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| Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, July 21 2013 @ 03:13 PM EDT |
The big deficiency in any add on encryption to GMail is that you lose the
ability to search your your emails.
Let's look at the possibilities:
If you use for example Thunderbird with Enigmail, you can keep your decrypted
email archived in plain text (presumably in an encrypted disk partition), and
all that goes back and forth on GMail would be encrypted mail. Google would not
have the ability to let you search your mail, but you could search your
decrypted mail archive locally using Thunderbird's search facilities. However
your ip address is revealed in mail that you send. You can use a VPN, but the
easiest fix to that is something Google can easily do if they chose to, which is
to give you the option of not putting your ip address in the Received header of
mail that you send.
Because of the ability of the government to require Google to log and reveal the
ip address used to send email, even if Google added the privacy feature to
remove the ip address from the header, one might still want to use a VPN.
If you use a web browser extension that gives you an interface to GPG (or its
own Javascript library like OpenPGP.js) it must be written carefully to not use
the GMail editor to compose the message so that the plain text does not end up
in your GMail drafts folder. Google would never see the plaintext and you would
have no ability to search the plain text. Even worse, to the degree that the
emails had From, To and Subject fields that were useful, those would provide
unencrypted information. To the degree that those fields did not contain useful
information it would be difficult to find any email without opening up each one
and decrypting it to look at.
There are ways to implement encrypted search queries of encrypted text without
the search engine having the decryption keys for either the queries or the text.
Recently there was an article, I think even mentioned in News Picks, about an
MIT researcher having a breakthrough in that area. The article says that it is a
breakthrough to show that the problem is solvable, but it is a long way from
being practical. However, I tracked that down and found out that the
breakthrough is in the more general problem of doing arbitrary queries of
arbitrary data in a database. It turns out that it is a simpler problem to do
keyword relevancy searches of text. There are a number of papers going back to
2006 describing practical methods to do that. Google could implement something
like that for encrypted GMail. But it would have to be done by Google, not as an
add-on.
However, notice that one reason we are talking about using the GMail web
interface instead of Thunderbird is because that is the interface in which
Google hides the ip address of the sender. If you are concerned about privacy
from the government, then that is not a way in which the web interface is
better. Google still knows the ip address and can be forced to reveal it. VPN is
still the answer for that.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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