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Does end-to-end encrypted, locally stored email exist?

8 points by notdrunkatall ↗ HN
I've been familiar with the NSA's data gathering program for a few years now, but I thought it was only Verizon and ATT which were sharing information. However it seems that facebook, google, and just about everyone else who matters is also sharing our information with the NSA, and that sucks, to say the least.

7 comments

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mtowle
If you read the Assange-Schmidt transcript, you will recall a section wherein Assange calls it unwise to encrypt your email, presumably because you stick out like a sore thumb. It's like telling anyone monitoring the network, "Hey! Look at me!"
informatimago
of course. just have your own smtp server on your own computer. and your friend. then emails will go directly from your computer to your friend's. internet is a meshed network, not a star network! just use ssl to prevent the isp between you and the recipient to catch the packets. even better, build your own links with your neighbors!
e12e
I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

Gnu Privacy Guard/PGP and S/MIME both provide encrypted, end-to-end email. Or you could share the same mail server (infrastructure), or set up a VPN with your own DNS, smtp etc.

GPG and S/MIME does leave headers open -- but some form of traffic analysis would be possible even with "direct" SMTP.

One way of defeating traffic analysis is to combine GnuPG/PGP with mix-master remailers (onion routing for email, similar in principle to TOR). As with TOR, many (exit) nodes are probably operated (directly or indirectly) by intelligence agencies.

e12e
I also came across this convoluted architecture, when I tried to see if anyone had implemented/extended OTR to email:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.29....

Somewhat amusingly, one of the authors worked for AT&T. Maybe he knew something about why you'd want an off the record channel for email ? ;-)

notdrunkatall
I mean a simple, user-friendly email service that only stores the emails on user's computers and offers strong end-to-end encryption. Not something necessarily for me, but something that I could build and market as a truly secure email and offer to the world.
e12e
If you want actual email (smtp), the only way to guarantee end-to-end encryption, is to encrypt and decrypt on the client (the email sender/reader). There's no real way to make a secure web service for this (As the story with hushmail.com shows).

The difficulty with both S/MIME and GnuPG is key/trust-management - an unsolved problem. With S/MIME you can set up certificates internally with e.g: Active Directory. With GnuPG you could perhaps set up/recommend all users to trust a "central" keypair, and use that keypair to sign all user keys.

I'd say eg: Thunderbird with a plugin for GnuPG is about as easy as things are going to get -- without some user education (wrt trust) -- you won't actually get any security anyway.