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E-Mail Tracking

Interesting survey paper: on the privacy implications of e-mail tracking:

Abstract: We show that the simple act of viewing emails contains privacy pitfalls for the unwary. We assembled a corpus of commercial mailing-list emails, and find a network of hundreds of third parties that track email recipients via methods such as embedded pixels. About 30% of emails leak the recipient’s email address to one or more of these third parties when they are viewed. In the majority of cases, these leaks are intentional on the part of email senders, and further leaks occur if the recipient clicks links in emails. Mail servers and clients may employ a variety of defenses, but we analyze 16 servers and clients and find that they are far from comprehensive. We propose, prototype, and evaluate a new defense, namely stripping tracking tags from emails based on enhanced versions of existing web tracking protection lists.

Blog post on the research.

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October 3, 2017 academicpapers, datacollection, email, privacy, Security technology, surveillance, tracking Read more >

Journalists Generally Do Not Use Secure Communication

This should come as no surprise:

Alas, our findings suggest that secure communications haven’t yet attracted mass adoption among journalists. We looked at 2,515 Washington journalists with permanent credentials to cover Congress, and we found only 2.5 percent of them solicit end-to-end encrypted communication via their Twitter bios. That’s just 62 out of all the broadcast, newspaper, wire service, and digital reporters. Just 28 list a way to reach them via Signal or another secure messaging app. Only 22 provide a PGP public key, a method that allows sources to send encrypted messages. A paltry seven advertise a secure email address. In an era when anything that can be hacked will be and when the president has declared outright war on the media, this should serve as a frightening wake-up call.

[…]

When journalists don’t step up, sources with sensitive information face the burden of using riskier modes of communication to initiate contact­ — and possibly conduct all of their exchanges­ — with reporters. It increases their chances of getting caught, putting them in danger of losing their job or facing prosecution. It’s burden enough to make them think twice about whistleblowing.

I forgive them for not using secure e-mail. It’s hard to use and confusing. But secure messaging is easy.

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August 31, 2017 email, encryption, pgp, privacy, Security technology, signal, whistleblowers Read more >

Giving Up on PGP

Filippo Valsorda wrote an exellent essay on why he’s giving up on PGP. I have long believed PGP to be more trouble than it is worth. It’s hard to use correctly, and easy to get wrong. More generally, e-mail is inherently difficult to secure because of all the different things we ask of it and use it for.

Valsorda has a different complaint, that its long-term secrets are an unnecessary source of risk:

But the real issues, I realized, are more subtle. I never felt confident in the security of my long-term keys. The more time passed, the more I would feel uneasy about any specific key. Yubikeys would get exposed to hotel rooms. Offline keys would sit in a far away drawer or safe. Vulnerabilities would be announced. USB devices would get plugged in.

A long-term key is as secure as the minimum common denominator of your security practices over its lifetime. It’s the weak link.

Worse, long-term key patterns, like collecting signatures and printing fingerprints on business cards, discourage practices that would otherwise be obvious hygiene: rotating keys often, having different keys for different devices, compartmentalization. Such practices actually encourage expanding the attack surface by making backups of the key.

Both he and I favor encrypted messaging, either Signal or OTR.

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December 16, 2016 email, encryption, pgp, Security technology, usability Read more >

Yahoo Scanned Everyone's E-mails for the NSA

News here and here.

Other companies have been quick to deny that they did the same thing, but I generally don’t believe those carefully worded statements about what they have and haven’t done. We do know that the NSA uses bribery, coercion, threat, legal compulsion, and outright theft to get what they want. We just don’t know which one they use in which case.

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October 6, 2016 datacollection, email, filtering, fisa, nsa, privacy, Security technology, spam, surveillance, yahoo Read more >