>Availability
>
>Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers
>Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers
>Not available to users with personal Google Accounts
Also to be available it must first be enabled by a workspace admin, then by the end user.
To me this feature looks like a box ticking exercise with an eye toward government contracts. Microsoft has it so Google needs it too in order to avoid looking less secure to decision makers who may not know whether or not it will ever be needed.
This is not just tick a checkbox and it is done. Enabling it is non-trivial as it requires setting up a whole bunch of stuff, like integrating with a third party key service provider (or setting up your own).
Availability
* Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Education Standard customers
* Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers
* Not available to users with personal Google Accounts
Yes I think if you work at a software company "GA" as a status in release management has a well-understood meaning - "general availability." However stating something is "generally available" in the headline only to followed by the lede that states it's actually only GA for a premium tier of product users feels a bit disingenuous if not click-baity.
i think i read all the blog posts and announcements, yet i can't for the life of me find a technical explanation of what exactly this does.
it looks like it could be like s/mime, or possibly a scheme for encrypting the contents of messages stored in gmail accounts. where are the keys stored? what is the threat model?
Can you only send encrypted messages to recipients who also use Google? If it isn't S/MIME then as far as I'm concerned it almost isn't email. Anyone can already make encrypted ZIP files or other proprietary encrypted attachments and send them via email. If it's not S/MIME, it feels like just a convenience layer on top of that.
It’s primarily for industries with strict regulatory/compliance requirements on managing sensitive data. The more detailed description is at [1]. Keys are stored in a cloud service, admins and end users use SSO to retrieve a key whenever they need to access an encrypted document. This is supposed to let companies do things like enforce rules on forwarding or printing sensitive emails, revoke access to particular documents if needed, and reduce the scale and risk of leaks if Google or an individual user account was breached. Of course, it’s not perfect in practice.
ok so it's basically like 0bin for google apps storage. that's a step in the right direction... it's confusing because they present it in the context of email.
although i suppose that's probably what customers are most worried about. corporate scandals tend to frequently be rooted in leaked internal communications.
These days, people really should get their own domain and host there email there. If you do not know how to do this, there are plenty of cheap hosting companies you can use.
And if you want to encrypt, use gnupg or that thing Thunderbird now uses. I am a mutt user and gnupg with mutt is rather easy.
I suppose jeremyjh@ meant emailing someone with a Google account kind of defeats the purpose of self hosting as your message is now at Google's hands. Self hosting probably makes more sense if people you're emailing are self hosting too.
This is purely marketing AFAIT. I don't see how it provides any protection against the 5 eyes or having one's google account breached. The encryption/decription is done with javascript code served to your browser by google (= can be hijacked/changed/…)
The only way to do client side encryption is PGP on a native client distributed by a third party.
I think the primary benefit is that in theory you can cut Google off at any time. If you disable the key service they can no longer decrypt your data. So if you decided that Google is no longer trustworthy you can leave and they can't access your data.
Of course this is sort of an odd game where you need to cut their access off before they backdoor it, so you have to somehow predict that Google is going to become malicious and beat them to the punch. If you a reacting to something that they are doing it likely isn't helping much.
Another possible advantage is that you could potentially have logging on key access which could give some idea of data usage. So if Google starts requesting keys for all of your stored data then you can be suspicious that they are siphoning up your data. (Or doing some background maintenance? Who knows?)
In practice this is probably mostly checkbox theater where it is a feature that Google and their users can list.
I wonder which tool we can use to decrypt the exported messages before importing them into a local (mbox, maildir) or remote message store (IMAP.) At worst we can use the JS code Google sends us, but extracting it from the gmail JS bundle is probably non trivial.
Except that we've got two decades of evidence of people regularly fucking up PGP leaking the contents of entire email threads. If the only thing that works is PGP then nothing works.
If the key is encrypted with your password, I don't see how that compromises security by a lot. If they adapt the javascript to break encryption on a large scale, that would sooner or later come out.
Yes, they could target specific people, deliver different javascript and break their encryption, but in general it's still a huge security gain. It makes it impossible for Google to handover E-Mails retrospectively to police or spy agencies.
Not saying much. Same is true about any e2e encrypted messaging (Telegram, Signal, etc.)
There's no way to tell if they are intercepting your messages clientside, and you'd have to monitor all the network traffic (which would be encrypted with their keys) to detect exfiltration.
>I don't see how it provides any protection against the 5 eyes or having one's google account breached.
It isn't supposed to protect you from government agencies. Really what this feature is, is 1) e2e of email, and 2) integration with an external enterprise key management service.
#2 means that at very least, your org will have access to your keys and therefore all encrypted mail, and if they have access to that, then they are open to things like subpoenas from law enforcement.
Wonder if there's a browser plugin that can calculate SHA 256 checksum for a page and all linked JS - to help verify that the encryption/decription code has not been compromised.
Readit News
Also to be available it must first be enabled by a workspace admin, then by the end user.
> Your organization operates in a highly regulated industry, like aerospace and defense, financial services, or government.
Just out of curiosity, why would you expect anything different?
Admins of many orgs don't like letting the user have options for things like security.
Dead Comment
;-)
They know the majority of their users are going to think 'generally available' is exactly what it sounds like, not their made up meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Whether it is available to everyone for free, requires a specific plan etc. is not part of the determination.
it looks like it could be like s/mime, or possibly a scheme for encrypting the contents of messages stored in gmail accounts. where are the keys stored? what is the threat model?
can anyone enlighten?
[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897
although i suppose that's probably what customers are most worried about. corporate scandals tend to frequently be rooted in leaked internal communications.
These days, people really should get their own domain and host there email there. If you do not know how to do this, there are plenty of cheap hosting companies you can use.
And if you want to encrypt, use gnupg or that thing Thunderbird now uses. I am a mutt user and gnupg with mutt is rather easy.
It seems to be a giant pain in the ass, and might be impossible in some circumstances
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
Deliverability is only an issue when self hosting (particularly for home IPs)
So nothing for power users?
The only way to do client side encryption is PGP on a native client distributed by a third party.
can be self hosted.
Of course this is sort of an odd game where you need to cut their access off before they backdoor it, so you have to somehow predict that Google is going to become malicious and beat them to the punch. If you a reacting to something that they are doing it likely isn't helping much.
Another possible advantage is that you could potentially have logging on key access which could give some idea of data usage. So if Google starts requesting keys for all of your stored data then you can be suspicious that they are siphoning up your data. (Or doing some background maintenance? Who knows?)
In practice this is probably mostly checkbox theater where it is a feature that Google and their users can list.
Yes, they could target specific people, deliver different javascript and break their encryption, but in general it's still a huge security gain. It makes it impossible for Google to handover E-Mails retrospectively to police or spy agencies.
Deleted Comment
There's no way to tell if they are intercepting your messages clientside, and you'd have to monitor all the network traffic (which would be encrypted with their keys) to detect exfiltration.
It isn't supposed to protect you from government agencies. Really what this feature is, is 1) e2e of email, and 2) integration with an external enterprise key management service.
#2 means that at very least, your org will have access to your keys and therefore all encrypted mail, and if they have access to that, then they are open to things like subpoenas from law enforcement.
Edit: Found out that it doesn't: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897#zippy=%2Cwhich-...