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...
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.
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 ?