| Re: Ping victor |
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| 'C-O,Z*-M.O S+ (me@who.com) |
2011/09/25 14:15 |
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Newsgroups: alt.fan.utb.naughty-boy
Subject: Re: Ping victor
From: "'C-O,Z*-M.O S+" <me@who.com>
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HMS Victor Victorian <victorvictorian@hushunomail.com> wrote in
news:bqiu771psq6ablch0b60q2isvqt3adrq4t@4ax.com:
> On Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:15:10 +0100 (BST),
> <Use-Author-Supplied-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>
>>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>Hash: SHA512
>>
>>HMS Victor Victorian wrote in alt.fan.utb.naughty-boy on Wednesday 21
>>September 2011 17:42 in Message-ID:
>><pfmk77ts8kfqjjd3vjbioqe809eh9nfh3i@4ax.com>:
>>
>>> On 21 Sep 2011 20:53:28 GMT, "'C-O,Z*-M.O S+" <me@who.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Victor
>>>> I do hope I can enrol you onto my ad hock security pgp-training
>>>> course!
>>>>
>>>> I understand it is a non-urgent project but none the less, believe
>>>> it would be worthwhile to add the new skills to your armoury
>>>> Yours faithfully
>>>> Cos
>>>
>>> Dear Cosmos,
>>>
>>> You are my last letter for this evening. How very curious that I
>>> also had an individual heretofore unknown to me write me at my addie
>>> with a very detailed request for the same.
>>
>>'Twas I, I believe.
>>
>>> Have I missed something? Happens, you know!
>>
>>I believe Cozmos is mistaken when he states that this is 'non-urgent'
>>as so-called 'lawful access' legislation coming down the pipe in
>>Canada will completely gut Hushmail's already-questionable security
>>model.
>>
>>In my view, Hushmail has been in the doghouse since 2007, when the
>>DEA's "Operation Raw Deal" went down.
>>
>>As you may recall from my message, the U.S. Drug Enforcement
>>Administration (DEA) managed to obtain some 12 CDs worth of decrypted
>>email between one Tyler Stumbo, his Chinese bulk steroid supplier, as
>>well as various customers of Stumbo's.
>>
>>Stumbo and his associates believed that because Hushmail was
>>headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., it was beyond the reach of American
>>law-enforcement. Nominally, this is true -- warrants issued by U.S.
>>courts are of no force nor effect in Canada -- however, they did not
>>take into account the existence of the Mutual Law Enforcement
>>Assistance Treaty (MLAT).
>>
>>Furthermore, Stumbo and his various associates swallowed -- hook, line
>>and sinker -- the outright lies then made by Hushmail that:
>>
>>* Even their own staff couldn't read their customers' email;
>>
>>* That no IP address logging was carried out so as to map IP addresses
>>to a
>> particular Hushmail account holder;
>>
>>* That, if the authorities were to subpoena a Hushmail account
>>holder's
>> messages, all they would receive in response were PGP encrypted
>> messages.
>>
>>These claims are documented in copies of Hushmail's FAQ as archived by
>>the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
>>
>>As can be seen from their own FAQs, Hushmail flat-out lied to their
>>own customers -- no surprise here, for if their customers knew the
>>truth, they wouldn't have used Hushmail in the first place, but rather
>>explored more secure alternatives.
>>
>>The supreme irony here is that, by 2007, secure alternatives (in the
>>form of nymservers and remailers) had been in existence for a dozen
>>years or more. Had Stumbo, his Chinese suppliers and customers made
>>proper use of these tools, many of them -- including Stumbo himself --
>>would likely not be rotting in jail cells right now.
>>
>>- From the Hushmail FAQ dated 2001-06-25 as saved by the Internet
>>Archive (Wayback Machine):
>>
>> 34. Does HushMail have a "back door" that can be accessed by
>> government
>> agencies?
>>
>> No. Email, which includes attachments, sent between Hush users
>> is completely encrypted.
>>
>>
>> 35. What if my message is subpoenaed?
>>
>> Hush will answer valid, court-issued subpoenas. However, if the
>> mail is fully encrypted, the subpoenaed version will not
>> resemble the original text version.
>>
>>You can see here that Hushmail are implying that encrypted data will
>>be supplied in response to a subpoena; a later revision of Hushmail's
>>FAQ explicitly makes this claim.
>>
>> 49. Does HushMail have access to my private keys?
>>
>> Hush never actually possesses the private keys of any of its
>> users. Private keys are created on the local machines of Hush
>> users when they create their accounts, and are symmetrically
>> encrypted, one key for both encryption and decryption with
>> individual Hush user passphrases. Then, the encrypted private
>> keys are sent to the Hush server and are stored there. Further,
>> a secure one-way hash of each individual user's passphrase is
>> generated on the user's local machine. The one-way hash is,
>> then, stored on the Hush server. This one-way hash can only be
>> derived from an individual passphrase, but the passphrase
>> cannot be recovered from the one-way hash.
>>
>> When a Hush user logs on to www.hushmail.com and enters their
>> passphrase, the passphrase is hashed in the same way, and the
>> one-way hash is sent to the Hush server for authentication.
>> Passphrases are never sent to the Hush server, so Hush never
>> has access to them, nor can Hush retrieve them. For example,
>> after an individual passphrase has been authenticated, the
>> Hush server sends the user's browser (Netscape ™/Internet
>> Explorer ™) the encrypted private key. The private key is
>> then, decrypted, locally, using the Hush user's passphrase.
>> At that point, the user can read their messages.
>>
>>
>> 57. Does Hush track IP addresses of visitors or address holders?
>>
>> No.
>>
>> 58. Do you keep logs of IP addresses of people logging in?
>>
>> No.
>>
>> * * *
>>
>>As can be seen from a later revision of the FAQ in February 2002,
>>Hushmail's stance on what they could/would provide if presented with a
>>subpoena is even more explicit.
>>
>>Also notice the change to their IP logging policy -- from a strict "no
>>logs" policy to a policy of, "We keep logs, but not so as to affect
>>your anonymity." Another blatant lie, as the Stumbo case amply
>>demonstrates.
>>
>>- From Hushmail's main FAQ February 2002:
>>
>> 37. Does HushMail have a "back door" that can be accessed by
>> government
>> agencies?
>>
>> No. Email, which includes attachments, sent between Hush users
>> is completely encrypted.
>>
>> 38. What if my message is subpoenaed?
>>
>> Hush, like any company or individual, is legally bound to
>> respond to court-issued subpoenas. However, because not even
>> Hush can access the encryption keys of individual users, in the
>> case of a subpoena Hush would only be able to provide the
>> encrypted (coded) version of the transmitted email.
>>
>>Unlike the earlier FAQ entry on subpoenas, this is unambiguous;
>>they're not skirting the issue, but rather confronting it directly.
>>Hushmail, essentially, was pledging here not to rat-out their
>>customers to the authorities.
>>
>>This, and the IP logging policy reproduced below, was likely what
>>Tyler Stumbo and many others relied-upon when they decided to choose
>>Hushmail for their privacy needs.
>>
>>Hushmail's failure here was to store the users' private half of the
>>PGP key- pair; if they didn't store the private half, then they would
>>have HAD no way to decrypt the users' messages. This is the way
>>nymservers currently operate; they only have the public half of the
>>users' PGP keypair, so they CANNOT be forced to decrypt a users'
>>messages.
>>
>>- From Hushmail's Technical FAQ February 2002:
>>
>>
>> 18. Does Hush track IP addresses of visitors or address holders?
>>
>> Hushmail.com does log IP addresses to analyze market trends and
>> gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.
>> However, HushMail.com will never log your IP address in such a
>> way that it can be associated with your HushMail email address
>> or identity. The procedure does NOT affect the anonymity of the
>> user at any stage.
>>
>> 19. Do you keep logs of IP addresses of people logging in?
>>
>> Hushmail.com does log IP addresses to analyze market trends
>> and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.
>> However, HushMail.com will never log your IP address in such a
>> way that it can be associated with your HushMail email address
>> or identity. The procedure does NOT affect the anonymity of
>> the user at any stage.
>>
>> Hushmail FAQ 2002-02-03 as saved by the Internet Archive (Wayback
>> Machine).
>>
>>Source:
>>http://web.archive.org/web/20010215032439/http://www.hushmail.com/about
>>_hushmail/faq/#gq34
>>
>> * * *
>>
>>If Hushmail had lived up to their promises as outlined in their FAQs,
>>Stumbo, his suppliers, and his associates would have had nothing to
>>worry about -- but that's not what happened -- not by a long-shot.
>>
>>Stumbo and his associates failed to anticipate four things:
>>
>>1) The existence of a Mutual Law-Enforcement Assistance Treaty (MLAT)
>> between the U.S. and Canada (among other countries).
>>
>>Under the provisions of MLAT, the U.S. government (or one of its
>>various agencies, like the DEA) can request that the Canadian
>>government order the courts to issue a search warrant valid in Canada
>>to provide any information the U.S. government or one of its agencies
>>is seeking. That is how they got around the jurisdictional issues.
>>
>>2) Because Stumbo and his associates all used Hushmail, this provided
>>the
>> authorities with "one stop shopping" as it were -- it made their
>> jobs so much easier than it would have otherwise been if they had
>> been forced to go after email service providers in any number of
>> foreign jurisdictions.
>>
>>3) Because their email was encrypted, and they believed it was
>>impervious to
>> police scrutiny, they were rather more candid, and far less
>> circumspect than they perhaps might otherwise have been, if they
>> thought their emails were subject to scrutiny by the authorities.
>>
>>4) The final (not to mention fatal) flaw lies in the design of the
>>Hushmail
>> service itself. This fatal flaw in Hushmail's design was in
>> violating one of the cardinal design principles of public key
>> cryptography -- namely the separation of public and private halves
>> of the key pairs.
>>
>>To understand what I mean, you have to know a little about the history
>>of cryptography, and /why/ public-key cryptography was developed. The
>>age-old problem plaguing cryptography since before the days of Julius
>>Caesar was that of key distribution. You can think of a key as a type
>>of password, i.e. a means to encrypt (and later decrypt) a message.
>>So, in other words, the same password (or key) is used to encrypt the
>>message on the sender's end, and decrypt the message on the receiver's
>>end.
>>
>>Sending an encrypted message is easy; the problem is, how do you get
>>the key to decrypt the message to the intended recipient of the
>>message? Therein lies the rub. If you send the key along with the
>>message, anyone who intercepts the message also gets possession of the
>>key to decrypt it, thus defeating the point of using encryption in the
>>first place.
>>
>>Because of this problem, until about 20 years ago, cryptography
>>largely remained the province of governments. Keys were distributed by
>>diplomatic couriers -- like the ones you see in movies with briefcases
>>chained to their wrists.
>>
>>Around 1970, Ellis and Cocks who worked for the ultra-secret GCHQ (the
>>U.K. analog to the American NSA) developed what they characterised as
>>'non- secret' encryption, which later was independently re-discovered
>>by Martin Hellmann, and Whitfield Diffie.
>>
>>Public key cryptography solved the key-distribution problem by
>>breaking a encryption key into two independent, but related, halves: a
>>public half, and a private half. The public half, as the name implies,
>>could be distributed publicly, while the private half had to remain a
>>closely guarded secret.
>>
>>The public key is used to encrypt messages, while the private half is
>>used to decrypt them.
>>
>>Where Hushmail screwed the pooch was in retaining BOTH halves of the
>>PGP keypair, for their users. Now mind, the secret key is protected by
>>a pass- phrase, and Hushmail did warn users to choose a secure
>>passphrase. In fact, they recommended Diceware, which is an excellent
>>method to generate secure passphrases. (See: http://www.diceware.com/
>>for details.)
>>
>>The problem is, having possession of the secret key means that all
>>that is required for your security to evaporate is for Hushmail to
>>capture the pass- phrase. Apparently they accomplished this by
>>modifying their much-vaunted Java applet -- regular customers got the
>>non-modified applet, while those named on a warrant got an applet
>>modified so as to capture the passphrase. (I'm sure that those of you
>>who are Hushmail users are familiar with the fact that a fresh copy of
>>the Hushmail Java applet is downloaded to your computer each time you
>>login.)
>>
>>For those not using the Hushmail Java applet, the secret key was
>>decrypted on a Hushmail server, making the decrypted private key
>>available for capture.
>>
>>With the secret key and your passphrase, decryption of your stored
>>email is trivial. That, in a nutshell, is how Tyler Stumbo, his
>>Chinese suppliers and his associates were all undone.
>>
>>It's a bit like locking up your valuables in an apparently solid
>>looking safe, only later to find out that the safe was actually made
>>of papier-mâché, and was sliced-open with a box-cutter.
>>
>>Hushmail users are essentially trading convenience for security, as
>>Stumbo and his associates found out much to their chagrin. If Stumbo
>>had used another email provider, used PGP/GPG, and took steps to
>>conceal his IP address, he might possibly not be serving time today
>>for trafficking in steroids.
>>
>>As I alluded to at the beginning of this message, legal changes will
>>be coming down the pipe in Canada that will make it easier for
>>law-enforcement to get information without having to get a warrant
>>from the courts. This was expected to be tabled in Parliament as part
>>of the government's massive anti- crime omnibus bill. Thankfully, when
>>the omnibus bill was tabled September 20th, lawful access was nowhere
>>to be seen -- but that doesn't mean that it's off the table, entirely.
>>Police have been lobbying hard for this type of power for more than 10
>>years now, and I don't expect the pressure from them to let-up anytime
>>soon.
>>
>>As Hushmail is headquartered in Canada, it will be subject to such
>>legislation if and when it is passed. Even for non-Canadian users of
>>Hushmail, this will prove to be ominous, as proposed changes to MLAT
>>may allow even foreign police forces to get the same information as
>>Canadian police all without requiring a warrant, or even evidence that
>>a crime has been committed.
>>
>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> V
>>> God Save the Queen.
>>> God Bless the Prince of Wales.
>>> God Preserve the Windsors.
>>> Rule Britannia!
>>
>>Baal <Baal@Usenet.org>
>>PGP Key:
>>http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x1E92C0E8 PGP
>>Key Fingerprint: 40E4 E9BB D084 22D5 3DE9 66B8 08E3 638C 1E92 C0E8
>>Retired Lecturer, Encryption and Data Security, Pedo U, Usenet Campus
>
>
> Dear Baal,
>
> If my correspondent was indeed you, then you've misrepresented
> yourself by signing your name "C", a detail I had unfortunately
> overlooked earlier. Once again, you provide a wealth of information
> regarding the issue at hand ... and I appreciate your efforts on my
> behalf.
>
> Most Sincerely Yours,
> V
> God Save the Queen.
> God Bless the Prince of Wales.
> God Preserve the Windsors.
> Rule Britannia!
>
My Dear victor
It would appear that my earlier text reply did not propagate to easy news
So I will cut and paste it again Hence the
C
And yes it was me! "not Baal" who emailed you!
Though I am in agreement with much of what he has said
Hence the
Cosmos
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