Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

This is pretty funny, actually. Lavabit is a secure email provider: the only people with your crypto keys is you with your public and private keys and the recipient with their public and private keys. The way that this encryption works is that everyone gives their public key to anyone who wants it, but keeps their private key a closely-guarded secret. If I want to send you an email, I get your public key and encrypt the message with YOUR PUBLIC key and MY PRIVATE key. When you receive the email, you decrypt it with MY PUBLIC key and YOUR PRIVATE key. This is an automatic process controlled by the software, and it's almost impossible to crack. And don't ask me how it works, it has to do with generating huge prime numbers, but this is how it works in a nutshell. In fact, it is considered utterly secure and unbreakable: basically with sufficiently large keys, which are easy to generate, it would take computer power running until pretty much our sun goes nova to crack it. I never know your private key, the private key is never transmitted across the internet, so unless you machine is compromised with malware, you're pretty darn secure.

That's how Lavabit worked. Apparently the FBI was on to Snowden before he fled the country and they served Lavabit with a subpoena for all of their crypto keys so they could read this email. Lavabit had no choice but to comply, so they did. They provided the FBI with five SSL keys, each of which are 2,560 characters.

They printed them. In four-point type. Eleven pages of extremely small gibberish. And if you get one character wrong, the key is invalid and can't be used to decrypt messages.

The court was not amused and two months later demanded that he hand over the crypto keys in digital form. That was the day that Lavabit announced that it was shutting down, because once the keys were surrendered, the communications of their customers would no longer be secure.


I think what they did was absolutely brilliant. I'm also sure that the FBI will amend their information demands to state "...in DIGITAL form." The article has a sample page of what they keys look like that were given to the FBI.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/03/228878659/how-snowdens-email-provider-tried-to-foil-the-fbi-using-tiny-font?sc=17&f=1001

It's a pretty simple attack that doesn't involve impersonating a web site, just an email server. For example, IBM Sweden's email addresses are se.ibm.com. Register the domain name seibm.com, put an email server there that stores all emails sent to seibm.com, forward them to se.ibm.com, and chances are that the participants in the conversation will never notice.

So a simple typo can reveal highly confidential information.

Two researchers set up several domains in this fashion and in six months harvested 20 gig of data.

Including: contracts from OPEC countries on oil sales and production, business reorganizations, router configuration and passwords, all sorts of wonderful stuff!

The easiest solution is, for example, for IBM to not allow se.ibm.com, force all email through ibm.com, and when you buy a domain to buy all related domains (if possible: org, biz, etc.

Another possibility is to use public key encryption which would cause the message exchange to fail because the recipient's public key couldn't be retrieved by your email server, but there were also arguments about how to get around that. And encrypted email is not easy to use and not often used.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/doppelganger-domains/