In security it doesn't make sense to ask "is it compromised?" but rather "can it be compromised?"
For that reason, I don't think "we don’t participate in blanket surveillance" and equivalent statements are even worth the pixels they take up on your screen. It may as well say "our security is endorsed by His Holiness The Dalai Lama"
The Australian government has the power under the recently passed National Security Legislation Amendment [0] to issue a secret warrant compelling access to any number of computers or networks for anything that will "assist" in "obtaining intelligence related to security". The warrant allows surveillance, as well as "addition, deletion or alteration of data". Disclosing that warrant's existence is punishable by up to 10 years in jail. This is without even considering the reciprocal spying possibilities of the Five Eyes network.
There is no equivalent in Australia to the US fourth amendment. Even illegally gathered evidence can be used in a trial depending on the discretion of the judge. [1]
If you think "we don't participate in blanket surveillance" is an acceptable response to that legal reality, I ask you to consider what you would think of a company that, when asked if they store passwords in cleartext, respond "yes, but we don't look at them."
>>In security it doesn't make sense to ask "is it compromised?" but rather "can it be compromised?" For that reason, I don't think "we don’t participate in blanket surveillance" and equivalent statements are even worth the pixels they take up on your screen.
Given enough money/power likely everything can be compromised. But it seems that Fastmail take enough precaution against the 'can it be compromised' threats.
Regarding the blanket statements: I wouldn't trust an US based company with such a statement because of the Patriot Act and what we learned from the 'Snowden documents' about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple etc. and the lying and selective truth by NSA. But I would trust companies which are based in countries where one (in general) is allowed to reveal when information has been requested.
The Fastmail privacy statements [1] seem fine to me. Additionaly with Fastmail I also appreciate that they have only part of information about me and not a much broader aggregated set of browsing/search history, location, credit card numbers, youtube... as would be the case with e.g. Google.
>>There is no equivalent in Australia to the US fourth amendment. Even illegally gathered evidence can be used in a trial depending on the discretion of the judge.
Until Patriot act has been relaxed/abolished and NSA splitted in smaller units (and relieved of part of their immense budget) the fourth amendment can imho only be a last-rescue instrument. Also afaik it doesn't 'protect' me as a foreign customer (of e.g. Google and Apple).
In security it also doesn't make sense to ask "am I secure?" but instead to ask "how secure am I?". The money in my bank account isn't more secure from a government that wants to freeze my assets, but it is certainly more secure than the money under my mattress from a potential break in. You have to identify the targets you're concerned about before you can tell if you're "secure enough." And, for the most part, individuals don't need to be "secure enough" against spy networks of nations.
Furthermore, and I think we're going to disagree here, I believe there is a balance to be played between trust, security, and following laws. For instance, a safe deposit box at a bank is generally secure. A bank won't usually open it, but they can if the need arises, and law enforcement can obtain the contents if they go through the proper channels and provide a warrant. In theory, I believe this to be an inherently good thing. The police must be able to pursue criminals, and, by providing evidence, be granted access to things they would otherwise be unable to access. I believe there to be a direct analogy between an email provider that does not routinely give access to its users emails but would respond to warrants as necessary.
Now, I would be naive if I didn't realize that the spy agencies of the world weren't holding up to their government's part of the bargain here. But I believe the answer to be in government accountability, not completely locked down security.
Aside from philosophical views, I also believe that this is a much more pragmatic approach. Do you know why people give up all their personal information, email, etc. to the Googles and Facebooks of the world? Because it's so goddamned convenient. Google provides so many great services for free. And full security is hard and inconvenient. You're going to have a tough pitch to sell fully encrypted email just on the basis of services not being able to provide a good search experience, because I gotta tell ya, Gmail search is really amazing, and it provides many people with tangible benefits. Fully encrypted email provides value that is much more intangible.
While I agree with your arguments, our digital footprint is the closest thing we have to mind reading and governments will simply not back down on warrantless surveillance, therefore I believe a line is being crossed that shouldn't be.
On the other hand, if you're not doing client side encryption, preferably offline, then you're not protected against a global threat, period. This is because, even if FastMail refuses to cooperate, well funded security agencies can do MITM attacks in spite of SSL/TLS.
This is exactly the right perspective. If the US has secret warrants in the form of NSL (National Security Letters) or similar, it's easy to imagine Australia having precisely the same thing. I've enjoyed being a user of fastmail for some time but I'll be switching to one of the new projects (e.g., LEAP) or self-hosting in the future.
>I'll be switching to [...] or self-hosting in the future
I can really recommend self-hosted email. This is not as hard as it sounds. Of course, you should have the following abilities:
1) find some good documentation (or friend) that explains a clean setup with spam filter, correct DNS/SPF and HELO entries, such that you don't get on the blacklists. Note that this is almost a one-time effort, you'll have to adjust things every 5-10 years, I guess. [1]
2) be able to administrate a Linux/BSD machine, i.e. to keep it simple and up-to-date in the long term.
I really hope that Tuxevara will finish his series about a modern email setup. This is his first part:
[1] For example, I had to add SPF entries since my mailserver also had an IPv6 address, otherwise Google and others blocked me - for understandable reasons.
Where does one host such a service such that one's neighbors haven't put your subnet on e-mail block lists? I wasn't able to host e-mail from my home IP address; do spammers not pollute the waters at hosting companies? Can you buy an IP address that isn't blacklisted, and won't be part of a subnet block?
Since there is so much malware out there delivering spam from private computers, dynamic IP ranges (which is what you usually get at home) are part of every modern blacklist.
Yes, this is very unfortunate. It means that you'll either have to rent some server or virtual server (which makes sense if you want to run tons of other services there).
Or, you'll need some VPN (possibly in addition to an IPv6 tunnel), which is cheaper.
A third option is to rent an own server/vserver, but to keep the costs low by sharing it with friends.
> I can really recommend self-hosted email. This is not as hard as it sounds.
For me the biggest hurdle is absolutely not the manual setup process or the need to adjust things from time to time. Rather, it’s the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a simple, quick and reliable way to tell if my setup actually works.
How can I be sure that my email actually reaches its destination? That there’s no error in my DNS entries? That an obscure email service used by one of my clients doesn’t whitelist only major email providers? Can I be sure that things fail loudly when they don’t work?
I really hope I’m wrong and it’s possible to implement some kind of monitoring that tests my self-hosted setup and alerts me by SMS if something’s wrong with it.
I've self-hosted my email for years, and for the past 5 or so have had a stable IP address. I've got SPF records, but am missing DKIM.
I've had no problems, but just recently I had two separate emails be ignored by GMail users. Some followup communication suggests to me the mails were never seen, but I am unable to find out if they ended up in the spam folder or not. (At least one other GMail user did receive a recent mail from me.)
That has shaken my confidence in my email setup, which has run without issue for many years now.
And I don't have any end-to-end tests, other than seeing people reply to my emails. I occasionally check my domain on various blacklist checkers.
> That an obscure email service used by one of my clients doesn’t whitelist only major email providers? Can I be sure that things fail loudly when they don’t work?
These are simply symptoms of FUD. Using that line of argument, you'll always end up with the biggest players, even though there is no technical reason to do so.
> to implement some kind of monitoring that tests my self-hosted setup and alerts me by SMS
On the other hand, how would you check that $BIGPLAYER's mail setup works with any other email service? You can't. Could you blame anybody at $BIGPLAYER? In a free service: No.
So why would you want do put so much higher standard on your own setup than on $BIGPLAYER's setup? Just to be able to say: "Oh no, available technology is not good enough, I'm staying with $BIGPLAYER."
Obviously I trust $BIGPLAYER’s setup. To name a few reasons: 1) their large user base makes it simply more probable that a given bug will be discovered by someone else than me; 2) they have a dedicated team with more experience and resources to spend on testing and fixing bugs; 3) their setup has been working for me for many years now.
I was unaware of LEAP, I assume you mean: https://leap.se/en/services/email ? Interesting approach, to use a local proxy to be able to transparently wrap legacy SMTP/IMAP with some added security and convenience beyond "just" GPG/PGP.
>We follow due process when dealing with law enforcement, providing individual data in response to the appropriate Australian warrant, so there is no justification to attempt wholesale surveillance of all our users.
Except if Fastmail can decrypt user's data, then they can be compelled to backdoor their system, and also compelled to keep it quiet. Australia is part of the "5 eyes", after all, and from an outsider perspective their government seems particularly hostile/authoritarian.
Failing that legal avenue, would Australia's intelligence services refuse to simply hack their way into Fastmail's servers if the NSA asked them to? Would the NSA refuse to just do it themselves, if it came to that? Surely not.
The president (or whomever) of NYI would certainly not refuse entry to federal agents wanting to install an implant. NYI just has to report an outage, meanwhile Fastmail's servers have grown a new rootkit. And failing that, then it's time to bribe a security guard in the middle of the night.
To me this reads as nothing more than Fastmail trying to provide a false sense of security.
It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. You can search your entire email archive in seconds, from a phone on the end of a slow network, and it just works. End-to-end encryption isn't compatible with the way people want to use email.
We are happy for people to use PGP, though of course we don't offer an interface to it because that would involve sharing keys with us and defeat the purpose.
We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes.
We would be aware of the outage - have you seen how reliable NYI are?
I'm much more worried about the NSA (or any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies) knowing of a hole in one of the pieces of software that we use and injecting a rootkit with that. Thankfully the same security practices that defend against hackers are also useful here.
To add to this, and this needs to be emphasised, is that we make it clear to anybody requesting data that there are legal channels with due process to go through which work.
Yes. Thanks for sharing this video. The minister refused to answer the guys question, just said "We collect what we need to do to our job, and stop asking this question."
One wonders if he's too stupid to understand the question, doesn't know the answer but can't be seen to not be answering, or if he's just trying to keep the options open.
All of the above are scary. But this is not without precedence. The UK chancellor couldn't even answer which tax greggs should be paying.
>It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data.
Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that.
>We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes.
You haven't addressed any of the points I initially raised. Your blog post skirts the issue quite handily.
They don't claim 100% uptime. They just happen to have it. We had a 30 second outage on ONE power circuit during hurricane sandy - we noticed because two non-production devices weren't dual power, and of course the notifications from the servers about their dual power being interrupted.
We've been there over 10 years, so we actually kind of know, rather than guessing, how reliable they are.
What exactly do you want us to say? We aren't participating in any dragnets. We've said that plenty of times. If you think that the NSA is in our datacentre, tapping our wires. Well, I was there in July and I moved all the devices by hand. I didn't pull them open and audit the circuit boards - but there's a level beyond which reality is impossible to distinguish from paranoia. We don't follow our hardware from the silicon sands through all the steps before it reaches our datacentre. Of course it could have nasties injected in it.
We design our security processes to make it hard for both hackers AND agencies to attack us with a bunch of things. Not running the same switch with VLANs for both internal and external networks is a big thing - switches are a notorious attack vector. Our internal network devices are fully isolated from the external links.
And then - the security agencies reading your email isn't even the biggest risk to your security and your life for 99.9999% of people. We're not going to throw out tons of features that improve their life for a perception of improved security - so end to end encryption isn't a sane response.
ProtonMail is a scam, much like Lavabit (although the nature of the scam differs). Lavabit at least had the decency to shut down once they realized their claims were fraudulent, once the government told them how they lied and that they would like to take advantage of those lies please.
They deliver JavaScript to the browser to decrypt messages. While it's true that they don't have access to user messages for as long as they remain honest, that's a profoundly useless property to have. You can just be honest and not try to access messages, which is what Fastmail does. There's no point in handcuffing yourself and holding on to the key.
As soon as a system administrator feels like accessing the messages (either out of curiosity / government order or because an unauthorized user gained administrative control), they can deliver modified JavaScript to the browser that sniffs the password and decrypted content and sends a copy somewhere. This is, very literally, "being able to decrypt data."
The encrypted messages that are sent to non-ProtonMail users require visiting a ProtonMail website to decrypt the message, which has all of the security concerns as above. Furthermore, it's pushing the line of what counts as "email". Fastmail is clearly advertising themselves as an actual email service, where you send content over SMTP and it shows up in the recipient's email client. You can't do that with ProtonMail encrypted messages; the recipient gets a link to the content.
You can build a new protocol that has the properties we'd all want out of a modern messaging system. You might be able to replace email. But it won't _be_ email, and Fastmail is email. If you want Pond, you know where to find it.
And snake oil with a well-designed website, $500,000 of crowdfunding, and a team of PhDs is still snake oil.
Thanks for making a really interesting point that I didn't have space for in the Confidentiality post, but did touch on in the Integrity post.
The whole thing with email is that it's your own immutable copy. If you can't even read it without going to some website that may or may not exist at a later date, then you don't really have a copy. So you wind up having to extract the plaintext and then keep a copy of that somehow to ensure you never lose access. Sounds like normal email, the hard way.
> Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that.
ProtonMail is security theater. It is simply not possible for a webmail service to maintain a zero-knowledge policy. They can capture your password every time you log in, and use that to decrypt your email if they want to. Or they could send you a backdoored version of their own JS-based encryption library the next time you visit protonmail.ch. (Hushmail got under fire for doing this a few years ago at the behest of the Canadian government.)
At the end of the day, the only thing that is actually protecting your email at ProtonMail is the fact that Switzerland is not yet known to be collaborating with the NSA. If they claim otherwise, they're either lying, incompetent, or seriously lacking in imagination.
> Except if Fastmail can decrypt user's data, then they can be compelled to backdoor their system, and also compelled to keep it quiet. Australia is part of the "5 eyes", after all, and from an outsider perspective their government seems particularly hostile/authoritarian.
If you don't expect the government to follow any rules, then most of these discussions are moot. But what we've been seeing with the Snowden leaks is that the governments are at least attempting to walk the tightrope of legality. Here in the U.S., that means having at least plausible procedures to filter out non-foreigner communications, and going through legal processes like subpoenas instead of simply breaking into computer systems.
These facts have practical concerns. Unless you hypothesize that the U.S. and Australia are putting citizens in prison using secret courts, the government still has to present evidence in a court proceeding, and that has to comport with the 4th amendment in the U.S., and whatever the equivalent is in Australia.
The law in this area is rapidly evolving, but in my opinion as someone with both a legal and technical background, encryption like what Fastmail has gives 4th amendment arguments a lot more teeth. When your data is in an e-mail service that's readily accessible to the service provider, or even data-mined for advertising purposes, it's susceptible to the charge that it's not private information, because after all you're allowing someone else to rummage through it. But if there are protections in place, even if they can be circumvented if needed, that's different. Now you're talking about something that's more like a safe deposit box at a bank or a rented storage unit, which do have 4th amendment protection. They're locked, and only the owner accesses what's inside as a matter of course. The lock can be broken, in an emergency, but that doesn't change the fact that the owner of the facility does not access the contents as a matter of course.
> Unless you hypothesize that the U.S. and Australia are putting citizens in prison using secret courts, the government still has to present evidence in a court proceeding, and that has to comport with the 4th amendment in the U.S., and whatever the equivalent is in Australia.
rayiner, how about the reports of "parallel construction" by the NSA? While it's true that the government still has to present evidence in a court, according to recent reports [1] the NSA "tips off" organizations like the DEA.
So, what you're saying is only use Google services if you're an US citizen and only use FastMail if you carry an Australian passport -- because otherwise all bets are off?
We have spelled out in our privacy policy and public communications that we don’t participate in blanket surveillance. We are an Australian company, and to participate in such programs would be in violation of Australian law.
Are you really this naive?
Australia is a member of Five Eyes[1]. Your local laws don't apply to intelligence agencies.
You've completely misunderstood the line you quote. FastMail as a company do not participate in blanket surveillance. We can't control the actions of any one else, governments or otherwise.
You say "FastMail as a company do not participate in blanket surveillance". And then, in your next sentence, you admit that this is actually not under your control.
Why do you keep trying to make it sound as if FastMail had a choice in the matter even though you know that it doesn't?
I said governments and other third-party actors are not under our control. I never ever said that FastMail was not under our control.
We do not participate in blanket surveillance.
I am not sure how to make it any clearer than that. Perhaps you could tell me what you'd like us to say, and then I can tell you whether or not that's something we agree with?
Perhaps you could tell me what you'd like us to say
I'd just like you to not use phrases like "We do not participate in blanket surveillance" in your marketing. It's dishonest and misleading. It's an empty promise.
FastMail will participate in blanket surveillance if and when the right papers are served to you.
And what then? Will you, personally, risk your ass to tell us the bad news, even if you are under gag order?
Our current advice is that we are bound by the provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. Neither of these contain provisions that would allow indiscriminate capture of communications. You can read more about how we understand and apply this in our privacy policy:
https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html
If you're talking to the proposed amendments to the TIA Act that are currently before Parliament then I can't really offer you much since the bills have not been passed and if they are passed, what's before Parliament might not be the final text.
So given that there is no legal means by which we can be asked to participate in blanket surveillance, it is entirely accurate to say that we do not.
If the legal situation changes then naturally we will make any necessary changes to our privacy policy and inform our customers of this.
If you're looking for us to commit to never ever doing something even if the law changes in the future to make that thing a requirement, then I'm afraid you're out of luck. But I hope you also see that that would be a rather silly commitment to make given its entirely hypothetical nature.
It might be possible and reasonable to interpret the statement "We do not participate in blanket surveillance" as a kind of warrant canary.
The status and efficacy of warrant canaries in various jurisdiction is a subject of much debate, but if you think they have meaning coming from these people in this jurisdiction, it looks like you've got one there.
(Disclosure: I am a paying FastMail customer) Is there any reason why you put the sender's IP address when sending out a mail via SMTP? Sure you want to keep logs, but why put the IP address of people like me who pay you for the service (and thus, won't spam or anything)
I wish they would setup servers in another country, say Iceland (since they have some there already).
Also, I'm thinking that Australia may not be an ideal jurisdiction if you want to run an email company that cares about privacy. The offering will never get any better than the worst of national laws [weakest link argument].
That may be a valid point, I'm not that familiar with Iceland.
My hunch though, is that they'll probably cooperate in criminal cases, but that it will go through some judge. Also, I think there is much lower risk of dragnet surveillance or secret court orders.
Yeah, I figured that was kinda self evident. We wouldn't leave any security holes open. I guess I can edit the blog post to clarify this without changing the meaning any.
Things like insecure SSL options (we knew that, but wanted to support older devices for a little longer - we've bitten the bullet and switched to SHA256 certs now, and turned off RC4)
They recommended a bcrypt hashing factor which isn't realistic for fast responses, it would have pegged a core for over a second.
A few things that were just testbed specific, and a couple of rate limits we had missed.
Some "internal details leaked in errors" - in two minds about that. Sometimes it helps debug. We mostly log the verbose error internally now and give the user a unique key that makes log grepping easy. Harder to self-help if you hit an error we didn't make a nice error code for yet though and you have tech clue.
Basically, you need to use an email provider in your own country. Each country (hopefully) has laws to protect the privacy of its citizens. Such laws usually don't extend to non-citizens.
So, ironically, it may be safer to store your data with a US company than an Australian company. Also, the EU believes (see linked page) that the NSA dragnet may be a violation of the safe harbor agreement.
Correction - Wouldn't it be better as an EU citizen to store your data with an EU provider (I.e. a non-NSA partner)?
The safe harbor agreement has been demonstrated to be patently false. The data wasn't ever safe. Every major US tech company has participated either willingly or forced through secret courts under threat of prison for non-compliance by individual employees. That's not 'safe'.
It's a joke. It's a kangaroo court. It's non-democratic. It's anti-privacy. It's a conflict of EU basic human rights. I could go on.
The EU has a responsibility to prevent EU citizen's data from leaving the EU, period. I hope they see it through and the safe harbor agreement is the first thing I'd rip up and throw in the the face of whichever kangaroo US President you have now or next time.
Then Microsoft need to win their upcoming court case against the USG, which will demonstrate clearly to everyone that the USG cannot open the electronic equivalent of a private sealed letter stored in a bank safe in Ireland, because they damn well feel like it.
The US constitution needs another amendment to protect the privacy rights of all, regardless of whether they are US citizens or not. It is time the citizens of the US started pushing for it. These three letter agencies with their massive black budgets funded by narcotics are your mess and it is time you sorted them out.
Isn't it just common sense to assume email is in no way secure?
If the government wants it they will torture you in Egypt to get all your keys and so on.
I personally use fastmail but that is because I don't want google tying my email to browsing. I am pretty sure that if the NSA wants my stuff they will strap some 120V to Rob Mueller's testicles in a cave.
Nah. If they want your stuff, they'd work through the appropriate Mutual Assistance Treaty to get an Australian court to issue a warrant, and then we'd comply with it and hand over your mail because we follow the law.
Making a phone call is way easier and cheaper than giving RobM a free Mediterranean holiday :)
Don't play this game unless you're not really interested in full confidentiality. Some people are willing to increase security to the point of protecting their financial interests without concerning themselves with security against nation-states, I think the future, if not the history as we already know it, will prove this to be foolish.
For that reason, I don't think "we don’t participate in blanket surveillance" and equivalent statements are even worth the pixels they take up on your screen. It may as well say "our security is endorsed by His Holiness The Dalai Lama"
The Australian government has the power under the recently passed National Security Legislation Amendment [0] to issue a secret warrant compelling access to any number of computers or networks for anything that will "assist" in "obtaining intelligence related to security". The warrant allows surveillance, as well as "addition, deletion or alteration of data". Disclosing that warrant's existence is punishable by up to 10 years in jail. This is without even considering the reciprocal spying possibilities of the Five Eyes network.
There is no equivalent in Australia to the US fourth amendment. Even illegally gathered evidence can be used in a trial depending on the discretion of the judge. [1]
If you think "we don't participate in blanket surveillance" is an acceptable response to that legal reality, I ask you to consider what you would think of a company that, when asked if they store passwords in cleartext, respond "yes, but we don't look at them."
[0] http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bil... [1] http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...