Hushmail Passing PGP Keys to the US Government

teknopurge writes "Apparently Hushmail has been providing information to law enforcement behind the backs of their clients. Billed as secure email because of their use of PGP, Hushmail has been turning over private keys of users to the authorities on request. 'DEA agents received three CDs which contained decrypted emails for the targets of the investigation that had been decrypted as part of a mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Canada. The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorities, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.'"

Goodbye Market!

I really hope that they go out of business for this. I mean they extremely deserve it. I know that they probably didn't have much of a choice to hand over the keys, but to continue advertising such security... That's not cricket.

The principle behind Hushmail is flawed.

That may all be well and good, but the fact of the matter is that the design of Hushmail is flawed.

You never give your private key away to anyone ever. Period. Giving Hushmail a weakly encrypted private key is fishy to start with, but then entering the passphrase to decrypt it in a Hushmail controlled applet is just stupid.

And it's completely unnecessary because there are very good encryption utilities in existence and it's very trivial to set up a system that is a thousand times more secure than Hushmail. How about Debian + KMail + GnuPG? You don't trust Debian enough, because it's a binary distro and who knows what they secretly put in there? Use Gentoo.

Perhaps the tinfoil hat crowd will say things like "but there might be a backdoor in your hardware", but Hushmail wouldn't save you from that. And let's be honest here: no one really believes that anyway.

You may have thought yourself very witty when writing that penultimate paragraph, but the fact of the matter is that in today's world you can actually be as good as sure.

Re:Hushmail did NOTHING WRONG

Hushmail gives you precisely as much security as they possibly can, and no more.

I don't know much about Hushmail, but I looked at their website, and they seem to want about $50 per year for what is basically GPG, and therefore available free. Except that, since java applets are downloaded from the server, there's no way to be sure that what you're actually running is what they claim that you are running, so their system might have all sorts of insecurities and backdoors, even if their source code looks OK. So they might give you as much security as they can, or they might be a bunch of cowboys. How do you tell? I certainly wouldn't trust them with my secrets.

Alternatives?

What alternatives are there besides Hushmail?

Re:Alternatives?

> What alternatives are there besides Hushmail?

GPG works fine.

Re:Alternatives?

If you want encrypted mail, run the encryption yourself... GPG is freely available. Then it doesn't matter via which service you transmit the mail.

Re:Web Mail

Are there any alternatives for people that must use Web mail

FireGPG. I haven't used it, but the blurb seems to indicate that that does the trick, at least for gmail.

That's been recommended to me, but I can't do it.

I just can't imagine sticking my PGP key and passphrase anywhere near my web browser. Sure, I use NoScript and all that jazz, but browsers are some of the most insecure programs in existence. Encryption keys are supposed to be kept as secure as possible; it strikes me as insane to let them touch the swiss-cheesiest app on the machine.

Re:Alternatives?

FireGPG. It frikkin sticks buttons onto the Gmail UI for sign, encrypt, decrypt, verify, etc. Doesn't get much easier than that folks.

BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.

Re:Alternatives?

What alternatives are there besides Hushmail?

This isn't meant as one of those haughty, holier-than-thou remarks that it might initially sound like: The best solution is to run your mail user agent yourself, on your own hardware. Really.

These days it's easy to find an old PC or Mac / Soekris box / Linksys router and install OpenBSD or Linux on it. Then you not only have a more powerful and secure router than you started out with, you also have a general-purpose Unix server at your disposal; set up a free dynamic DNS account from DynDNS.com [dyndns.com] or the likes (in conjunction with the ddclient update script from the OpenBSD ports tree or Debian repositories) and OpenSSH, and you have a secure and efficient way to log into this system from anywhere on the public Internet. That's one step away from a remote access mail client with far greater security than any web-based company will provide you.

A few pointers:

• Set up daily, automatic backups of your mail folders with rsync! Don't lose your mail.
• You'll need a command-line mail user agent so that you can access all this by SSH. Mutt is my favorite, but others swear by Pine or the Emacs client.
• You can use msmtp to relay, and fetchmail to download, your messages from a remote server; or you can set up your own mail service if your ISP allows it. Consider using procmail to sort incoming messages.
• Configure S/KEY passwords on your home server: this way you can login from a somewhat untrusted client, yet rest assured that your password cannot be surreptitiously cached and used again.
• Access your mail on the server as a non-wheel user. Now even if somebody does compromise that account (a risk that is, in my opinion, far lower than the risk taken in using web-based systems), they will not have immediate control over the entire system.
• Carry Putty [greenend.org.uk] around with you on your USB memory device, in case you need to login from a Windows client. Putty is much smaller and more manageable than keeping your own personal copy of Firefox, and it will happily run from the USB stick without any installation or modification required.
• Install GPG on the server and import your keyrings.

This approach has a number of advantages over using any third-party web based system. The most obvious one is that in this configuration, GPG runs entirely on the server, keeping your encryption keys safe from untrusted clients. Also, because you are not using a web application, this system is immune to CSRF and XSS attacks. And OpenSSH offers a wide variety of authentication options, many of them far more secure in real-world scenarios than the simple username/password schemes implemented by most web apps.

Real information security takes real work, and as Hushmail has so kindly demonstrated for us, it isn't sound to exclude your own hosting company from your threat analysis. Why not simplify things and host part of your mail system yourself - the part that matters, where your encryption keys are stored and your messages are cached. Sure, it won't protect you from every vector of attack; but if your system does get attacked, it will be much more difficult for the attacker to do so entirely behind your back.

I'm not claiming that such a setup is for everyone. But if you want better security than what Hushmail was able to provide, this is what you need to do. If this is more work than you're willing to put in, it important to realize what you're giving up, and that there are no vastly "better alternatives" in the web-based secure email cottage industry. Or in other words: if you want something done right, do it yourself.

Not paranoid enough.

I guess this is a brief lesson in why one should never fully trust the encryption of your private materials to a third party.

Missing from the article

There are several facts missing from the article:

1) Was there a court order? Or Canadian equivalent?
2) Did hushmail lie? The obviously commited willful deception, but did they outright lie?
3) Did hushmail violate it's TOS?
4) Did hushmail do anything illegal?

Of course, what the article did mention is important, especially to hushmail, and potential hushmail users. However, it would have been nice if they had dug a little bit to answer these obvious questions.

Re:Missing from the article

The Register ran an article on this last week. From their piece:

US federal law enforcement agencies have obtained access to clear text copies of encrypted emails sent through Hushmail as part a of recent drug trafficking investigation.

The access was only granted after a court order was served on Hush Communications, the Canadian firm that offers the service.

Hush Communications said it would only accede to requests made in respect to targeted accounts and via court orders filed through Canadian court.

Re:Missing from the article

This is all old news that was spelled out in a much more detailed article on Wired [wired.com] last week. To subvert those that don't RTFA, I'll answer your questions here on /.:

1. Hushmail was served with a court order issued by the British Columbia Supreme Court (the Feds in Bakersfield, CA had to forward their request to the Canadian government)
2. Hushmail glosses over the vulnerability to private key capture in their non-Java based web client, but it is mentioned. The Java client never transmits the private key (you still must trust the client, source code is available; compare the hashes)
3. No, Hushmail's TOS do not prevent them with complying with a legal court order. Their users also must not break the law, per the TOS.
4. Hushmail followed Canadian law perfectly.

So what can we learn from this? First, don't do illegal things (and use Hushmail or anything else). Second, while their non-Java client is convenient for avoiding the bulk of your traffic getting sucked up by programs like Carnivore [wikipedia.org], use the Java client and not even Hushmail can hand anything over (they never received the private key, even for an instant).

Re:Missing from the article

2) Did hushmail lie? The obviously commited willful deception, but did they outright lie?

Come on now. It's the same thing.

No mater how secure

No mater how secure a company claims to be, you can't expect them to not fallow the law.

If you give away your key...

This is only possible because users want the convenience of letting the Hushmail servers do the encryption on their behalf. To do this they have to hand over their encryption key, and once it's out of your control, so should be any expectation of privacy.

I'm not sure what users expect. If a legitimate legal request that is clearly going to stand up to any legal challenge comes in and you give the company the ability to decrypt the messages you send, the company has no option but to comply.

If Hushmail users want privacy they need to put up with the inconvenience of using an applet to sign their messages, and should be checking the hash of the Applet each time it is downloaded too so they can ensure it hasn't had a backdoor added. ideally the applet shouldn't send anything over the network, it should just encrypt the text and pass the pgp encrypted text content to the browser compose window. Then the user can check the data doesn't include anything they didn't put there themselves.

who the hell gives away their private keys???

kind of defeats the purpose, I'd say.

Lesson Learned:

Don't trust someone else to do what you should be doing yourself.

Not as big a deal as you think

Hushmail has 2 options, client side encryption which is done via a java plug in, and server side encryption.

They only had the keys to give away for those people who chose server side encryptions. They don't have the private keys for those who cleint side.

Also, when you choose you method, Hushmail tells you that server side is much less secure. They and anybody else operating in the US would have to turn over the private keys they heald with a court order.

Whats the leason? Key your private keys private. Duh.

Wrong wrong wrong

I've seen several comments already to the effect that we should know better than to trust PGP or other forms of asymmetric encryption.

These comments are misguided.

The crypto is fine. It's just been applied in an obviously flawed manner. Of course if some third party obtains your private key, your should assume that your communications are no longer secure. What part of that is hard to understand?

There way asymmetric crypto is supposed to work, you generate the key pair yourself. Then you give out the public key. You never ever give out the private key.

As an exercise, think about the following scenario. You go to a website which purports to offer some kind of secure service based on asymmetric crypto, using for example PGP keys or X.509 certificates. The site asks you to supply a bunch of identity information. It then generates a key pair for you.

What part of this scenario should you trust? The answer: no part! It's not the function of another party to generate your key pair for you. You must do this yourself. You must closely guard the private key, store it securely, never give it out, and avoid transmitting it in cleartext. Got that? Then your problems are over.

Server-side Webmail Only!

This only applies if you use their webmail service with server side encryption. They have to have your key in order to encrypt/decrypt server-side, and they have to turn it over to the authorities if they have a valid warrent. It's the law.

If you use their client-side Java applet to do the encryption on your computer - as they strongly recommends that you do - then this is not an issue. Hushmail never see you keys and thus cannot be compelled to hand them over.

Several other sites covered this story earlier in the month all without the crappy sensationalism of slashdot. I first saw it at arstechnica [arstechnica.com], which linked to an interview with the CEO by wired [wired.com].

I'm not usually one to hard on individual slashdot editors, but this is the 4th intentionally misleading troll that zonk has posted today. It is crap like this that caused me to not renew my slashdot subscription so many years.

Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same

The difference, I would think, would is fairly obvious to most people. GMail and Yahoo don't give you a promise of "unbreakable encryption for your emails" that even the government can't break. There's no question that Google will share your information when properly ask to do so by law enforcement. It's in their Terms of Service. You know what to expect and you use your GMail or Yahoo accordingly.

On the same token, while I am appalled at HushMail's actions, it's for a different reason than most here I suspect. I don't have a problem with HushMail sharing information about customers engaging in illegal behavior with the authorities. Those people don't deserve their activities to be protected - they're illegal. But I DO have a problem with HushMail not disclosing that they're doing it right up front. Now, I've not fully read their ToS so maybe they do but their statements on the website would lead you to believe they aren't.

Really though, why would anyone use a PUBLIC service to conduct illicit activities? Setting up a private mail system complete with encryption is trivial and MUCH more secure.

Re:So? Google and Yahoo do the same

Encrypt it yourself

Mark my words, there's going to be an effort to make any personal encryption illegal. I know all the arguments about why this "can't happen" and why we'll all be able to get around any law regarding personal use of encryption, but that's not going to stop the government from trying to outlaw it. And it's going to happen under the guise of "fighting terrorism". Further, it doesn't really matter if Mrs Clinton or Rudy Ghouliani become president. Either one will try to outlaw personal use of encryption. I'm not one of those people who believe there's no difference between the two political parties, and I don't believe any of the other Democratic candidates would go this way, but my sense is that Mrs Clinton is as enamored with secretive authoritarianism as any Republican corporatist.

Now, to be fair, Hushmail was probably pushed pretty hard by the NSA or FBI or DOJ to give up the PGP keys. They're trying to make a go of their little business and some alphabet outfit comes and basically lays it out that they can either play ball and let go of the keys or cease to exist. They couldn't even go to court to fight it because the government just has to say that "national security" is at stake and the case is thrown out. That's how bad it's already become.

But still, any provider of online communication services who does this must be given the consumer death penalty. It may be unfair to boycott a company that is otherwise good when they come up against this type of government bullying, but if we don't make a stand, every single company we rely on is going to fold to the government. We have to let any company that is going to handle our information that giving up our stuff without a warrant means they lose their customers. We're going to have to be every bit as ruthless as the corporate power establishment that is masquerading as our government.

If any of you have Lexis/Nexis, just take a quick look at the unbelievable acceleration of the destruction of our constitutional freedoms that has happened in the last 7 years. Although there's always been a push/pull in this kind of thing (after the Nixon years, the pendulum swung the other way for a while, with many laws protecting our freedoms shored up by congress), there's never been an administration that has been so outright hostile to our Constitution, and never has there been a court system so willing to acquiesce to the "Unitary Executive". If you look at the current makeup of the Supreme Court for example, we have a majority of activist, anti-freedom, reckless justices from the Chief on down. It's chilling. If Bush gets one more appointment, it's game over for at least three generations. Even without one more appointment, the Court has never been this hostile to personal freedom and willing to lie, twist and simply ignore our Constitution.

It's time that we take privacy and our freedoms into consideration with every decision we make, especially the economic ones. My wife and kid and I have already decided to make every effort to subvert the consumerist agenda that is being forced down our throats. Instead of borrowing to spend, we save. Instead of investing in the corporations that are our adversaries, we invest in family and neighbors. No carrying balances on our credit cards. No home equity loans to take vacations or buy HDTVs. Interestingly, our standard of living has improved. And when a company is hostile to our interests, we don't do business with them, and we encourage all our friends to stop doing business with them too. We're rooting for a horrible xmas buying season. When we heard that consumer confidence fell dramatically, we cheered because it means people are waking up. Once we realize that corporations use the same FUD to keep us buying and borrowing that the government uses to get us to give up our freedoms and privacy, we learned that there are worse things than a downturn in the economy - especially since the current economic model is feeding on midd

Re:By the authorise?

How did this happen? Fuck knows. It isn't supposed to be possible. Hushmail's system was supposedly designed so that they couldn't do this, even if they wanted to. Perhaps one of them was running with an incredibly weak passphrase and hushmail cracked it on behalf of the feds...? All I can think of.

TFA is crappy in this regard, there are better articles which explain what happened in more detail. (Full disclosure: I submitted this Wired article [wired.com] to /. but apparently got beaten.)

Basically, Hushmail has two main modes of operation. One of them is (reasonably) secure, the other is a trainwreck.

In one mode, the 'secure' one, you -- the user -- access their site and download a Java applet to your browser, which contains the OpenPGP encryption engine. You type your emails, they're encrypted on your machine, and sent to the server that way. Hushmail never, at any point in the operation, knows the password to your private key.

Now, because a lot of people use browsers that don't support Java, as of a few years ago, Hushmail came up with an alternative, which doesn't require it. Instead of using a Java applet, it works like a regular HTML/HTTPS webmail system, and all the encryption is done on the server. This means you don't need to be able to run the Java applet on your client machine.

However, and this is the crucial part, when you use this second mode even once, you expose the passphrase to your private key to Hushmail. And that's how they could decrypt all the messages. Once a person used the insecure service, they had basically sold themselves down the river. Hushmail had their passphrase, and from there could decrypt their private key, and from there get at all their messages. (Or at least their incoming messages; I don't know whether Hushmail encrypts outgoing messages to the sender's private key as well as the recipient's.)

From what I can tell, if you used Hushmail and were careful to always use the Java-based service, you wouldn't necessarily be vulnerable to this sort of attack. Since Hushmail wouldn't have your passphrase, the most they could do would be to hand over your encrypted messages and encrypted keys to the Feds, who would then have to try to brute-force your private key. (Meaning, everything would rest on how good a passphrase you used...)

Of course, any time you're depending on a downloaded applet for encryption, you're at the mercy of whomever you're downloading it from ... there's no reason (other than it being more difficult) that Hushmail couldn't be forced to "poison" their Java applet, or backdoor its encryption engine. Unless you're going to examine the code yourself each time, you have no way of really trusting it. But that's a lot more technically difficult than just grabbing the password from the server-side decryption engine, which appears to be what they did.