On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 12:51 AM Caveman Al Toraboran <toraboracave...@protonmail.com> wrote: > > hi. context: > > 1. tinfoil hat is on. > 2. i feel disrespected when someone does things to > my stuff without getting my approval. > 3. vps admin is not trusty and their sys admin may > read my emails, and laugh at me! > 4. whole thing is not worth much money. so not > welling to pay more than the price of a cheap > vps. moving to dedicated hardware for me is > not worth it. my goal is to make it annoying > enough that cheap-vps's admins find it a bad > idea for them to allocate their time to mingle > with my stuff. > > thoughts on how to maximally satisfy these > requirements? > > rgrds, > cm. >
I'm rather late to the game with this, but at the end of the day, mail coming *into* a mail server isn't typically encrypted (and even that is only the body, the headers can still reveal a great deal, and are necessary for the server to work with it). A packet dump at the switch will turn over every piece of mail you receive along the way. Email's not designed for end to end security by default. Secondly, any hosting on hardware you don't control is impossible to fully secure, if the services on that end have to operate on the data at all. You can encrypt the drive, encrypt the mail stores themselves, etc, but all of those things will result in the encryption key being loaded into ram while the VPS is running, and dumping ram from the hypervisor layer destroys every illusion of security you had. Dedicated hardware in a locked cabinet is as close as you get to preventing physical attacks when you're hosting in someone else's DC, and that's not nearly in the same market segment, price-wise, as a cheap VPS. At best, if you have sensitive email that you're sending or receiving, work with the other end of the communication and then encrypt the contents properly. Even better, go with a larger scale, paid, solution in which your email isn't even remotely worth the effort to tamper with for the hosting company's employees, and hope the contractual obligations are sufficient to protect you. If you have any sort of controlled data going in and out of your email, step up to a plan that adheres to the regulatory frameworks you're required to adhere to and make very sure the contracts for it obligate the vendor to secure things properly on their end (aws, azure/o365/etc mostly all have offerings for, at least, US Gov level requirements). -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
