P2P, Encrypted Email Protocol

by gbrindisi • 13 years ago

97 66 13 years ago

omh2• 13 years ago

It seems like it would be relatively easy to perform traffic analysis of this protocol. If you can see the traffic of a reasonable number of nodes (as I'm sure the NSA can) then can't you just watch the messages being inserted and retrieved and work out who the sender and recipient is?

Obviously this doesn't help with the content of the message, but in many cases just knowing who's talking to whom is a good part of what you want to keep secret.

tux• 13 years ago

Unless you're using your real name this should not be a problem. Also many will use this client with VPN/Proxy.

omh2• 13 years ago

In that respect it's not much better than just anonymously signing up for gmail via a VPN.

adouzzy2• 13 years ago

You can pretend reading ,say 1M, emails passed by. I mean you can only understand those you can encrypted. But there is no way to analysis which emails have you encrypted through traffic analysis.

The best way to get invisible is to get into the crowd :)

kansface• 13 years ago

This is just an encryption scheme. It does not provide anonymity. Truly anonymous email would not be good for spam.

Steuard2• 13 years ago

I've read chunks of the site, but I'm still not entirely clear on what advantage this scheme has over RSA encryption of standard SMTP mail (via PGP/MIME on the local machine, say).

Is the main advantage that a given identity isn't tied to a specific server here? Is that a big enough gain to justify an entirely new protocol and ecosystem of clients? I assume I'm missing some other benefits.

delinka• 13 years ago

P2P reduces points of failure. Sure, you can encrypt email to your heart's content, but can you trust the server you dropped it with to deliver it? "Why would anyone want to prevent you emailing people?" you ask. Lots of reasons, the biggest of which seems to me to be that if you can't trust encrypted mail to arrive, perhaps you'll abandon it.

zokier2• 13 years ago

SMTP leaks metadata.

qznc3• 13 years ago

How does this p2p approach avoid that?

bcl• 13 years ago

Only if the servers aren't using SMTPS. Which in practice many don't but there really is no reason why that cannot be changed.

ye• 13 years ago

You still need a way to exchange the RSA encryption keys with each sender and receiver.

Steuard2• 13 years ago

Isn't that still an issue for this new protocol? My skim through the site gave me the impression that this system essentially addresses messages to a specific RSA signing identity. I can just as easily choose to do that over SMTP, right? (I'm imagining sending to an SMTP email address encoded in the public signing key.)

ugexe4• 13 years ago

So this allows potential crackers to save every copy of every encrypted email, allowing them to be cracked in the future when there is increased computer power and more advanced cracking techniques/rainbow tables?

qznc3• 13 years ago

How would you prevent this?

It is not prevented by SMTP and not by this p2p approach.

ugexe4• 13 years ago

This puts your email in everyone's hands, it's just encrypted so it probably can't be read without the key (yet). Regular email does not do this.

adouzzy2• 13 years ago

But there would be millions of emails. If meta data is concealed, how would the crackers which email is valuable?

As long as it is not possible to crack a proportion of the total traffics, I think it is safer this way.

pampa3• 13 years ago

If meta data is concealed, how would the crackers which email is valuable?

From the protocol doc: "When an email is sent then the email’s hash is added to the DHT in the key that matches the recipient’s address; the mail is then transferred in a BitTorrent like fashion."

How does that conceal metadata? If you dont have plaintext From: and To: fields, it doesnt mean the metadata is concealed. Metadata is not whats IN the communication, it is the data that you collect OBSERVING the communication.

Without special measures to provide anonymity, it is no different than an OTR-encrypted chat or PGP email.

AndrewDucker2• 13 years ago

If it's P2P then I'm back to running my own server - and if you run your own server then email is already P2P.

autotravis• 13 years ago

But setting up a mail server is more difficult than firing up a piece of P2P software.

AndrewDucker2• 13 years ago

True. But servers have advantages, like being able to get to my email from anywhere. I remember the dark days of POP...

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

Not really - setting up a mail server is actually pretty easy if you ignore spam detection algorithms.

Email/SMTP is a very fault-tolerant protocol, which means it's very forgiving to a whole number of different errors that you can make while setting it up.

The problem comes when you account for the facts such as (1) some ISPs block ports commonly used for email; (2) some email providers will mark email from self-hosted email servers as spam.

But none of that is about email/SMTP specifically (and could theoretically apply to any P2P solution that catches on).

ape42• 13 years ago

This is a nice try. I would like to see some incremental improvements in mail. For example in the header we could display a rating of how secure the mail is. Based use of TLS, etc. If client programs displayed this it would encourage infrastructure improvements.

pampa3• 13 years ago

Any proof of concept source code yet?

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Is this about re-inventing the wheel again?

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ does encrypted p2p for "email"/chat/VOIP/file sharing/forums/etc.

dingdingdang• 13 years ago

Thanks for mentioning retroshare, it is a VERY decent system. Still, I reckon there's quite a bit of mileage in doing -one thing- right; retroshare's fix-it-all-in-one-package may not appeal to everybody.

sirsar• 13 years ago

So it's like Bitmessage, but without an implementation?

johnchristopher2• 13 years ago

I also thought they already had a working client.

The wording is misleading:

    "FlowingMail is the name of a new decentralized messaging protocol, while FlowingMail Client is an email client that uses the protocol."

Osmium• 13 years ago

Speaking of the need for a more secure email, I just want to share an anecdote that blew my mind recently. I was trying to pay for something with a major tech company but they were having problems with my card, so they emailed me my card details to check they were correct!

I'd be tempted to name and shame them, but it's not really their fault as much as it is the specific person, because I find it hard to believe people aren't trained not to do that. Makes me think that all customer support emails should be regex'd for credit card numbers and if they're found their mail servers shouldn't allow them to be sent...

In any case, the whole institution of email is a security nightmare. I doubt this is the solution, but there certainly needs to be one, and as much for "normal" people as anyone else. We all have information that needs to be kept secure.

showerst• 13 years ago

I've actually worked for someone who had a company-wide email filter for credit card numbers and SSNs.

It was frustrating because it would occasionally catch license keys or foreign phone numbers, but probably a good idea for some groups.

corobo• 13 years ago

In the era of automatic payment processing I can't think of any reason why a member of staff should have access to anything other than the last 4 digits, name and address for verifying it's the correct card

adambard• 13 years ago

I've been trying to get some identity documents (birth certificate, marriage certificate) translated recently. Every place I've contacted wanted me to just email them scans of the documents, that will presumably sit on their ISP's server in plaintext indefinitely.

I definitely think there's something to a messaging protocol that's simply not able to be insecure.

kgo2• 13 years ago

This seems very similar to bitmessage, which has a functioning client and 1000's of active nodes. Why would I wait for this instead of using bitmessage?

yapcguy• 13 years ago

Read the Bitmessage white paper and you'll know why you should avoid Bitmessage: Every node will have a copy of every single message sent across the entire network. I believe the meme to use here is "Fail".

pampa3• 13 years ago

Care to explain why you think it is a fail?

johnchristopher2• 13 years ago

Bitmessage messages are encrypted IIRC. I read that bitmessage would fail a security audit but it's still designed to be encrypted.

cmiles74• 13 years ago

This is an erroneous assertion, sending every message to every client on the network was a valid design choice. By delivering every message to every client it is ensured that envelope information (to whom, from whom, etc.) isn't leaked. Even if you can see all of the BitMessage network traffic, you still can't deduce who sent and received a particular message.

They do have an acknowledgement mechanism that may make some level of envelope leaking possible but it's optional on the client side.

If you trust that the messages are properly encrypted, there's no reason to fear distributing those encrypted messages as widely as possible.

mknits• 13 years ago

Retroshare already do that.

lectrick• 13 years ago

I'm moving on until I see a link to some open-source code.

With a test suite.

Vektorweg2• 13 years ago

If xmpp would be more secure, it would be a good replacement for email. Using multiple xmpp servers would give a comparable advantage to p2p email.

marquis2• 13 years ago

I wasn't aware XMPP wasn't secure? It supports TLS, SSL, OTR and more. Are there known issues?

zanny• 13 years ago

I was under this impression too. I really like Jingle for encrypted voice calls, but if that is vulnerable I'd want to know!

Vektorweg2• 13 years ago

The only problem is, that the server can see all messages. OTR solves this problem, but who use it? OTR would even solve the e-mail issue.

nightcracker• 13 years ago

I've been looking at similar ideas lately, but I simply do not know how to defeat the Sybil attack =/ A centralized certificate authority is necessary to keep a functioning system, as far as I can see.

mic159• 13 years ago

If I understand correctly, there is a key in the DHT that is effectively a list of pointers to all your mail? If so, an attacker could control your inbox by starting a bunch of nodes around that key, couldn't they?

To disable a persons mail, you would start up some altered nodes around the address space you want to attack, have them respond normally until you control enough or all of the nodes covering the target address. Then flip a switch that makes them all start saying that inbox is empty. Then start backing off your nodes, and replacement regular nodes would replicate your altered state.

Would this be possible? Or am I missing something?

P2P, Encrypted Email Protocol

Related Stories