Google’s Revamped Gmail Could Take Encryption Mainstream

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/google-crypto-gmail/

by id • 12 years ago

131 89 12 years ago

rjknight2• 12 years ago

I would, quite happily, forgive Google for everything if they do what's described in this article.

tptacek6• 12 years ago

You would forgive Google for spending millions of dollars over the last decade to work harder than virtually any other tech company on the Internet to resist NSA surveillance, thanklessly and quietly, or, when not quietly, under the duress of thousands of shrill, under-informed detractors? For essentially orchestrating the worldwide deployment of TLS forward secrecy, for more or less inventing browser certificate pinning, for donating high-quality crypto code to NSS and OpenSSL --- by the way, also, for finding Heartbleed and publishing it, rather than holding it as a "competitive advantage" --- and for killing probably several thousand browser RCEs? And, in all of this, for spending god knows how much money on lawyers behind the scenes?

That's generous.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Well said.

rjknight2• 12 years ago

Working harder than others simply makes them the least bad. They may have struggled valiantly to keep data secured, but they failed often enough. Google did more than many to pioneer the model of centralised information-gathering as a commercial strategy, which is part of what made surveillance so rewarding. I think we expect far too little of companies that manage our data, and Google manages far more than most.

Client-side crypto, along a PGP model, would be a welcome admission that Google can't secure everyone's email within their network. It would be a step away from the idea that we simply have to trust utility-scale cloud providers with our data. I see that as putting right a mistake.

EDIT: To de-escalate the argument, I should say that we're probably perceiving 'Google' differently. Their security people are excellent people, and Google has undertaken many excellent security initiatives. Many people at Google are on the side of the angels. As you probably know these people and their work much better than I do, I can imagine that your picture of Google's activities is different to mine. But from a consumer's perspective, Google is much more ambiguous. As a matter of corporate strategy they have pooled vast amounts of customer data via the integration of their services, and they have created a security risk by doing so. When faced with a choice between doing something that might make users safer but might harm their ability to gather data on them, I don't believe Google as a company has often chosen the former.

kevinh2• 12 years ago

Surely he means Google's anti-competitive and anti-employee pacts with other companies in the area, their desire to take away privacy via forcing people to use their real name across all of their products, and their commitment to forcing mobile paradigms into a desktop environment.

It would be generous.

ladzoppelin• 12 years ago

Yea but they do all that to secure their services so they can harvest the information. "Rather than holding it as a "competitive advantage"" Doing so gives them the "competitive advantage" by creating the illusion of some "white knight" protector of the internet and its users. I don't even mind Google as much as I mind the weird delusional back-flips people do in order to forget the fact that Google is an advertising/tracking company. They have no business plan if people stop trusting the internet or use browsers that can make tracking/analytic data harder for them to collect.

pingswept• 12 years ago

I agree that Google's efforts, as you have described, have been exemplary.

Have they not also gone along with the NSA in what appear to be violations of the 4th amendment?

I'm mostly ignorant of this stuff, but reading the quote below from the Guardian makes them look complicit. I think it's fine to be complicit when you're powerless, but Google is not powerless. What bad thing would have happened to Larry Page if he had said "Uh, we're not handing over the data." Would he actually have been arrested?

(Just to be clear, you've probably thought about this for 400 hours more than I have, so if I'm totally wrong, sorry.)

From the Guardian [1]:

"The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”"

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-...

rdl• 12 years ago

Wow, you hold a grudge over Google killing Reader for a long time :)

In general, I'd say Google has done mostly great things for the Internet, and good things for Internet security. They're a huge target -- their biggest sin is that they're inherently centralizing a lot of stuff which used to be decentralized (mail servers, etc.). In general that increases security because Google does a better job in software and operations than virtually anyone else, but it creates a big juicy target.

agl alone probably makes up for any negatives Google has brought to security. The other thing I hate them for was Rubin's hatred of security and thus no platform security on Android, but that's being fixed, and ChromeOS is pretty amazing in contrast.

droob• 12 years ago

Bummed that "could" here means "could theoretically", not "might".

sounds• 12 years ago

I guess I'm going to err on the side of hope, so for me it seems wired does have some sort of inside information. Not very much, apparently.

But a pre-product announcement from Google doesn't mean much, since they work on so many products. If they do decide to push it to "beta" (ha ha) I'll happily use it.

Either way, I would hope public key crypto does become more mainstream, especially in email.

mnw21cam• 12 years ago

Even if google does implement this, where is everyone going to get a shiny new PGP key from? Is google going to create it? Is the user going to create it? How about linking it in to the web of trust. Who is going to go around teaching all the users how to securely verify each other's keys, so that the public key part of the system isn't a complete and utter waste of time?

Don't get me wrong, I would love it if loads more people were to get a PGP key and enter the PGP web of trust (like, say, paypal). It's just that over the last ten or so years, I have found remarkably few people who both have a PGP key, and care about it.

21echoes• 12 years ago

I would love if Google did this, but I see two significant problems.

1. Who stores my private key? Google? Chrome? Both seem troublesome

2. "Also, Google wouldn’t be able to scan and index the text of your e-mails. That’s a problem if you need to search for old emails not stored on your own machine. It could be a real issue for Google’s business model as well, which involves scanning the text of emails in order to place contextual advertising."

Unclear that Google would give up arguably their greatest personal data asset (better than search, imo), which of course is the key to their whole business model.

Thirdegree• 12 years ago

In response to 2)

I would say the best way (from Google's perspective) would be a way to flip a switch on a per-email basis. So by default, emails aren't secure, but if you need it you can activate it. I wonder if the loss of data would be worth the increase in users though.

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

I wonder if the loss of data would be worth the increase in users though.

I think that's the wrong way for Google to look at it. The question should be "how many users will I lose if I don't enable something like this in my services soon?"

The best thing American companies could do right now, especially large ones like Google, to make sure regions like Latina America or Europe don't take a "you have to build your datacenter here" stance and make things much more expensive for them, is to ensure that the data is private, even if it's on American servers, because they've adopted trustless protocols, and even they can't see what's inside.

That's what's going to stop users and institutions from other countries from bailing on American corporations like Google. So losing a little data signal from the ad tracking data is hardly a big loss in comparison, and could help Google regain at least some of the trust they lost post-NSA revelations.

shkkmo4• 12 years ago

That would make sense anyway from a UI perspective. The 'encrypt this email' option can clearly only work if google is able to reliably determine (or have you provide) the correct public key for the address or person that you are emailing.

zmanian5• 12 years ago

In the current state of affairs, lawful intercept/ PRISM devices on Google's network can potentially see everything behind the SSL layer. The global passive attacker can see all incoming and outgoing emails between providers that don't use StartTLS. Google needs to provide the email history < 6 months of US person in response to a administrative subpoena and >6 months with a warrant.

Let say Google made a key directory and end 2 end encryption possible in Gmail but Google held the keys. This would frustrate blanket lawful intercept and the global passive attacker. Google might be able to legally argue that turning over keys requires a proper warrant. They might be able to defend against falsifying the key directory because of external audits.This is roughly where Apple is with iMessage.

If Google goes a step further and only stores an encrypted key or keeps the key client side, now we have the legal terrain of the Government asking a software provider to maliciously modify their software to obtain keys or a passphrase. I think this legal battle is coming. We might be able to preempt it with software verification techniques but definitely coming down the pipe.

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

IANAL but I did write a "lawful intercept" (LI) spec for a type of infrastructure router. As far as I know, most places in what we'd call "the free world" don't compel carriers to do anything to thwart users from protecting their payloads, nor do they compel carriers to actively deny service to encrypted payloads or even discourage use of encryption. Even if individuals can be compelled to hand over keys, it isn't the carriers' problem.

Empirically, we know that, for about a year, Google, Yahoo, etc. have been bitching about PRISM, but not doing anything to make it more convenient for their customers to encrypt their payloads. Is there some secret law? Heavy-handed pressure? Or did they just spend a lot of time wishing the privacy thing would just go away?

This will be an interesting test to see just how much freedom Our Benevolent Overlords think we can handle.

panarky2• 12 years ago

PRISM devices on Google's network can potentially see everything behind the SSL layer

Is there evidence of this, or is this your assumption?

I'm aware that NSA monitored unencrypted data transfers between data centers on Google's dedicated fiber circuits, but as far as I know that was accomplished through telcos and not Google.

Google said they've now encrypted the circuits between data centers, and they've strenuously denied allowing monitoring devices to reside on their network.

Is there another exploit I'm not aware of?

lern_too_spel4• 12 years ago

There is no "blanket lawful intercept" in the US or any "PRISM devices on Google's network." You seem to be confusing several different NSA leaks.

GCHQ's MUSCULAR program apparently tapped Google's leased lines into the UK, giving them access to Google's unencrypted internal traffic entering that country. That's the closest report to any security agency having devices on Google's network. Google says they no longer have unencrypted traffic on those connections.

PRISM is an NSA system that accesses FBI DITU electronic wiretap data, which contains data the companies send to the FBI for specific users the government presented a court order for.

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

Issue #2 could potentially be solved by a homomorphic cryptosystem in the future.

tvladeck• 12 years ago

2. "Also, Google wouldn’t be able to scan and index the text of your e-mails. That’s a problem if you need to search for old emails not stored on your own machine. It could be a real issue for Google’s business model as well, which involves scanning the text of emails in order to place contextual advertising."

Caveat: I am no expert whatsoever in crypto/CS so understand this is almost certainly non-workable for some reason (which is what I'm trying to understand). Why couldn't Google hash every word in an email and store the list of hashes alongside the encrypted version. Then when you search for something, the search terms are hashed as well and the service searches for the hashed search terms amongst the lists of hashes.

Edit: Thanks everyone!

level• 12 years ago

Because that's not really making it private. If you have each word hashed and a rainbow table full of hashes matched to words, it's very easily reversible. It doesn't really introduce any privacy.

Not to mention the computational and storage cost.

mike-cardwell5• 12 years ago

Hashing only helps when the number of possible inputs is very very large. When the number of possible inputs is "the number of words in the dictionary", or "every IPv4 address" or "every phone number" etc, then it would take a modern home computer a few seconds to generate a raintable which would make the hashes instantly reversible.

brown9-2• 12 years ago

In order to do this, Google would need access to the plaintext of the email message, which defeats half of the purpose of the supposed encryption initiative.

smsm42• 12 years ago

This requires what is called homomorphic encryption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

There seems to be active research done in this field, e.g.: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/klauter/cryptosto... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/senyk/slides/e...

I haven't read all those papers so I'm not sure how close it to working, but from what I have read I'm not sure if it even is practical for searching your own mail. For google indexing everybody's email, that would be contradictory as indexing an email basically reveals its content to the party that is using the index to look up.

read• 12 years ago

this is almost certainly non-workable for some reason

Why is it necessary to have the ability to search past emails? Could there be any value in not looking back?

(It's ok to laugh at this.)

arghnoname• 12 years ago

There is a lot of research in this area. Here is a paper on how to search on encrypted data:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/se.pdf

One thing you need to be wary of is plaintext attacks. Even if you use a salt and a difficult has but I send you an e-mail and know the contents and can obtain the ciphertext or its digests, you are vulnerable. There are ways past this, of course, but it is one example of a valid attack.

The pdf I referenced has what seems to be a pretty workable approach to me and lets you do hidden searches, boolean searches, phrases, proximity queries, etc.

mike-cardwell5• 12 years ago

Who stores my private key? Google? Chrome? Both seem troublesome

If you use the OpenPGP plugin for Roundcube, you paste your key into a form on the settings page whilst logged in, and it gets stored in your browsers localStorage (never sent to the server). Of course, with this system, the key needs to be managed externally and pasted into each browser you use, and you need to trust that the server doesn't send modified JS which steals your key.

To make it so you don't have to manage the keypair externally, it could be sent to the server after being encrypted using a password, then whenever you need to use a new browser, it will retrieve the encrypted key from the server, decrypt it with your supplied password and then store it in localStorage. Or perhaps it should remain encrypted when in localStorage, and when you log in, retrieved from localStorage, decrypted with a supplied password and then stored in a global variable.

Javascript crypto in the browser works... until the person running the server decides to steal your key when you log in, or until somebody finds an XSS flaw in the app.

Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0• 12 years ago

Why can't the browser do the crypto on your input, before it even gets to the site/js? (e.g., expose a secure input and output API (say, a new type of HTML textarea and markup tag). Whenever you start entering text, or when a secure element enters the viewport, look up the key for the site (stored locally, like how they remember passwords) and encrypt/decrypt the content. All the site/js sees is gibberish.

freehunter• 12 years ago

IIRC, Google doesn't mine information from paid-for accounts, so this encryption could be a feature for accounts where the user is paying Google for the service. That's a pretty small number of accounts though, I would think.

lttlrck• 12 years ago

what about searching?

suprgeek• 12 years ago

This is what happens when you piss-off such a large number of people. Suddenly end-to-end encrypted e-mail not only becomes a differentiator but something that could get regular <gender neutral grand parent> excited.

For the hundredth time Thank you Snowden!

spindritf• 12 years ago

The way I see Mailpile becoming popular and putting a dent in dragnet surveillance is not by everyone downloading it and running themselves but a trusted third party running it and holding keys for a relatively small group of people.

Some will complain that this way the third party can still access the key and mail encrypted for it. That's true but also a massive step up from everyone on the wire being able to read your messages.

Now, an intelligence agency can just siphon anything and everything. With a large number of independent e-mail providers, only narrow and targeted surveillance would be feasible.

All that without giving up any convenience of webmail.

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

I'm very wary of upvoting such posts lately, even related to Google. On one hand, we do need a large service provider like Google to adopt end to end encryption in e-mail and popular chat apps, because otherwise it's going to take forever, if we just try to convince people one by one.

On the other hand, Google's corporate goals are very much against end-to-end encryption and strong privacy, and they're even lobbying [1] against it. So it remains to be seen if it's an actual useful thing from Google, or just PR. And I realize that even if it's mainly for PR, that PR could lead other companies to want the same kind of PR, too, and implement such measures as well - but hopefully not in a gimmicky/not very useful way.

Making something like this available at all in major services would still be a big win, however it's still a far cry from actually being enabled by default (like the way Telegram doesn't enable end to end encryption by default - even though their main marketing message for it is "the most secure chat app in the world" - except for most people using it).

[1] http://www.vice.com/read/are-google-and-facebook-just-preten...

tptacek6• 12 years ago

Beyond this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634928 a further question:

How does opposition to Rand Paul's "Fourth Amendment Protection Act" even make sense for ITAPS? The federal FAPA says exactly one thing: electronic records held by third parties are inadmissible in criminal proceedings unless obtained under consent or under color of a specific warrant demonstrating cause.

What are the business implications of such a law? Google and Facebook have no obvious commercial interest in the outcome of random criminal cases.

Isn't it a lot more likely that Vice just doesn't know what it's talking about and has gotten the bill wrong? That rather than opposing the "Fourth Amendment Protection Act", they're opposing individual state FAPAs derived from the 10th Amendment Center's Model State FAPA, which can hold a corporation in violation of state law for honoring a federal subpoena or court order, which would (a) create potentially 50 different new data protection policies and (b) put Internet companies in an absolutely impossible position of needing to choose between violating either a federal law or a state law?

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

On the other hand, Google's corporate goals are very much against end-to-end encryption and strong privacy

If there's money in privacy, I don't think that would be the case. If Google made web-of-trust and key exchange easy, I'd pay to use it. I already pay for other things Google can't monetize with ads. So it isn't as if Google fails to see alternative monetization approaches.

higherpurpose4• 12 years ago

What about Adam Langley's own Pond protocol, which last I checked replaced OTR with TextSecure's Axolotl ratchet? But I think someone was saying it's quite a nightmare from a UX point of view for now. Any improvements there lately? And couldn't TextSecure be used effectively as e-mail, since it's async, but just put an email-like UI on top of it?

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

tptacek6• 12 years ago

Even Adam Langley doesn't think that large service providers should roll out Pond, presumably because Langley is serious about cryptography and understands that systems like this can take years to iron out and aren't ready for deployment simply because somebody wrote them up.

Axolotl is Trevor Perrin's protocol; it doesn't belong to TextSecure. However: TextSecure procured a pretty significant block of Trevor Perrin's attention to help review and improve their cryptography.

TextSecure is also, as I understand it, significantly older than Pond.

shmerl• 12 years ago

Could? Does the article imply that Google plans to do it? I didn't see anything from Google about such plans. Or it's simply "if Google ever does that it would be great" etc.?

Google's approach of harvesting the data from e-mail doesn't fit with end-to-end encryption.

malkia• 12 years ago

... grypto! ...

carlob2• 12 years ago

Has anyone else noticed they spelled pidgin as pidgeon? It's a really weird typo especially when you consider the link points to the right site and it can't be a spelling correction as both pidgin and pigeon are words but pidgeon is not [1]. It's also weird that a news outlet such as wired would make such a mistake.

[1] Though you might say it's a meta-pidgin borne out of the hybridization of pidgin and pigeon.

shkkmo4• 12 years ago

How would that be a 'meta-pidgin'? A 'meta-pidgin' would be a pidgin formed by combining two separate pidgins.

What you are describing in [1] is a language change due to user error, not the creation of a pidgin.

carlob2• 12 years ago

That was a joke: seeing how a pidgin is a hybrid between two languages pidgeon is a hybrid between two words. Nevermind

pushedx• 12 years ago

Implying that encryption is not already mainstream. What do you think that lock symbol in your browser means?

greenpresident• 12 years ago

I means your connection to the server is encrypted and that your browser trusts their certificate, preventing stuff like sniffing and mim attacks. It does not mean that emails on the server are encrypted, which is what this is article is about.

SilasX• 12 years ago

Google: if you wanted to take encryption mainstream, you shouldn't have gone miles out of your way to sabatoge compatibility with web email encryption plugins.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/831463

glasz• 12 years ago

even if they did, i'll call anybody who thinks this would make anything better an idiot.

google is in bed with the cia via iqt. lord knows what else is behind this. they even work together: http://www.wired.com/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

ppl like to forget the news of yesterday. all is so shiny. all is so well.

tripzilch• 12 years ago

Question, even if Google were to actually do this, given that GMail runs on server-provided JS code inside the browser, doesn't this carry the same problems as all other in-browser encryption applications?

Isn't this type of in-browser encryption code considered broken, no matter what way you go about it?

Google’s Revamped Gmail Could Take Encryption Mainstream

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