POP3-based, theoretically, based on what is now used for secure instant messaging - but I can't just recommend this to individuals.

Also, my suggestions do not make email private, they reduce the exposure to large-scale surveillance and make it more difficult to target individuals. Also, they do not involve "shoehorning" as far as user experience is concerned.

<comment><USER76> > But most of us are facing the problem of MASS SURVEILLANCE

All that you're accomplishing by switching to decentralized servers is publishing the metadata that you claim to be concerned about for free. Before, someone had to serve Google a valid subpoena to find out who you've been talking to. After, you're just broadcasting it publicly across the net in network header logs.

<comment><USER75> You're misinforming people. Nobody has to hand Google anything. The NSA has direct access to their systems and can take in as much as they want.

This is not a conspiracy theory - it is public knowledge thanks to the Edward Snowden leaks.

<comment><USER77> Can you cite that this is true today?

<comment><USER75> Seriously? :-(

<comment><USER77> Yes, as far as I can tell you're claiming one of three things

1\. Google actively assisted the NSA with data collection, beyond legal obligations (subpoenas etc.)

2\. The NSA had a way of legally compelling companies to provide direct access to systems and can do arbitrary processing on company internal data

3\. The NSA was snooping in Google's systems without Google's knowledge in 2013, and this hasn't been fixed 7 years later.

As far as I know, the Snowden leaks don't provide any real evidence for (1) or (2), and so are an extraordinary claim without evidence. (3) also seems rather unlikely. Hence the question.

<comment><USER76> I think OP is talking about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\)).

<comment><USER77> I'm aware. My statement still stands.

<comment><USER76> But the outline of PRISM described there seems to confirm (1) and (2), no? They didn't need a subpoena for each user, had access to a search term firehose, and the legal method for (2) was the secret FISA court.

The access isn't as complete as full arbitrary data, but it's also a long way from only responding to known legal warrants and subpoenas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm usually confused why nobody ever mentions S/MIME. Its super easy to use with Apple Mail.

</comment><comment><USER78> I use ProtonMail as my primary email and when I exchange email with another ProtonMail user, I feel that it is secure.

Great can be the enemy of good. Another example is Signal which gets some criticism for being centralized. Signal is good. ProtonMail to ProtonMail mail exchange is good.

</comment><comment><USER79> What about civil disobedience as a motiv?

Maybe I'm aware that some entity, probably tied to a powerful player like a nation state, can read my encrypted mails somehow.

But the more people are using encrypted mail the more difficult and expensive this will be for this entity.

</comment><comment><USER80> I fail to see an argument here. So the author thinks that PGP is not good. Then the author argues against encrypted email?

I'm not sure whether to tag this under 'non sequitur' or ' throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

</comment><comment><USER81> This reminds me of how Pavel Durov every once in a while posts a story of some recent WhatsApp/Signal/whatever fuck up, which ends up with a Cato-style reminder of the fact we should switch to Telegram. Except, he is comparing apples to apples, does this in kinda tongue-in-cheek manner and is understandably endorsing his own product. None of which can be said about the OP. So, unless you can name a better PGP+email replacement, all of it has quite little value, and, no, Signal is not an email replacement, and, yes, we still need email, so, sorry, cannot switch.

P.S. Does Signal still require a phone number?

<comment><USER82> > P.S. Does Signal still require a phone number?

Yes, as the article mentions and (weakly, IMHO) justifies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Setting aside the points in the article which are well taken and, for the most part, things I agree with ...

If you run your own mailserver _and also if_ you send email to people on that same mailserver, your email _never traverses a network_.

This use-case is not mentioned in the article, but should be. It is uncommon, currently, but much less cumbersome and rife with pitfalls then trying (and failing) to implement some kind of GPG regime, etc.

We do this at rsync.net - everyone uses the same mailserver, which we connect to over either SSH or HTTPS, and when we send mail to each other it is _simply a local copy operation_.

<comment><USER46> Why do you think it's uncommon? The zillions of people who communicate gmail- to-gmail, in Gsuite, etc never have their mail traverse some external SMTP network.

<comment><USER83> I guess I am speaking specifically of privacy-minded solutions that don't involve a third party provider.

You are correct, of course, but when your email is handled by one of the FANGs there is a wholly new, and different, kind of exposure happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> This article came in a right time for me.

My team is assigned to think how to send "secure emails" to customers. The thing is that those emails contain documents as attachments which can contain names and social security numbers. Use case is that customer buy these documents from our website and they can be delivered to email.

We already told that email is insecure by design to do things like that, but now I am thinking about other possibilities. Best I can come up with is encrypted attachment, but that's way too difficult for average customer to open it with public key.

How have you handled situations like this?

<comment><USER21> Deliver the documents via your HTTPS website, secured with a username, password, + 2FA if possible.

Send email just to notify the user that a document is available, providing a link to your website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I think he is missing the point on archives.

Disappering/Nonstored is only a good thing in some contexts. There are several type of communication that I want to be secure but also archived for later reference or documentation.

</comment><comment><USER86> Let's ignore for the moment the paternalistic and I-know-it-all tone permeating the whole post...

> Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status > signal or show of solidarity.

Where is the data supporting this statement?

Where can I read an quantitative analysis on how many emails on the Internet are encrypted, and - out of those - the motivation for having them encrypted, all by percentage? Really, I am willing to pay for it.

Or is the author basing it on personal anectodes, by looking at the few mails in his personal mailbox?

Because at that point also my experience in the corporate world is as good as theirs, and it actually proves the opposite on most points.

Over multiple years, I have seen PGP being used to secure all email exchanges about product security with customers, suppliers, partners, security researchers, and even competitors.

Not a single day passes without a PGP email being sent or received.

As far as I can tell, 100% of the emails contain information for objectively sensitive topics (like security flaws, trade secrets, material under NDA, etc).

Even though emails are exchanged with professionals that are skilled and trained in IT security more than your average Joe, new contacts consistently have PGP keys already and they know how to correctly use PGP.

Any suggestion to use Signal or wormholes won't make you look very good(for good reasons), even though it is clear they are great security products.

Security is good enough: we know that because we do objective risk assessments, where sensationalist articles on the Internet don't play a big role.

I can't recall the last time people replied in the clear - though yes, it happened in the past some times. It also happened that people copy & paste & share paragraphs from sensitive emails though, which is as bad.

The main problem I see is not email encryption per se, but the first key exchange. PGP keyservers are bad and avoided.

The second problem is usability, and it is appalling that nobody is able to tackle this for PGP. It is not really rocket science and certainly people are willing to pay for it.

>> Email is end-to-end unencrypted [1] by default.

>> Serious secure messengers foreclose on this possibility. Secure messengers are encrypted by default

TCP is unencrypted by default too; actually and, you know what, it doesn't even support encryption! You use TLS on top of it (in a hop-by-hop way unfortunately).

Same thing for email. The fact that the underlying message is unsecured, does not mean you need to throw it away.

>> Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it.

This depends on your threat model. In ours, metadata largely doesn't matter.

>> Secure messaging systems make arrangements for "disappearing messages".

You do understand that this is a big no-no for corporate right?

You must be able to set retention and escrow policies.

You must use data formats that are very likely to be around or re- implementable in the years to come, not hipster apps that will disappear from circulation next year. We love public standards or industry standards.

Sometimes retention rate is "never delete": that's necessary and it is OK.

</comment><comment><USER87> The real bottom line criticism of encrypted email is that people will screw up, and leak metadata or plaintext.

But arguably that also applies to _any_ encrypted messaging system. Not just email. So I'm not sure exactly what the point is.

About metadata: You can just anonymize it away. Maybe most people can't do that. But then maybe most people will screw up in some other way.

Or rather, one could just build in anonymity.

Fundamentally, encryption isn't all that useful without ~anonymity. Because if adversaries can find you, they can do whatever it takes to get what they want. Or at least, to make your life Hell until you give it up.

And with adequate anonymity, those aren't issues.

> Messages can be material to a civil case and subject to discovery. They can > be subpoenaed in a law enforcement action. They safeguard life-altering > financial transactions. They protect confidential sources. They coordinate > resistance to oppressive regimes.

Anonymity fixes most of those problems.

About Signal, until it gives up the phone number requirement, it's hopelessly _not_ anonymous. And encryption without anonymity is pointless.

Edit: Maybe I'm still ranting, but less personally.

</comment><comment><USER59> Damn, that good to see that $50 million Signal recently received is already being spent on marketing.

</comment><comment><USER88> Some of the arguments make perfect sense, some do not:

> If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext.

This is not an inherent problem with e-mail and can be solved with client software. You can still have unencrypted communication while giving a big red warning if a user sends an unencrypted reply to an encrypted conversation and strip away quotes by default.

> Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it.

This is true, but can I do think that this can theoretically be solved be a new generation of server architecture while keeping the federated nature.

> Every archived message will eventually leak.

The problems here are a matter of implementation and what software is used.

> Every long term secret will eventually leak.

This is the one inherent problem with PGP e-mail in the entire post as I see it. It is an issue.

All the issues the author bring up certainly hold true today but most of them are not inherent to e-mail and I think with enough coordinated effort they can be fixed while keeping decent compatibility.

I do think that apart from the metadata issue (not saying that this is to be disocunted!), we could keep using the exact same servers as today in a perfectly secure and private way if we have a new generation of e-mail clients and e-mail cryptography.

As for the metadata part: I've been toying with the idea of a messaging system using e-mail for transport but having an encrypted protocol on top of that which solves these issues.

It would also require some way of distributing encrypted messages around (maybe in a gossip-like protocol akin to SSB) and broadcasting gateway servers that relay these messages on behalf of large amount of users.

Finally, there's something to be said with that PGP was ever only meant to solve the secrecy, non-reputability and integrity of messages, which is only part of a security and privacy story. It doesn't mean that PGP is broken, only that it is incomplete depending on your threat model.

<comment><USER89> >> Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it.

> This is true

No, it _can_ be true. There are classes of communication where the metadata is really not important. Like when my boss sends me an encrypted email with some secure passwords we don't store in plaintext anywhere.

The metadata that shows it's from my boss and might have some identifying is much less important than the fact I don't keep it in plaintext anywhere and it wasn't sent in plaintext, yet I can get to it if needed.

<comment><USER88> I might have been unclear, I mean what OP is positing under that headline in the article is true. So, the e-mail leaking it part.

If you read my whole comment I finish with that it depends on your threat model, which is basically what you're saying.

<comment><USER89> Sure, I just think it's worth noting again and calling out explicitly, given that there's a lot of assertions that are being made, but some are only accurate in some use cases. It's either a lack of understanding on the author's side, or a rhetoric tactic that I have little respect for. In either case I think it deserves attention.

To some degree, it's not even the threat model which is different, but people's entire use, which _of course_ might change the threat model. The article is treating email as if it's the same as messaging, which it emphatically is not. Email is also the de-facto method of exchanging file for certain types of people (even if it's always been somewhat poor at it), or providing explicit information that should stay around to individuals that isn't desired to be on a website.

Email has always been somewhat poor at the use case of instant messaging, but that's okay, it does other things much better than instant messaging (try finding an instant message from ten years ago and migrating it from the service it was on to a new one). Saying that it's not as good as the security models of instant messaging when being used like an instant messager is not a good reason to stop using it entirely. There are other reasons given that are more compelling, but this one seemed to so fundamentally misunderstand what some people use email for that I though it was important to note.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > So, for example, it recently turned out to be possible for eavesdroppers to > decrypt messages without a key, simply by tampering with encrypted messages

Does anyone know the background behind this?

<comment><USER90> I believe they are referring to [https://efail.de/](https://efail.de/)

<comment><USER18> Ah, so they're not referring to pgp per se, but the fact that email clients will just execute any decrypted content embedded in the email.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Per se" is doing a lot of work there.

When 'tptacek first heard of efail, we were both in the office, he called me over and said "if there was a disastrous GPG bug that fails in way $X, what would it look like" and my first answer was "of course it's that MDCs don't actually work and the packet stream is malleable and something is going to consume unauthenticated plaintext". That's not because I'm some sort of genius: it's because to anyone who has studied the protocol and has a cryptographic background, those flaws are glaring.

That matters because I think it's reasonable to blame a protocol when it is indisputably flawed (there is no debate about MDCs not being a MAC, there is no debate that authenticated encryption is important) and it turns out those flaws all but imply vulns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I have matrix - synapse with riot running at home for a year now, based on yunohost.org in a virtual machine. Private chat and (video)calling for my family andere friends.

</comment><comment><USER91> I have matrix - synapse with riot running at home for a year now, based on yunohost in a virtual machine. Private chat and (video)calling for my family andere friends.

</comment><comment><USER91> I have matrix - synapse with riot running at home for a year now, based on yunohost in a virtual machine. Private chat and (video)calling for my family andere friends

</comment><comment><USER92> Not LARP. I think the canonical term is _cargo cult_.

Although pretty offensive, at least the term clearly signals that the intent is valid, as much as the methods aren't.

<comment><USER3> The point of the comparison is that people are carelessly doing things that would ordinarily be hazardous, but aren't, because the stakes aren't real for them. They're then actively recommending those same reckless things to people for whom the stakes are very real.

How you know the stakes aren't the same is that technologists by all outward appearances care more about ergonomics than security (and, indeed, their own idiosyncratic ergonomics, like "federation" and "works with email clients nobody else uses"). If the stakes for nerds were real, nobody would be fucking around with broken crypto. But they're LARPing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> He _really_ doesn't like LARPers.

<comment><USER3> I have no problem with LARPers at all.

<comment><USER93> That's too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> I generally can agree with this. Encryption is a distraction from the real issue: the weakest chain in the link.

We've recently seen recordings of meeting with Trump and associates. _No one_ is safe.

You must assume your every tap on a smartphone, you every keystroke and interaction with a computer is being logged in some way. You interact with computers by proxy - people entering information on your behalf, perhaps other devices are listening to you, or logging your movements/interactions within the world, perhaps taking videos and pictures of yourself. Profiling who you are, who you talk to, what your financial situation is like, who you care most about, who you align with, your network; colleagues, close and distant friends, those you once interacted with but not so much. A brain capable of recording every minute detail that you may want to forget. Details can be recalled within seconds and just a few keystrokes, a second by second recording in ultra high quality and the density of information being stored is unmatched to any other time in history.

If somebody wants to get your information, they _will_ get it, one way or another. This much has been proven true again and again.

So sure, use your fancy tools and gadgets, but be clear, one day, it's highly likely what you wanted to keep private may become public.

When, not if.

</comment><comment><USER95> Well, certain countries block traffic to Signal and other encrypted apps.

As far as I know, in pretty much any country where you can send e-mail, you can also send an PGP encrypted e-mail.

So, Signal is not a universal solution.

<comment><USER3> If I ran a state-level intelligence service I too would try to get everyone in my country to use PGP encrypted email instead of Signal.

<comment><USER95> Sure, but "stop using encrypted email" implies everyone would have to use plaintext instead of Signal.

<comment><USER3> _Or not send dangerous messages electronically at all._

Fortunately, there's no place in the world where encrypted email is your only option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I can agree with all the PGP bashing in the world, but it seems to me that PGP provides one thing that apparently nobody else cares about, and I don't understand why: the thing is identity verification. When I encrypt or sign I don't just do it for the sake of itself: I want to be sure to whom I am encrypting and from whom I am verifying a signature. If I am not sure of what is the link between the used key and an actual person, organization or service, crypto is not very useful for me. PGP has a way to do that. We can speak for hours of its pitfalls, but it's there, and with same care it can be used.

Do the alternatives have anything similar? I don't think so. Signal and WhatsApp basically rely on a GSM identity (a telephone number), which is verified by checking a six-digits code by SMS. There are hundreds of ways to screw this up. Any random street pickpocket would be able to get your phone, read the code and put it back in your pocket without you even noticing, not mentioning attack on the actual GSM protocol of which I do not know much (but have heard of its insecurity more than once). It's true that there is Perfect Forward Secrecy and your peers will get a little notice saying that your security code has changed (and will most probably ignore it), but if it is so easy to take over one's identity, I don't think I can put much trust if the system as a whole. (also, OP complains that GPG is a complex and obscure implementation; what are they going to say about GSM stacks?)

Ironically, the thing that would make this system secure would be that people actually checked security codes, which would basically amount to what PGP users do when they exchange fingerprints (and I am sure OP would consider that the LARPmost possible thing in the universe). Not even with the advantage of having a proper Web of Trust, though.

Even TLS, although it is not mentioned by OP, has quite a few problems. Most TLS certificates are Domain Validating, and the validation procedure essentially consists in recovering a secret file by mean of an HTTP request to that domain (surely that's true for Let's Encrypt, but I believe that most commercial DV operators work in the same way, except that you have to pay for it). So as soon as you're able to MITM the domain validation (and there are a lot of actors who are able to) you can grab the certificate, which would in theory protect from those who are able to MITM your server. This mechanism still protects your from MITMs positioned close to the client, that's true and it's better than nothing. But you still have all the holes you want. And bad examples of TLS CAs are nothing near missing.

So, bottom line: I am very happy if you give me modern and advanced tools for encrypting stuff, but please do not ignore the problem of giving names to keys, a problem that as far as I know only PGP is currently able to tackle.

<comment><USER97> > So, bottom line: I am very happy if you give me modern and advanced tools > for encrypting stuff, but please do not ignore the problem of giving names > to keys, a problem that as far as I know only PGP is currently able to > tackle.

I think that SQRL (grc.com) gives us hope here. Focusing on making is easy for people in general to keep a secret signing device would be a big leap forward, since you can base other identity service on that. Add Matrix to that and you get identity as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> The reasons of presumed eventuallity is a horrible reason not to do something.

</comment><comment><USER99> Nice try NSA

</comment><comment><USER84> ad

</comment><comment><USER100> >Ordinary people don't exchange email messages that any powerful adversary would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email is LARP security.

We are literally living in an age where the NSA is spoofing cell towers to intercept and save unencrypted (and probably encrypted) traffic to a database that will probably be around as long as the NSA exists. This is naive and everyone should be taking precautions against the kind of power that a true authoritarian government would literally kill for.

I'm also personally insulted to be accused of LARPing for taking steps to preserve my privacy. Even if something like protonmail isn't perfect, assuming it isn't compromised it's orders of magnitude better than outlook, Google, et al who are literally scanning your messages.

Edit: let me clarify my point, because people seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. The fact that encrypted email is partially broken does not mean that it doesn't currently reduce the leak surface. If I send 5 emails from a service like protonmail to @outlook.com and 5 emails to @gmail.com, that's two fractured datasets vs sending 10 from a Gmail account where they're all scanned into one database. Locks are trivially picked but that doesn't mean I'm LARPing to everytime I leave my house and lock my doors.

<comment><USER3> If your adversary is NSA, and your defense is Protonmail, you are literally LARPing. You don't believe Protonmail protects you from NSA; the reason you're using it is because you know what you're sending and receiving isn't interesting enough to target. If you had real secrets, you would not send them through a Protonmail-encrypted email; you would make other arrangements.

<comment><USER100> You're ok with Google and Microsoft building a profile of intimate details on everyone who uses their services?

This isn't about having an adversary now, this is about minimizing future risk. A database of personal data is one index or scan away from being used to Target someone. Imagine what the Soviet government could do with information about your purchasing habits, organization membership, political leanings, religious participation. It's happening right now in China.

The fact that you don't have anything nefarious to hide doesn't mean you shouldn't be worried about the existence of such databases. I'm not hiding drug and weapons deals from the NSA, I'm trying to minimize how much information about myself leaks to people who have no business collecting it. All people should be similarly cautious. Unfortunately this isn't the kind of thing that matters to most until it's too late.

How many laws or executive orders or judge rulings do you think it would take before even the U.S. government could trivially abuse such information to target someone? What if you're a whistleblower like Assange? What if you piss off the wrong police officer? You haven't heard of corrupt cops harassing citizens and who stuck their neck out a little too far?

Bad actors exist all over society. It is only rational to minimize the amount of ammunition they may have against you, even if you aren't planning anything nefarious. The problem with this kind of digital surveillance, regardless of whether it is by government or corporation, is that the stored data is permanent and easily harnessed. Let's not even get into the power that such bits and pieces confer to actors with access to even simple ML technology.

I don't understand the reaction that people seem to have toward the desire for maximizing privacy.

<comment><USER3> I honestly don't care what superficial steps you take towards minimizing dragnet surveillance. Go right ahead. My problem is with communicating to ordinary people that encrypted email is reasonably safe to use to protect secrets. It is not.

<comment><USER100> It's substantially better than nothing, is it not? Do you disagree that it requires more effort on the part of a malicious actor when emails are sent from on ostensibly encrypted email service?

Do your house doors not have locks because locks are easy to pick?

Further, wouldn't encrypted email, even in current implementation, be much more effective in keeping secrets if everyone used it? You can do much less with metadata than with email contents, and the fact that leaks of plaintext archives may happen eventually doesn't mean that all archives will be leaked.

The article has a valid point but shaming people by accusing them of larping is IMO irresponsible.

<comment><USER3> Encrypted email is not substantially better than nothing in the cases where security actually matters. If the metadata of your message can get you arrested, or if an accidental plaintext reply to a message can get your bank account zeroed out, then using a system that carries those risks is _worse than nothing_. When we talk about secure messaging, those are the use cases we must consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> " _encryption on the Internet is performative_ "

Security on _computers_ is performative. Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, Apple, Google, deep state, and God only knows who else can crack these pieces of garbage like an egg.

Whoever wrote this is _also_ a LARPer.

</comment><comment><USER102> tptacek is right as usual, but everyone should still check out the excellent mailpile: [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

It integrates GPG really nicely.

</comment><comment><USER103> Author advocates "wormhole" as the alternative to pgp for sending files. It is written in Python. "Python" and "security" (or "good software engineering") do not belong in the same sentence.

</comment><comment><USER104> So the general advice seems to be, stop using federated protocol and start using... signal?

I find it hard to believe that an app that runs in electron and falls for basic web security 101 XSS exploits[1] is a more secure solution than using an encryption layer on top of a federated protocol.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17050754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17050754)

<comment><USER105> What on earth does a "federated protocol" have to do whether an app runs in Electron?

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> If I encrypt a message and put the secret on an sd-card I hand to my friend at the park, I can mail him encrypted messages over plaintext e-mail and we are safe.

Most people don't use it this way, but to say it's impossible to secure e-mail is arrogant and not true

<comment><USER107> One of the concerns with email that article raised was: the recipient can click on "reply" \-- without encrypting the reply message -- which would send the response together with the original message "quoted" \- all of that unencrypted. This is apparently common operational mistake.

Note that this has nothing to do with key exchange, ie putting it on sd card or whatever, would not change anything about the issue raised above.

There is also about a dozen other issues that the article lists, worth reading for sure.

<comment><USER106> Oh yeah that's a huge flaw in implementation (that probably every main e-mail vendor is guilty of). If it's prevalent enough, then the article is warranted, but the title and the conclusion are still gross simplifications -- it's not like the piping is inherently flawed, it's just that we prefer clear viewing windows to interact with messages, and where these two trains cross is where privacy meets your eyeball and also meets oxygen. Really, all decryption should happen on-device; but we cannot afford to abandon indecipherable messages on a daily or hourly basis in favor of universal privacy. It's somewhat reminiscent of the LOSE_POINTS_TO_LAG flag in quake and setting it to false. Maybe a better title would be Encrypted Email quickly becomes Unencrypted

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> I understand that sending email in plaintext is a design issue for email. And that PGP is outdated.

However, I think it's possible to have a system completely in the open and still be secure. Bitcoin comes to mind. I don't think the problem is with email, but with the lax encryption models and the lack of support by email clients and servers alike. Wouldn't you agree?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Completely open" is not the only useful property to discuss about a system. Email itself is still fundamentally terrible for secure messaging.

Your argument seems to boil down to: "bitcoin is open", "bitcoin can $X", "email is like bitcoin", therefore "email can $X". There are a few flaws in that argument. Firstly, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, it makes no attempt to hide transaction details, which obviously message security would need. Secondly, even if the properties of bitcoin were relevant to messaging, at best you've made the argument that "a system with public transaction records can still do what you need for safe messaging", but not "email specifically can do what you need".

There are two ways I could see your argument working out and both are pathological examples. We can do secure comms over TCP, so just design a secure comms system and then all the way at the end choose a blockchain or email as your transport. That sounds true, but also doesn't seem like a useful thought tool that results in improving anyone's communication security tomorrow.

<comment><USER108> I'm not sure why you feel like calling my arguments pathological, or a false equivalence. I'll disregard this.

I did not introduce any equivalence about valuation in my argument. I used Bitcoin as an example of a well known open database, where everyone can see the data (arguably an analog to plaintext exchanges) and yet it's secure.

Additionally, your point about Bitcoin being pseudonymous also applies to email. You may create your own address, on any number of servers. At a high level, it feels like the pseudonimity is essentially the same.

Are you proposing people stop using email and switch to a more secure messaging system, like Signal? Or maybe to make an email app on top of tech similar to Signal (kind of like Protomail?), or to improve email by baking in modern security standards?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not call your arguments pathological, I called my own examples pathological to clarify that I am not trying to strawman you: I appreciate that my own examples are almost certainly not what people have in mind when they talk about email security.

The pseudonymity is precisely one of the reasons e-mail does not work well. One of the features of secure messaging as it is commonly understood is participant privacy: hiding who participates and ideally when. This is the metadata leakage problem described in the post.

You're restating your argument of "bitcoin is public and yet it is secure and so it is possible to have secure systems that are public". I understand that, but you don't appear to have engaged with my counterargument: "secure" is not a universal term, and things that are fine bitcoin transactions are not necessarily fine for secure messaging.

Protonmail does not seem like "tech similar to Signal" to me at all. I'm all for implementing stuff like MTA-STS, and I appreciate e-mail isn't going to die any time soon. I think that trying to add E2E-style encryption to e-mail is fundamentally doomed, signing for e-mail is mostly doomed, and yes, private conversations belong on something like Signal.

<comment><USER108> I appreciate the clarification, thanks.

It's interesting that you feel email has a lot of traction and is broken, but you see that as an argument for moving away from it. I would think it's an opportunity to fix that system, since users are unlikely to switch. I've thought quite a bit about what making email like Signal would look like, but I'm curious what's your take on the overall problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not think it is meaningfully possible to fix that system (I say meaningfully, because I'm excepting the pathological senses I mentioned above). If you want it to look, feel like email and be compatible, you can't secure it.

MTA-STS works because it does not require end users to do anything. If you need end users to change their workflow, you could try to do that with e-mail (which fundamentally can't do all the things you need it, per the post and the PGP post), or you can just make them use a non-broken protocol.

<comment><USER108> I guess I don't understand why you would think that the following wouldn't work: \- use random email addresses \- encrypt the content with something more secure than PGP (on the client) \- receive the email and decrypt it (on the client)

Sure, it's plaintext, but I don't see the downside?

<comment><AUTHOR> How do I securely communicate what the new email address is? How do I hide IP- level metadata? How do I hide time-level metadata? How do I do PFS?

At some point you're going to keep adding lipstick to the pig until eventually you have something morally equivalent to the pathological example I gave.

<comment><USER108> That's interesting. Thanks for taking the time to expand on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> If I'm using GPG, I want to ensure:

1\. The message I received is from person possessing private key (signing).

2\. The message I received is not available to Google or any other 3-rd party.

GPG is good old dumb tool that deals with crypto. I can save e-mail into text file and use it with GPG. I can even copy that text file to an offline computer if I don't want to risk exposing key.

Signal is just yet another whatsapp competitor? I don't want to publish my phone number. I don't want to trust some random application from AppStore. I don't want my correspondence to go through some untrusted servers (and I trust Google servers much more than Signal servers). Especially servers controlled by the same person who wrote an application. I have no idea how to be sure that message I got corresponds to a public key that person gave me when we met last time. How do I extract message source from Signal? What's are console tools to deal with it? How do I deal with new key issuance if person reinstalled his application?

GPG have answers for those questions. Signal does not. Basically GPG is encryption for nerds, Signal is encryption for ordinary people. It's important, but not particularly interesting for me and it's not a replacement. Especially given the fact that Whatsapp and Telegram provide E2E and they are much more widely used.

Basically GPG is good enough and we don't need nothing more than that. And that GPG critique is just manipulation of facts. When my Debian distribution will use Signal to verify packages, I'll consider using it.</comment>