Re:You have a moral obligation to use crypto
by abemassry on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @02:41AM
(#7223082)
I'm working on this small project, it might be less friction, probably not zero. I'd be interested if you had any thoughts on how to improve it. It's using GPG for end to end encryption.
Re:You have a moral obligation to use crypto
by jimmaswell on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @09:17PM
(#7222081)
Do email sites not already use HTTPS?
Re:You have a moral obligation to use crypto
by jedbrown on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @09:52PM
(#7222236)
Transfer between servers is over SMTP, which is not encrypted by default and almost always subject to degradation attacks (the MITM can claim not to support STARTTLS). In any case, the user cannot verify or demand that STARTTLS be used and many hosts don't support it at all. Meanwhile, PGP does not require any trust of intermediate entities, but relatively few people you might want to email have PGP keys and even those with keys might not have them on the device from which they intend to read your email. S/MIME is in a similar position to PGP, with a CAs trust model instead of Web of Trust.
Re:You have a moral obligation to use crypto
by andrewaylett on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @09:01AM
(#7224271)
Note that this is indeed almost always, rather than actually always. My mail server is configured to refuse to send to Google (and a few other hand-picked sites) unless protected by SSL. The converse is, unfortunately, not yet true.
DANE[0] should allow me to put DNSSEC secured records in place to tell Google (et al) that they should always use SSL to talk to me too, but I don't have DNSSEC support for my domains yet and my version of Postfix isn't new enough to be able to use it for outgoing mail either.
More frustratingly, many popular email providers (for example, BT) don't support SSL at all. That lowers the bar for eavesdropping from active MITM to passive listening.
However, here's the deal/problem:
I am willing to encrypt outgoing mail only in cases where I can identify that the recipient are capable of decrypting it (with 0 friction at any stage).
It's (still) more important to me that my e-mail is read by the recipient, than that it's not read by any other party.