Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: foxen624 on August 09, 2013, 10:09 pm
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I was just doing a bit of reading, and found the following [chilling] excerpt:
"....although both Silent Circle and Lavabit relied on highly-secure encryption to protect the contents of emails, representatives from both sites hinted that even that might not be enough to keep Uncle Sam from snooping."
whole article on the *clearnet* at: http://rt.com/usa/silent-circle-shutdown-lavabit-300/ - although, I personally found the (below) article which is similar in nature to be more informative (but that's just me :o )
"Silent Circle, co-founded by email security guru Phil Zimmermann, has pulled out of the secure email business. It was a pre-emptive measure inspired by Lavabit’s self-shuttering, and a worrying sign for the U.S.-hosted secure communications industry."
--->full article found at *CLEARNET* http://gigaom.com/2013/08/09/another-u-s-secure-email-service-shuts-down-to-protect-customers-from-authorities/
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Unless the government posses quantum computing PGP will stay safe and impossible to crack.
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Unless the government posses quantum computing PGP will stay safe and impossible to crack.
Well... there are 3x 512-qubit quantum computers in existence now and quantum entanglement was effectively proven. Google has one, the NSA/DOD has one, and the company that built them has one (a Canadian company funding largely by US defense $).
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Well, that's reassuring... or is it? It's just when the co-author of PGP suggests that it may not be enough to keep the government from getting through anyway.. well, it did get me somewhat concerned and I wanted to get the thoughts of others in this community...
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i think we will need multiple layers of security and protection. think of inception. dream in a dream of a dream. we'll need tor with pgp with vpn with something that can further encrypt or put our pgp messages through another step of encoding. i think that the hackers and computers guys will always be one step ahead, and sooner than later we'll have a stronger encryption system that the government will try to decode. a never ending battle between two sides.
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Are there not higher levels of encryption that can be utilized?
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i think we will need multiple layers of security and protection. think of inception. dream in a dream of a dream. we'll need tor with pgp with vpn with something that can further encrypt or put our pgp messages through another step of encoding.
a never ending battle between two sides.
Something similar to the concept of infinite regression.
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AES-Twofish-Serpent!!!!1111111
/thumbs
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@maf - While it's easy to use PGP and to have a basic understanding of how it works is one thing, but as you, I also didn't understand fully the tecnnical details of the article you posted - although I must admit that I'm somewhat in a hurry - r/l calls - but I did skim it enough to understand the implications, which are not far from what I'd already suspected. Even if the smartest and most technically minded people, hackers, etc.. happen to be on our side, I'd be willing to bet that the government spy agencies have a lot more in the way of resources to find a way (even if they were dumb - which I'm afraid they're not all that way or even most of them) to catch up and surpass us if we ever became a really high priority for them...
Seems as if the best thing to do if faced with us against the largest, most sophisticated spy machine in the world.. would be to just keep as low of a profile as possible... then again... just my opinion...
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Well, that's reassuring... or is it? It's just when the co-author of PGP suggests that it may not be enough to keep the government from getting through anyway.. well, it did get me somewhat concerned and I wanted to get the thoughts of others in this community...
If you read Jon Callas' comments carefully, they make perfect sense, particularly to those of use with some understanding of how the technology works.
We designed our phone, video, and text services (Silent Phone and Silent Text) to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your data to be nil. The reasons are obvious — the less of your information we have, the better it is for you and for us.
Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for us. Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure.
Callas is mostly right here. Email can be made secure, but it requires using tools and techniques that will literally make the average user's head explode.
All of Silent Circle's other services are point-to-point, from one user to another, whereas email is based on store-and-forward technology. You have to understand that when the net was initially developed, the technological landscape was _very_ different to what it is now. DSL and cable modems didn't yet exist -- almost all communications took place via dial-up lines using laughably slow modems -- at least by today's standards. The best you could ever get on a dial-up line using a conventional modem was 56 Kbits/second.
I'm old enough to remember when modems were a "buck a baud" -- when I scored a brand-new Hayes 1200-bit modem for about $700, I felt like I had won the lottery! (Remember even the slowest high-speed connections today, at about 1 megabit/second, are almost one thousand times faster than these old lumbering beasts.)
When email was developed, back in the day, computers all too often communicated over dial-up lines via long-distance. These transfers (usually over UUCP, Unix to Unix Copy Program) usually took place in the middle of the night, when long-distance rates were lower. Part of the reason that email messages are store-and-forward hearks back to those days -- someone figured out that machine A could call machine B for a cost of a local call, and machine B could call machine C for the cost of a local call, whereas a call from machine A to machine C might incur long-distance toll charges.
The entire point behind using a store-and-forward system was to reduce communications costs to the operators.
The problem is that the current email standards, based on store-and-forward, are too well established to abandon easily, if at all. Silent Circle could come up with a new standard, but then it wouldn't be email as any of us would recognize it.
You note that he's not saying anything about the Feds breaking PGP; that because it's highly unlikely that they have done so.
Finally, here is some information on Silent Circle's Silent Mail offering, from a archived copy of their website: you can see that they were offering a email service, with 1GB of storage, and also a service to manage user keys (likely similar to Hushmail.)
I'm sure you can understand how both of these would provide extremely attractive targets to LEA.
* Encrypted Email - Send completely encrypted emails and files directly to other Silent Mail users or to any email address.
* Plug-N-Play - Easy, quick and secure. Simply plugs directly into your existing mail client (Outlook, Mac Mail, etc).
* PGP Secure - The world's most used encryption designed by our founders Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas
* 1 GB of Storage - Get a @SilentCircle.com email address. Comes with 1 GB of encrypted storage.
What Silent Mail Can and Cannot Do:
Silent Mail is an encrypted email service that provides secure, encrypted email with minimal burden to its users. Silent Mail integrates with any email client that supports IMAP on any device. Silent Mail offers two modes of working:
- Complete end-to-end encryption with you, the Silent Mail user, holding your own OpenPGP key or S/MIME certificate.
- Managed encryption using our PGP Universal encryption servers that manage keys and certificates for you.
The first mode of operation offers full email security, but is hard to use. Most of the world does not use email encryption precisely because it is hard to use. There are many ways to use OpenPGP or S/MIME, and our PGP Universal servers make the encryption easier.
The second mode of operation is convenient, but not as secure. All you have to do is configure your email client to use our servers and your email will be encrypted. The downside is that our servers create and manage your keys. We separate duties with our staff between email management and key management. The people managing your email can't read it and don't have access to your keys. The people who manage the encryption server don't have access to your email. Only you can decide whether this meets your security needs. We are pleased if it does, and understand if it doesn't.
There are some things that Silent Mail cannot do. Our Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes utilize peer-to-peer (device-to-device) encryption, which means your device holds the encryption keys, not us. Silent Mail uses server-side encryption.
Nightcrawler
4096R/BBF7433B 2012-09-22 Nightcrawler <Nightcrawler@SR>
PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (MIT clearnet keyserver)
PGP Key: https://keys.indymedia.org/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (IndyMedia https: clearnet keyserver)
PGP Key: http://qtt2yl5jocgrk7nu.onion/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (IndyMedia .onion keyserver)
PGP Key: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=174.msg633090#msg633090 (Silk Road Forums PGP Key Link)
PGP Key Fingerprint = 83F8 CAF8 7B73 C3C7 8D07 B66B AFC8 CE71 D9AF D2F0
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If silent circle gave a damn about user privacy they wouldn't be using 100 different scripts on their site.
Go with safe-mail.net it's the only legit alternative. Or use tor chat.
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@Nightcrawler - that was quite a post you made there! As far as dial-up ... hate to admit it, but I do remember when I thought that was the only way to get to the Internet. Also, even way back when, I had the creepy feeling with no basis in any kind of real knowledge, that whatever was written in an email was being watched by... someone. Bad people who wanted to do harm in some way. Although at that time, the idea that those "bad people" who in fact were and are listening/reading/watching are none other than our own government :o
But, what I did not know until I just read your post was that the very basis of email was founded on the principal of saving money on long distance phone calls (basically). I never really questioned "why" it was "free" (aside from the monthly ISP bill) to communicate through the phone line to someone anywhere in the world. Though upon reading it the way you explained, it does make perfect sense.. for the age of dial-up at least. That part, I did find fascinating as a concept.
O.K. back to modern day... See, what it was/is that bothered me - even though I didn't read the archived paper that you posted anywhere except in your post, of the various articles that I did happen across earlier when I first made the post, was in part the fact that Silent-Mail did in fact offer - as stated in your posted archive:
"Complete end-to-end encryption with you, the Silent Mail user, holding your own OpenPGP key or S/MIME certificate." Which sounds to me to be identical to the GnuGP PGP that we use here today... which is the PGP that I started to wonder if it really is still secure. Perhaps I'm missing something here? ???
The other feature offered by Silent Mail which I'm also quoting from your posted archive:
"Managed encryption using our PGP Universal encryption servers that manage keys and certificates for you." Which does sound a whole lot like Hush-mail as in that there was a central server or third party who would also know how to decrypt the user's messages and obviously would not be secure as no matter the good intentions of the server, they could still be compelled to hand over the info to the fbi/nsa/multiple government spy agencies. Though apparently Hush Mail didn't have the most honourable of intentions - but that's neither here nor there as I was not referring to this type of encryption.
It was the fact that as I read in various articles (I believe I have the url's to at least two of them in my OP) that both Lavabit and Silent Circle were closing down their email services because even with the heavy encryption (I don't know a whole lot about Lavabit, but assume they surely also offered the same kind of PGP that we use here - where the server has zero knowledge of what the messages contained or how to decrypt them), that had me concerned about just how secure PGP really is.
If Silent-Mail was truly secure with using just the one option, then it seems they would be able to simply stop offering the other option that sounds like the same concept that Hush-mail used, and keep operating using just the one option where only the user has all the info and the server has none.... but, nothing I read on this over the past two days sounds as if those who created the concept of the PGP we use today feel it secure enough to "keep Uncle Sam from snooping" (I believe was the wording w/o being able to see it at the moment).
Sooooooo.... apparently I'm still a bit confused on that..... :-\
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lol,safe-mail.net you do realize it's run by mossad don't you?in other words the Israeli intelligence service lol.
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Yes, it's still safe, if used properly. Todays quantum computers are not usable to crack encryption yet. They couldn't even run Tetris on it.
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It doesn't really matter what email service you use as long as you PGP encrypt everything, If PGP was cracked the government wouldn't still be using it.
At least with safe-mail.net you can log into it without using scripts anonymously from Tor, Even if it is run by Mossad they can't crack the PGP so as long as you dont send or receive any mail unencrypted you are safe.
If you want even better privacy use Tor chat it's just as good as email.
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@Nightcrawler - that was quite a post you made there! As far as dial-up ... hate to admit it, but I do remember when I thought that was the only way to get to the Internet.
For many years it was the only way to get online.
Also, even way back when, I had the creepy feeling with no basis in any kind of real knowledge, that whatever was written in an email was being watched by... someone. Bad people who wanted to do harm in some way. Although at that time, the idea that those "bad people" who in fact were and are listening/reading/watching are none other than our own government :o
Your impression, although correct, was the exact opposite of the more widely-held (although erroneous) impression that email was somehow 'private'.
But, what I did not know until I just read your post was that the very basis of email was founded on the principal of saving money on long distance phone calls (basically). I never really questioned "why" it was "free" (aside from the monthly ISP bill) to communicate through the phone line to someone anywhere in the world. Though upon reading it the way you explained, it does make perfect sense.. for the age of dial-up at least. That part, I did find fascinating as a concept.
For what it's worth, both email and Usenet use similar methods. Usenet, one of the oldest surviving technologies (along with email) uses a flooding algorithm to propagate news posts. Again, back in the day, I think that the idea was to reduce communications costs.
O.K. back to modern day... See, what it was/is that bothered me - even though I didn't read the archived paper that you posted anywhere except in your post, of the various articles that I did happen across earlier when I first made the post, was in part the fact that Silent-Mail did in fact offer - as stated in your posted archive:
"Complete end-to-end encryption with you, the Silent Mail user, holding your own OpenPGP key or S/MIME certificate." Which sounds to me to be identical to the GnuGP PGP that we use here today... which is the PGP that I started to wonder if it really is still secure. Perhaps I'm missing something here? ???
Yes and no. The situation is exactly the same as the current one, in that by using GnuPG we are all controlling our own PGP keys. We are also using the same crypto algorithms, so in that sense it's the same.
As best as I can tell, not having been a subscriber, it would appear that the situation would be closest to a hybrid of Hushmail and Tormail. Let me explain:
You have to understand that there are several factors at play here. One factor that Hushmail and Tormail both have in common is the "one stop shopping" factor. Both Hushmail and Tormail attracted a large number of users with something to hide (not necessarily criminal activity, I should point out). In the case of Hushmail, it was being used by illegal steroid vendors, their customers, and even the vendors' Chinese bulk powered steroid suppliers.
Silent Circle, by running their own mailservers, would have been in precisely the same position, in other words, a big, fat, juicy target for the Feds. Once a mailserver is seized, the Feds can see what email(s) have been sent and received by their targets of choice. They can also peruse address books. By its very nature, email is NOT anonymous -- there is lots of header information there to allow the Feds to conduct relationship/traffic analyses on the seized emails.
Silent Circle aims its products/services at those with less security sophistication -- like Hushmail, that is their primary selling point. (I didn't subscribe because it would have been pointless for me, I simply have no need of it.)
For those who use GnuPG (and thereby manage our own keys, as well as those of others) the situation would be more akin to that of GPG users who used Tormail. With the seizure of the server(s), the Feds can see who is writing to who, and glean what little information they can from the headers. One of the things that has to be emphasized is that neither Silent Circle nor Hushmail were anonymity services, unlike Tormail.
Gleaning a user's real IP address from Tormail's email headers simply isn't going to happen, because Tormail was accessed solely through Tor. The idea was to prevent the operator from learning anyone's real IP address. In contrast, neither Hushmail nor Silent Circle would be routinely accessed through an anonymity network like Tor, thus the users'IP addresses would be available for capture (and would probably, to some extent, show up in the server logs and/or email headers).
With users who used SIlent Circle to manage their keys, the service became more akin to Hushmail than anything else, and therefor subject to the same types of compromise.
The other feature offered by Silent Mail which I'm also quoting from your posted archive:
"Managed encryption using our PGP Universal encryption servers that manage keys and certificates for you." Which does sound a whole lot like Hush-mail as in that there was a central server or third party who would also know how to decrypt the user's messages and obviously would not be secure as no matter the good intentions of the server, they could still be compelled to hand over the info to the fbi/nsa/multiple government spy agencies. Though apparently Hush Mail didn't have the most honourable of intentions - but that's neither here nor there as I was not referring to this type of encryption.
Precisely.
It was the fact that as I read in various articles (I believe I have the url's to at least two of them in my OP) that both Lavabit and Silent Circle were closing down their email services because even with the heavy encryption (I don't know a whole lot about Lavabit, but assume they surely also offered the same kind of PGP that we use here - where the server has zero knowledge of what the messages contained or how to decrypt them), that had me concerned about just how secure PGP really is.
Fair points. Let me give you my take on this...
To the best of my knowledge (which may be far from complete), Lavabit used server-side encryption; if memory serves it was based on some type of elliptic key algorithm (ECC). While on the surface, this sounds extremely good (especially those looking for buzzword compliance) it still has a problem, namely: the data has to be decrypted in order for you to access it. It's very much like TrueCrypt -- the encrypted containers offer superb security -- when the computer is shut-down, or the containers are closed. However, as long as the containers are mounted, they are essentially in the clear.
Hushmail made similar claims, that even their own administrators could not read your mail. Hushmail relied on a client-side Java applet to decrypt your private key -- that was the hole that the Feds exploited. Using a poisoned Java applet to grab your passphrase, they could trivially get access to your private key, and thus all your encrypted email.
By the same token, even if the data in your Lavabit email account were ECC-encrypted, it would, of necessity, have to be decrypted in order for you to access it. Accordingly, all the Feds would have to do is snag whatever they needed to decrypt your data when you login to the service.
If Silent-Mail was truly secure with using just the one option, then it seems they would be able to simply stop offering the other option that sounds like the same concept that Hush-mail used, and keep operating using just the one option where only the user has all the info and the server has none.... but, nothing I read on this over the past two days sounds as if those who created the concept of the PGP we use today feel it secure enough to "keep Uncle Sam from snooping" (I believe was the wording w/o being able to see it at the moment).
The reason that Silent Circle offered a managed key option (and why Hushmail exists) is because the average customer (especially business and professional-types) can't be bothered to learn about public key encryption.
If I had to hazard a guess, I would guess that only 5-10% of their users self-managed their keys. Silent Circle's CIO/CEO has said that given the nature of their customers (including some very prominent people) the odds of a major breach of security is simply too high.
Finally, there is another major difference between Lavabit/Silent Circle and the Hushmail debacle in 2007, which makes the current situation even worse or more omnious.
Remember that in 2007, the DEA used the Mutual Law Enforcement Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to get a judge to sign a warrant -- Hushmail has always stated that they do not honour warrants issued outside of Canada. Using the MLAT treaty, the DEA was able to convince an American government official to approach his/her counterpart in the Canadian government, and have the Canadian Minister of Justice order the British Columbia courts to issue a warrant to get the data the DEA wanted. While this was bad enough, it was still a case of criminal law/law enforcement. The current situation with Lavabit/Silent Circle purportedly involves the issuance (or potential issuance) of National Security Letters (NSLs). These NSLs can be signed by any FBI supervisor, without ever having been presented before a judge. WHile the judicial level of protection was narrow, it was at least there. It provided at least _some_ guarantees against abuse. Not so with NSLs.
Sooooooo.... apparently I'm still a bit confused on that..... :-\
Hope that clears-up your confusion somewhat.
Nightcrawler
4096R/BBF7433B 2012-09-22 Nightcrawler <Nightcrawler@SR>
PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (MIT clearnet keyserver)
PGP Key: https://keys.indymedia.org/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (IndyMedia https: clearnet keyserver)
PGP Key: http://qtt2yl5jocgrk7nu.onion/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB8F1D88EBBF7433B (IndyMedia .onion keyserver)
PGP Key: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=174.msg633090#msg633090 (Silk Road Forums PGP Key Link)
PGP Key Fingerprint = 83F8 CAF8 7B73 C3C7 8D07 B66B AFC8 CE71 D9AF D2F0
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Yes, it's still safe, if used properly. Todays quantum computers are not usable to crack encryption yet. They couldn't even run Tetris on it.
As far as we know publicly. Surely there will be working quantum cracking machines long before we know about them. The history of national intelligence organizations makes that obvious.
lol,safe-mail.net you do realize it's run by mossad don't you?in other words the Israeli intelligence service lol.
Exactly, and do you really think the Mossad shares everything with your nations intelligence organization, or hands over details if asked, or is likely to get hacked? Probably not, on all counts. I would rather use webmail hosted by Israeli intelligence then hosted on some sketchy server like tormail that was bound to get owned by the USA eventually.
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Yes, it's still safe, if used properly. Todays quantum computers are not usable to crack encryption yet. They couldn't even run Tetris on it.
As far as we know publicly.
The good news is that LE is unlikely to make that news public in a case against you or me. Therefore evidence acquired through its use will be inadmissible in our court cases.
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The good news is that LE is unlikely to make that news public in a case against you or me. Therefore evidence acquired through its use will be inadmissible in our court cases.
Buddy, just because something is inadmissible in courts doesn't mean that an adversary won't use that information against you in other ways. Or simply for motivation (in the case of police).
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At the end of the day, possession is still 9/10ths of the law. Remember that.
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As far as we know publicly. Surely there will be working quantum cracking machines long before we know about them. The history of national intelligence organizations makes that obvious.
We will however know when there are quantum computers which are actually capable of cracking encryption. Scientists create those computers, not the NSA.
If they could break encryption then they wouldn't need to bully the owner of Lavabit btw. They could simply sniff the traffic and crack the encryption.
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Yes, it's still safe, if used properly. Todays quantum computers are not usable to crack encryption yet. They couldn't even run Tetris on it.
As far as we know publicly.
The good news is that LE is unlikely to make that news public in a case against you or me. Therefore evidence acquired through its use will be inadmissible in our court cases.
Astor, as SOD teaches us, even if they obtain evidence against a person illegally, they will cover this up and even make up another method through which they will say they obtained it.
LE is not following the letter nor the spirit of the law. We are living in an unlawful state for the most part. If they wanna get you, they will, by hook or by crook (mostly the latter).
goblin
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Utah surveilance will have current ssl pgp figured out within a year of operation. But the good guys with have version new.O by then. One step ahead.