On 11/18/2013 09:37 AM, Josh Steiner wrote:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail-initiative
Basically, it is an initiative to open source the lavabit's internal code and turn it into a new secure mail protocol they are calling "Dark Mail"
The really annoying thing is that lavabit's platform and Dark Mail are totally incompatible and have nothing to do with one another. So the kickstarter is meaningless. * lavabit's prior software allowed the service provider to encrypt a user's IMAP disk storage individually to the password of the user. * darkmail is a project driven mostly by silentcircle that is to create something entirely new that is email-like, but not email. In case you missed it, moxie did a pretty good job explaining why lavabit's old code should die and should most definitely NOT be open sourced or used by anyone: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/lavabit-critique/ This critique was later posted to arstechnica, and then later there was an exchange on reddit under Ladar's AMA in which Ladar doubled down on his completely unjustified claims and Moxie doubled down on lavabit being total snakeoil: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qetvk/i_am_ladar_levison_owner_and_op... It is not pretty. Moxie is correct, of course, but a valid defense of the lavabit model would have been to talk about how US law treats data at rest very differently than data in transit. This was not the approach Ladar pursued. It does not totally matter, because that potential justification doesn't hold true anymore based on what we now know. So, really, there is no justification for making the lavabit approach open source. The darkmail project is interesting in that they have promised all things to all people: * end-to-end client-side encryption * automatic management of keys * not email, but xmpp used in an email-like way * but maybe also gateways to email for backward compatibility * asynchronous forward secrecy and metadata protection via SCIMP 2.0 * thunderbird extension * local imap & smtp server so you can use existing mail user agent * open protocol and open source code so anyone can adopt * tools to make it easy for a service provider to use Because we don't have any details yet on darkmail it is impossible to critique. What we do know is that SCIMP 1.0 doesn't have the properties that are promised, and they can't be added without basically a whole new protocol. But I think darkmail is exciting and is making the right promises (total end-to-end security). I certainly hope they will answer my emails :) Of course, LEAP (https://leap.se/email) already does almost everything that darkmail wants to do, with the one caveat that currently we use SMTP exclusively and rely on the service provider for PFS and metadata protection (although we have a plan to fix this in the future). -elijah _______________________________________________ Guardian-dev mailing list Post: Guardian-dev@lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To Unsubscribe Send email to: Guardian-dev-unsubscribe@lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/guardian-dev/eugen%40leitl.org You are subscribed as: eugen@leitl.org