OK, there's a longer form version of it on a recent Security Now podcast (again, Steve Gibson), but the long and short of it is that the NSA (and GCHQ, and I'm sure there are many many more) are (in theory) inspecting traffic upstream of the various Data Centres that Google, Yahoo, et al are using, and therefore, unless your S2S (Server to Server) connections are also using TLS (only Google supports that, I believe) then no matter how "secure" your C2S (client to server) connection is, no matter how much your ISP promises not to inspect the content, whenever the resultant mail leaves that server and crosses an interception point, it will be parsed by government agencies.
There are rumours (although, I don't recall the source) that NSA etc. are requesting the expired TLS certificates from companies such as Google, so they can decrypt the stored-for-later-decryption collection of packets. Ultimately, we should have moved off SMTP as a communication method many years ago (in the same way we moved away from telnet and FTP), but it's an easily understood and implemented protocol that non-techies can grasp. The move from HTTP->HTTPS was prompted by the financial industries worried about the risks of interception, but this is easily controlled because the focal point of an HTTPS connection is the same as the focal point of an HTTP connection, and so it's relatively simple to redirect that HTTP (insecure) connection to an HTTPS (secured) connection, just by saying "Don't ask here, ask over there"... there's nothing inherent in the SMTP protocols (as far as I can tell) that would do the same thing, plus the decentralized and S2S nature of SMTP makes it much harder to say "Don't use plain text with this host". Just to clarify, I'm not saying MyKolab is particularly a bad actor here (I don't really know much about them, beyond the fact that PJ promoted them and Steve suggested that wasn't a great idea), but by suggesting it is a "secure" host you are ignoring the underlying problems in SMTP as a whole, especially as the initial question was started with "Given the revelations about PRISM". Personally, I'd prefer to see something on an always-on device such as an Android or iOS phone that is physically local to you, which provides your mail services - either using something like BitMessage, or SMTP which has forced GPG encryption before relaying (ideally over Tor), so that the communications are always managed by you... but this won't happen until more people get concerned about this stuff. Regards, -- Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs On 3 September 2013 12:09, Alan Pope <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3 September 2013 11:55, Jon Spriggs <[email protected]> wrote: >> Sadly, even MyKolab isn't really secure [0] >> > > Got anything better than a single tweet from Steve "RAW SOCKETS!" > Gibson? I have a hard time taking anything he says seriously. > > Cheers, > Al. > > -- > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
