Lavabit abruptly shuts down

Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by adrianwaj on Thursday August 08, 2013 @07:28PM (#6182698)

"encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers"

how is that possible? I'm curious to know as to how they achieved that technically. I mean if the user is reading an email in their browser, then it would've had to have been created on the server first.

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by cozeulodorieso on Thursday August 08, 2013 @07:48PM (#6182763)

Lavabit's explanation of their security, via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20130530023856/http://lavabit.com...

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by babby on Thursday August 08, 2013 @07:41PM (#6182736)

It's just how encryption works; you don't store the plain passwords or keys the users submit to decrypt their stuff, thus you have no way to access it.

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by rorrr2 on Thursday August 08, 2013 @09:03PM (#6183057)

It all happens on the client side. Servers only store the encrypted emails and have no idea what the contents or the keys are.

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by moutarde on Thursday August 08, 2013 @10:38PM (#6183387)

The same server(s) also control the JavaScript code run by the client/browser. They could serve special code (to any one the government wanted to spy on) that returned their password to the server.

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by rorrr2 on Friday August 09, 2013 @09:04AM (#6185319)

That's exactly why LavaBit shut down, looks like they were forced to do that.

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Re:Lavabit abruptly shuts down by adrianwaj on Thursday August 08, 2013 @09:12PM (#6183090)

right, but incoming and outgoing emails from lavabit servers won't necessarily be encrypted, unless the other party is using GPG or whatever - it's just the way they're stored.

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