Scramble.io: secure email for everyone

Re:Scramble.io: secure email for everyone by tptacek on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @01:36PM (#6677042)

Let's stipulate that your detection system, which does not currently exist even as a design document, actually works. By your own admission, only a small minority of users will actually install it. Now: a whistleblower in the USG, who is much more likely not to be a "power user" (if they were clueful they wouldn't be using this system to begin with) leaks a document from your service to a journalist and begins a conversation.

The FBI decides they'd like to read that conversation. They issue a court order requiring you to hand over your TLS private key, and use it to MITM your users to feed them corrupted JS code that discloses PGP private keys.

The small minority of users "detect" this change. But not quickly enough: the whistleblower has already logged in to check their mail, and has now disclosed their private key to the FBI.

What now? What's the feature you're going to build to keep that from happening?

Not only are you using Javascript crypto to provide this "service" to users, but you're not even forward secure.

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Re:Scramble.io: secure email for everyone by hershel on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @01:47PM (#6677150)

Tptacek, whistle blowers level security should not be a use case for this extension , and should be advertised as part of it.

But decreasing the amount of dragnet surveillance by some extent sounds like a good thing to me. For example, many people wouldn't like the government to know mundane stuff about them, like having an abortion.This could help.

* BTW haven't moxie written about an asynchronous diffie hellman key exchange ? it could at least give PFS to this , so the private key would be much less useful ?

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Re:Scramble.io: secure email for everyone by jmccree on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @03:18PM (#6677925)

I think the disconnect here is, many of us can't imagine offering something with known technical security issues such as browser side JS encryption, and branding that "secure". Much less with all the unknown legal, operational, and techical security issues that may arise later in a project like this. As well, from what I read this project transfers your (encrypted with only a passphrase) private key over the internet, where it will be caught in the dragnet for decryption later.

I find it far more dangerous for someone to think they're secure against government level threats, than to know they're not. And if you're not worried about government level threats, gmail with MFA and pinned chrome certs is likely safer than this project. Of course, this is all just my humble opinion...

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Re:Scramble.io: secure email for everyone by blahbl4hblahtoo on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @02:10PM (#6677336)

Its not a personal insult. This system just doesn't provide serious protection from "dragnet surveillance". Distributing keys and allowing the client to encrypt a message to another user ala GPG is a great idea...you just can't use server delivered code to do it in the traditional web server/browser way. The JavaScript is modifiable in transit.

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