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post Email & privacy/security concerns 2020-03-21 01:46 -0400 true

Plaintext email

Email is inerently insecure. By default, everything is sent in plaintext from one server to the next with no encryption whatsoever. Servers can encrypt mail in-transit by implementing SSL and TLS but that still leaves copies of your data in plaintext on both servers. For example, see this email I sent to myself. At the very bottom, the content of my email is shown in the file for anyone with access to the server to see. At first glance, this may not seem like such a huge deal. It does, however, become a big deal when you're conducting private business over email. If I so chose, I could go to that directory and read everything you're saying and there's nothing you could do about it. Any mail provider has this capability: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Fastmail, the list goes on. Unless special measures are taken to encrypt your emails at rest, this holds true in every single case.

Encrypted email

Providers like Protonmail and Tutanota do exactly this and that is their main draw. Mail to and from other users of the same platform (Protonmail -> Protonmail, Tutanota -> Tutanota) is encrypted from end-to-end as well as at rest so the only parties that can read it are the sender and the receiver; the provider itself can't access them. However, the benefit of at-rest encryption becomes absolutely meaningless the second you communicate with someone on a server that doesn't implement it. Protonmail -> Gmail is 100% insecure and Google is free to perform whatever text analysis and user profiling they wish. NixNet Mail will implement at-rest encryption in the near future but, even then, there is no way to verify that that's actually the case unless I gave everyone root access to my server at all times (security and compliance nightmare). The only viable solution is to take your privacy into your own hands and encrypt emails yourself.

GPG encryption

"GPG" stands for "GNU Privacy Guard" and is a libre implementation of "PGP" or "Pretty Good Privacy", originally created by Phil Zimmerman. PGP was eventually bought by Symantec and became Symantec Encryption Desktop and GPG quickly became the most widely used implementation of OpenPGP standards. GPG integration is especially common in open source email clients such as Thunderbird and Evolution. It relies on public-key cryptography and allows users to encrypt their emails with another user's public key. The email would then be decrypted using the receiver's private key. Take a look at this encrypted email I sent to myself. As admin of the server, that is literally all I can see. The text between BEGIN PGP MESSAGE and END PGP MESSAGE is the email body and it just looks like a block of random characters to me. To the person receiving the message, however, after decryption, they'll be able to read it just like the plaintext one linked in the first section.

If you want to learn more about GPG encryption and protecting your privacy when using email, I recommend reading through Email Self-Defense, a fantastic resource from the Free Software Foundation.

NOTE: Encrypting an email does not encrypt the metadata. When you sign up for a new email service, send one to yourself and inspect the headers to see if they obfuscate identifying details.

Metadata

Another thing to keep in mind with emails is metadata in the headers of the emails. In Roundcube, you can view these by clicking More then View source. In Thunderbird, just press CTRL + U.For other clients and web UIs, you'll just have to look around for options to show headers, view source, download, something like that. You can also take a look at the email I sent myself.

I'll break down some of the lines and explain what they are. Some of it is irrelevant to this and will be skipped though.

Return-Path: <amolith@nixnet.xyz> 👉 Address your reply will go to

Delivered-To: amolith@nixnet.email 👉 Address the email was sent to

To: Amolith <amolith@nixnet.email> 👉 The displayed receiver

From: Amolith <amolith@nixnet.xyz> 👉 The displayed sender

Subject: Email demonstration 👉 Subject of the email

Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2019 00:20:46 -0500 👉 Timestamp at which the email was sent. This does include the timezone and can be used to identify you

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.2.2 👉 Full user-agent the email application includes with the email. In this case, it consists of the organisation, my display server, my operating system and architecture, the HTML rendering engine, and the email client and version. This can really be used to identify you.

The rest of it is server-side stuff that doesn't matter too much for this document but will likely be discussed elsewhere in the future. Together, all of this metadata can be used to identify people in a conversation. Timezone (vague location), OS, email application, correspondents, and client version. That last component could actually be useful for determining whether or not the client is susceptible to certain malware attacks