> The trouble is that opens another attack vector. This story[1] (previously discussed on HN[2]) comes to the opposite conclusion.
> Who is right? Is there a consensus in the security community?
There might not be one best answer. There have been many other stories on HN of people loosing access to their Gmail accounts, and having no recourse with Google to regain access.
My gut feel is the best any of us can do is to set up our digital lives so that our accounts are "misaligned" to make it more difficult to use social engineering to pivot between them. For instance, in the story you linked, they key to an actual attack was a shared credit card number between Paypal and Godaddy that was used for verification. Ignoring the fact of how stupid it is to use just 4 digits for such a task, it would have made that path more difficult for the attacker if he'd used a dedicated card for Godaddy (given his domains were valuable enough to him that they could be used to extort a $50k twitter handle from him). Having different, secret, email addresses/domains attached to important accounts could also provide a stumbling block.
But it's also worth noting that much of the attacker's planned attack failed, and he only succeeded in the end through extortion.
Unfortunately we rely on registrars for too many things nowadays, which is probably as bad as our enormous trust on commercial certificate authorities.
This is the only correct response to this problem, and it needs to be seen more prominently.
E-mail in 2020 is not secure against a motivated attacker. It doesn't matter how secure and woke your provider is, when:
1. Everyone you talk on an e-mail thread gets a copy of the entire e-mail thread, to do whatever they want with.
2. You can't control the present and future security of other people's providers, or the present and future security of the computing devices they use to read the e-mail you send them.
Now, if you want to LARP, you can try setting up a mailing list for your friends who only use secure providers (For whatever definition of secure you want to use), and only limit your use of a single e-mail address to that mailing list. Great. Go for it. Write a blog post about it, even. But that's not going to solve the fundamental problems of #1 and #2 for the rest of the world.
Now, if you actually want security (as opposed to 'I want to LARP at security'), take a page from conspiracies in the financial sector, and don't use e-mail for any conversations that you'd like to remain secure.
Securing e-mail is a waste of time. It can't be secured, because of 50 years of social expectations about how e-mail should behave. (Other people retain copies of your e-mails, and other people can choose which provider services their address.) You can spend that effort on trying to secure a different communication protocol, which does not have those 50 years of social expectations, and that will probably lose to e-mail (Because those two security holes provide users with value, and when it comes to value versus security, security will lose every time.)
The link may say that more people are looking for a private email inbox, but I don’t think most people are willing to pay the price of a domain and an external service. The latter is practically an oligopoly currently because of the lack of options; in terms of price, email services are a complete rip-off.
They're not willing to pay because they don't know that you can buy domains in the first place. Most of the time when I tell someone my first@lastname.com they're like ...and that'd be @gmail.com?
Not everyone is even contactable from my own domain. The IP address used to belong to some spammers several years ago and some blacklists are still there.
Also, my newsletter, even though it uses double opt-in, triggered some automatic mechanisms of Spamhaus. I ended up on a blacklist several times. Fortunately, I was able to argue my way out and after the last incident, they must have updated their lists.
But those were bad times, no one could literally post a link to my blog onto Twitter etc.
No worries, the NSA will see it all anyways :) There's no privacy on the internet.
That said: I'd love to run my own e-mail servers, but Yahoo does a pretty good job keeping spam away from me and offers enough convenience that I just stuck with it.
Happy to consider alternatives I can run on a cheap instance somewhere.
Is it possible to configure Fastmail's web client to connect to an arbitrary CardDAV and CalDAV server?
Partner is a die-hard webmail user who detests native desktop clients. I'd like them to be able to use Fastmail webmail with my self-hosted calendar and contacts.
The only thing preventing me from leaving Gmail is that they have awesome clients (web, android, iphone). And all of them sync well. Does anyone else have this?
Awesome clients? For android try ninemail (if you are calling android default email client awsome you wont come to your breath for next 2 weeks ;). For web you have gazillion of them, from roundcube to horde and nextcloud plugin (anyway, its just a user interface, protocols are standardised (mostly IMAP beeing used for accessing mail and any client supporting it can read emails). But yep. It is for self hosted people. And I think that everyone in 2020 should be self hosted (I thought that in 2000 too but it is just getting worse, everyone locking himself into some vendor jail, one way or another).
I don't know about Proton, but right now I cannot think of anything missing from FastMail that exist in Gmail -- they even support label now. The clients are better than Gmail, IMO.
If you are focused on privacy, you probably aren't using a client app. Browsers are the way to go, particularly on mobile devices. They allow you to more easily prevent data being stored on the device. The simple presence of an app evidences that you have an account with that service whereas a browser, absent bookmarks, reveals nothing. I don't hesitate to unlock my phone for airport checks. They aren't going to find anything, nor be able to say I have an account anywhere.
(A great thing about HN is that you don't need to have an account in order to read articles. So I can bookmark it on my phone without worry.)
Since SMTP transfers things unencrypted, you kind of have to assume that a bad actor with reach as wide as the NSA's is intercepting all your email regardless of who your provider is. There's really no solution there, since the company from which you order your suppositories isn't using end-to-end encryption to send you their order confirmations.
That said, I still 100% support getting off of the free email providers in order to wave a middle finger at surveillance capitalism.
I use DDG on my mobile device now. I switched when Google started showing images in the omnibox as I typed in search terms. I found it useless and distracting but (of course) Google knew better and didn't offer any way to disable it.
Generally I'm pretty happy with DDG
results and don't feel the need to switch back to Google. I have seen a lot of scam ads on DDG which I've reported but never received a response to. The new Apple map integration seems to work pretty well even though I'm on Android.
I'd wish DDG would either provide their own email service or create a front-end for your choice of mail providers (i.e. iCloud, Protonmail, etc).
I'd love to move away from everything Google (further support a company who is pro-consumer) to a company in which i trust and whose business model/ethos is privacy.
I just want Duckduckgo browser on desktop. Obviously its just chromium with a "delete history" shortcut built in, but the way their mobile browser inverts the way you think about privacy really helps. It inverts your browsing experience from "We will save all your cookies, history and data unless you clear it" to "We will delete your cookies and history constantly all the time unless you specify the websites you want to have your stuff saved on."
That's doesn't sound like a reason not to trust PM specifically, but an indication that you want a zero-trust solution. Trust is an orthogonal concept to risk. Trust mitigates risk, it isn't a term for the absence of risk.
I use proton mail just for the privacy guarantees enforced by social pressure on their brand. They hold your PGP keys (you can't give them a subkey of your own private master key) so there's no reasonable security there. In general, I don't think PGP encrypted emails provide much security anyway. If I need to send a message securely, something like Signal provides better cryptographic properties like forward secrecy.
All I know is, I would hear about it very quickly as soon as Proton Mail is discovered to violate my privacy, and that's all I can expect of email. To be honest, the fact that their API is not open sourced and I have to use their web client or mediocre IMAP bridge would make me seek alternatives if I were to reconsider email providers. It would have to be one that has as strong of a privacy-conscious brand, or self-hosting.
I avoid ProtonMail, and encourage others to do the same, because of the reasons you stated. They have all the keys. It's security theater, just like pre-2013 Lavabit used to be. Unlike pre-2013 Lavabit, the fact that they have the keys doesn't even result in usability benefits like, you know, being able to use plain old IMAP with my favorite email client.
ProtonMail has been dragging their feet for so long in the interoperability department, it almost feels like they're aiming for vendor lock-in. If they truly were serious about interoperability, they've had plenty of time to create an open standard around their protocol (like FastMail and post-2017 Lavabit has done), or release patches to make their protocol available in widely used open-source email clients like Thunderbird. Instead they've got that mediocre IMAP bridge you mentioned. No thanks. When I choose an email service I want to retain the ability to export all my data and leave on short notice, without having to depend on non-standard tools.
"I use proton mail just for the privacy guarantees enforced by social pressure on their brand."
There are no such guarantees. Social pressure on their brand did not stop Enron or Madoff from committing fraud. Nor did it stop millions of others from committing various crimes, atrocities, and other unethical acts throughout history.
In the realm of email providers, the case of Hushmail[1] serves as an instructive example.
Hushmail is an email provider that provides a service similar to ProtonMail, but:
"Developments in November 2007 led to doubts, amongst security-conscious users, about Hushmail's security, specifically, concern over a backdoor. The issue originated with the non-Java version of the Hush system. It performed the encrypt/decrypt steps on Hush's servers, and then used SSL to transmit the data to the user. The data is available as cleartext during this small window of time; the passphrase can be captured at this point, facilitating the decryption of all stored messages and future messages using this passphrase. Hushmail stated that the Java version is also vulnerable, in that they may be compelled to deliver a compromised java applet to a user."
and
"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of United States v. Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."
Incidentally, despite all this, and what you'd expect to be "damage to their brand", Hushmail is still around, and I'd expect many of their users have never even heard of any of this.
>... something like Signal provides better cryptographic properties like forward secrecy.
Forward secrecy only works up to the point your end point gets compromised and only for messages you have not kept. So for the vast majority of people it provides very little value.
It provides no protection against someone who breaks your encryption and something like the Signal Protocol's much greater complexity provides more opportunities to do that.
I'm a happy Protonmail user, but The lack of quality of their bridge and import/export tools will cost them quite a lot on the long term. It's a bit sad to see. The UX work is really lacking there. On the other hand their current web interface is quite fast and straightforward.
I trust them less because their privacy claim around email (and really their entire service) is dumb.
It’s good to use your own domain, it’s good to use a non ad-driven business model like fastmail (though even this is mostly for the user experience and not security)
Beyond that “secure” email when you’re largely communicating with other @gmail users, isn’t a thing.
Google has some of the best security researchers in the world, I’d trust their employees to do a better job than proton at securing the service itself.
Email should be treated as largely public (for personal use) and not used for sensitive communication. It’s a little different in a corporate setting, but then you’re not using proton mail anyway.
I see people discussing different alternatives, but for me there are very few viable solutions that would be nearly as good as gmail. And actually I don't like it this way. I hate to use the m word here, but it's kind of monopolistic for me.
And seriously, this is an email period it was invented how many decades ago? It should be easy to have something that works very well with offerings from multiple providers.
As you dig deeper, there are a lot of little details that give Google the advantage. I'm not expert enough to describe all of them in detail, but certainly part of it is we have big players who are dominant on Android and Apple making it difficult for small players to catch up. We also have, as one person pointed out, blacklists and not being easy to get around that with other providers because Google is so dominant in this space too.
There is one rather ugly privacy threat that I seldom see discussed even on HN.
The spam fighting services. First of all, I'm not sure whether they are being run locally on the mail servers or maybe the mail servers forward our emails body to a third party anti-spam service to get a "spam score".
And secondly, after being assigned a "spam score" a part of your email may end up in the headers as "X-something" where the anti-spam service describes why it didn't like your email. And we know that many 3-letter agencies collect as much email metadata (e.g. headers) as they can sniff out. So, you should know that the first X bytes of your unencrypted emails are less private than the remaining part, because they can be part of the metadata.
Spam detection is run locally on the receiving mail server, and adds the result information to the email as the "X-something" header fields you are referring to as part of the receive pipeline. See e.g. rspamd.
Should you forward the email with these header fields intact, then all it does is reveal a bit about your mail providers' infrastructure, which is already entirely public information.
I've seen small parts of my email body in the "X-something" headers inserted there by the anti-spam service. I can try to find an example later when I get to my desktop.
I see that Lavabit also reopened as an email service (they famously shut down rather than release the SSL keys for Snowden to US intelligence agencies[1]).
Yes and even if Linux was a true alternative on phones you would still leak a lot to your ISP (they can triangulate your position using cell towers and unless you use a VPN they know every websites you connect to).
anyone in a FVEYs, or 14EYs, or 22EYs country should use Yandex mail. hosted in Moscow.
FBI cant issue an NSL to read every email you sent or received to construct your patterns of life to more easily parellel construct you or blackmail/coerce you into compliance.
even NSA has to tread lightly, and cant just casually feed your emails into XKEYSCORE, because if they get caught, then Yandex with the assistance of FSB will kick out NSA and/or hack back or retaliate with active measures. so NSA would only risk blowing their Yandex collection for very high National Priority targets. not you.
in a sense, the smartest surveillance evasion tactic is to hide in the fog of cyber war between the Nation States. if you're not Baghdadi or Carter Page, you wont have to worry as much.
plus, Yandex mail is better than gmail. Yandex is what gmail was 10 years ago--simple UI, no bloat, no ads, no spam, no BS. Yandex has a mobile email app too. better, you can host your private DNS on Yandex, then use Yandex for your private domain's emails.
and unlike Google, who is probably selling your info about you from your emails to an ecosystems of ad spammers and "database of ruin" analytics spy companies, Yandex is not. thanks to US sanctions on Russia, your data is effectively siloed off from the US market.
finally, consider the Shadowbroker hacker used Yandex to leak the stolen NSA EQGRP files. has the Shadowbroker been caught? nope. Yandex security looks better than anyone else's.
we live in interesting times, when Russia is now a safer place to store your data than the US. the world has gone mad.
Do you know if Yandex mail has a friendly API? One of the things that keeps me on Gmail is that they have an API with many language bindings that I have used on occasion.
i highly recommend Yandex browser. it is a Chrome fork, but it appear to be heavily modified with extra security features added. Such as DNSSEC pointing to Yandex's own DNS servers. I presume everything that phones home to Google has been ripped out of Yandex browser, much like Ungoogled Chromium. I like Yandex browser mainly because it puts the URL bar at the bottom. Google removed that feature years ago. Yandex browser also integrates with all of Yandex's services, like Mail and Disk.
and yes, Yandex has an API for everything. You don't need language bindings as long as your language speaks HTTPS.
Readit News
I recommend everyone BUY A DOMAIN. Then switch providers. you can always switch with your own domain.
The select a provider based on thier offering be it protonmail, fastmail (shameless plug), or others
Who is right? Is there a consensus in the security community?
[1] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927465
> Who is right? Is there a consensus in the security community?
There might not be one best answer. There have been many other stories on HN of people loosing access to their Gmail accounts, and having no recourse with Google to regain access.
My gut feel is the best any of us can do is to set up our digital lives so that our accounts are "misaligned" to make it more difficult to use social engineering to pivot between them. For instance, in the story you linked, they key to an actual attack was a shared credit card number between Paypal and Godaddy that was used for verification. Ignoring the fact of how stupid it is to use just 4 digits for such a task, it would have made that path more difficult for the attacker if he'd used a dedicated card for Godaddy (given his domains were valuable enough to him that they could be used to extort a $50k twitter handle from him). Having different, secret, email addresses/domains attached to important accounts could also provide a stumbling block.
But it's also worth noting that much of the attacker's planned attack failed, and he only succeeded in the end through extortion.
you will end up having most of your conversations with gmail or outlook users so that would not change anything
E-mail in 2020 is not secure against a motivated attacker. It doesn't matter how secure and woke your provider is, when:
1. Everyone you talk on an e-mail thread gets a copy of the entire e-mail thread, to do whatever they want with.
2. You can't control the present and future security of other people's providers, or the present and future security of the computing devices they use to read the e-mail you send them.
Now, if you want to LARP, you can try setting up a mailing list for your friends who only use secure providers (For whatever definition of secure you want to use), and only limit your use of a single e-mail address to that mailing list. Great. Go for it. Write a blog post about it, even. But that's not going to solve the fundamental problems of #1 and #2 for the rest of the world.
Now, if you actually want security (as opposed to 'I want to LARP at security'), take a page from conspiracies in the financial sector, and don't use e-mail for any conversations that you'd like to remain secure.
Securing e-mail is a waste of time. It can't be secured, because of 50 years of social expectations about how e-mail should behave. (Other people retain copies of your e-mails, and other people can choose which provider services their address.) You can spend that effort on trying to secure a different communication protocol, which does not have those 50 years of social expectations, and that will probably lose to e-mail (Because those two security holes provide users with value, and when it comes to value versus security, security will lose every time.)
Not everyone is even contactable from my own domain. The IP address used to belong to some spammers several years ago and some blacklists are still there.
Also, my newsletter, even though it uses double opt-in, triggered some automatic mechanisms of Spamhaus. I ended up on a blacklist several times. Fortunately, I was able to argue my way out and after the last incident, they must have updated their lists.
But those were bad times, no one could literally post a link to my blog onto Twitter etc.
My company name was too long, so we registered a domain for our email that was just our initials and it was nicer to type, and really easy to set up.
Post Cambridge Analytica I'm not sure which is worse.
That said: I'd love to run my own e-mail servers, but Yahoo does a pretty good job keeping spam away from me and offers enough convenience that I just stuck with it.
Happy to consider alternatives I can run on a cheap instance somewhere.
Partner is a die-hard webmail user who detests native desktop clients. I'd like them to be able to use Fastmail webmail with my self-hosted calendar and contacts.
For CalDAV, many people use the Fastmail web interface with other calendars by syncing them (https://www.fastmail.com/help/calendar/sync.html?).
Everyone has this. It's called IMAP.
As for the gmail web client, various services are providing similar interfaces on their email service.
(A great thing about HN is that you don't need to have an account in order to read articles. So I can bookmark it on my phone without worry.)
That said, I still 100% support getting off of the free email providers in order to wave a middle finger at surveillance capitalism.
But that's false. They're encrypted with TLS. It's just not end to end encrypted.
There is clearly some merit to Proton Mail's privacy claims. Even Google goes out of their way to try to scrape data from ProtonMail: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/9yl94k/never_co...
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Maybe a desire for privacy is driving this. Or maybe Google's increasing bias, or ad saturation, or AMP, or something else...
Generally I'm pretty happy with DDG results and don't feel the need to switch back to Google. I have seen a lot of scam ads on DDG which I've reported but never received a response to. The new Apple map integration seems to work pretty well even though I'm on Android.
I'd love to move away from everything Google (further support a company who is pro-consumer) to a company in which i trust and whose business model/ethos is privacy.
There's nothing stopping them from sending your browser Javascript that completely compromises your keys.
They've admitted as much when I asked them about this years ago.
All I know is, I would hear about it very quickly as soon as Proton Mail is discovered to violate my privacy, and that's all I can expect of email. To be honest, the fact that their API is not open sourced and I have to use their web client or mediocre IMAP bridge would make me seek alternatives if I were to reconsider email providers. It would have to be one that has as strong of a privacy-conscious brand, or self-hosting.
ProtonMail has been dragging their feet for so long in the interoperability department, it almost feels like they're aiming for vendor lock-in. If they truly were serious about interoperability, they've had plenty of time to create an open standard around their protocol (like FastMail and post-2017 Lavabit has done), or release patches to make their protocol available in widely used open-source email clients like Thunderbird. Instead they've got that mediocre IMAP bridge you mentioned. No thanks. When I choose an email service I want to retain the ability to export all my data and leave on short notice, without having to depend on non-standard tools.
There are no such guarantees. Social pressure on their brand did not stop Enron or Madoff from committing fraud. Nor did it stop millions of others from committing various crimes, atrocities, and other unethical acts throughout history.
In the realm of email providers, the case of Hushmail[1] serves as an instructive example.
Hushmail is an email provider that provides a service similar to ProtonMail, but:
"Developments in November 2007 led to doubts, amongst security-conscious users, about Hushmail's security, specifically, concern over a backdoor. The issue originated with the non-Java version of the Hush system. It performed the encrypt/decrypt steps on Hush's servers, and then used SSL to transmit the data to the user. The data is available as cleartext during this small window of time; the passphrase can be captured at this point, facilitating the decryption of all stored messages and future messages using this passphrase. Hushmail stated that the Java version is also vulnerable, in that they may be compelled to deliver a compromised java applet to a user."
and
"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of United States v. Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."
Incidentally, despite all this, and what you'd expect to be "damage to their brand", Hushmail is still around, and I'd expect many of their users have never even heard of any of this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...
For someone from Belarus and opposing Lukashenko, ProtonMail is fairly secure service. For Edward Snowden, probably less so.
Forward secrecy only works up to the point your end point gets compromised and only for messages you have not kept. So for the vast majority of people it provides very little value.
It provides no protection against someone who breaks your encryption and something like the Signal Protocol's much greater complexity provides more opportunities to do that.
It’s good to use your own domain, it’s good to use a non ad-driven business model like fastmail (though even this is mostly for the user experience and not security)
Beyond that “secure” email when you’re largely communicating with other @gmail users, isn’t a thing.
Google has some of the best security researchers in the world, I’d trust their employees to do a better job than proton at securing the service itself.
Email should be treated as largely public (for personal use) and not used for sensitive communication. It’s a little different in a corporate setting, but then you’re not using proton mail anyway.
And seriously, this is an email period it was invented how many decades ago? It should be easy to have something that works very well with offerings from multiple providers.
As you dig deeper, there are a lot of little details that give Google the advantage. I'm not expert enough to describe all of them in detail, but certainly part of it is we have big players who are dominant on Android and Apple making it difficult for small players to catch up. We also have, as one person pointed out, blacklists and not being easy to get around that with other providers because Google is so dominant in this space too.
The spam fighting services. First of all, I'm not sure whether they are being run locally on the mail servers or maybe the mail servers forward our emails body to a third party anti-spam service to get a "spam score".
And secondly, after being assigned a "spam score" a part of your email may end up in the headers as "X-something" where the anti-spam service describes why it didn't like your email. And we know that many 3-letter agencies collect as much email metadata (e.g. headers) as they can sniff out. So, you should know that the first X bytes of your unencrypted emails are less private than the remaining part, because they can be part of the metadata.
Should you forward the email with these header fields intact, then all it does is reveal a bit about your mail providers' infrastructure, which is already entirely public information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Connection_to_Edward_S...
It's right there in the link you're replying to.
The irony here. I wonder if the number of people searching for Google search alternatives on Google is up as well?
FBI cant issue an NSL to read every email you sent or received to construct your patterns of life to more easily parellel construct you or blackmail/coerce you into compliance.
even NSA has to tread lightly, and cant just casually feed your emails into XKEYSCORE, because if they get caught, then Yandex with the assistance of FSB will kick out NSA and/or hack back or retaliate with active measures. so NSA would only risk blowing their Yandex collection for very high National Priority targets. not you.
in a sense, the smartest surveillance evasion tactic is to hide in the fog of cyber war between the Nation States. if you're not Baghdadi or Carter Page, you wont have to worry as much.
plus, Yandex mail is better than gmail. Yandex is what gmail was 10 years ago--simple UI, no bloat, no ads, no spam, no BS. Yandex has a mobile email app too. better, you can host your private DNS on Yandex, then use Yandex for your private domain's emails.
and unlike Google, who is probably selling your info about you from your emails to an ecosystems of ad spammers and "database of ruin" analytics spy companies, Yandex is not. thanks to US sanctions on Russia, your data is effectively siloed off from the US market.
finally, consider the Shadowbroker hacker used Yandex to leak the stolen NSA EQGRP files. has the Shadowbroker been caught? nope. Yandex security looks better than anyone else's.
we live in interesting times, when Russia is now a safer place to store your data than the US. the world has gone mad.
Also, I see that they have their own browser?? https://browser.yandex.com/ I assume it's just a rebrand.
and yes, Yandex has an API for everything. You don't need language bindings as long as your language speaks HTTPS.