The proposal for forward secrecy in the spec (<a href="https://darkmail.info/downloads/dark-internet-mail-environment-december-2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://darkmail.info/downloads/dark-internet-mail-environme...</a>) is not great and does not reflect the current state of the art:<p>> PFS for message objects, as the description above suggests, is far more difficult, and contrary to the nature of email.<p>It recommends just rotating public keys every few days with a paranoid mode. A much better solution is to implement the Axolotl Ratchet pioneered by Open Whisper Systems for TechSecure:<p><a href="https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki</a><p>With Axolotl Ratchet, you get:<p>* forward secrecy - disclosure of private keys doesn't let an attacker in the future go back and read encrypted communication<p>* future secrecy - disclosure of ephemeral private keys doesn't disclose (much) future content<p>I also get the feeling from a glance reading the spec that way too much trust is being placed on service providers. That there is even such a category as "trustful" where the server has access to your private keys is a huge red flag and that was exactly the problem with lavabit: <a href="http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/lavabit-critique/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/lavabit-critique/</a>
Is "Dark Mail" going to be the official name? I am no marketing expert, but I am pretty sure it's not a good name. People associate darkness with negative feelings, thus a lot of people might start thinking that encryption is for hiding "illegal" things, and not for keeping privacy.<p>And please, don't even try using the silly X.0 naming, as some tech-ignorant journalists started doing over a decade ago.<p>Besides the naming thing, I wish them the best, as I hope that this will spread and become a new standard, even with the masses.
3 of 5 comments so far mentioning that the name is a mistake. Allow me to make that 4 of 6. Come on guys, authoritarians are going to argue that this is just about defending criminals and terrorists, do you want to make that argument for them?
Call it 'Liberty mail' or something.
The spec is pretty intense, I think the first thing to work on is better high level documentation and overview. There is a lot going on with how this proposed system formats, encrypts, signs, routes, and validates.<p>I've only glanced over less than half of the spec so far, but I'm not convinced of the design just yet. For starters, I'm not sure I fully understand the trust model, or even the baseline limitations on things like one-to-many emails, key exchange, PFS. Before jumping straight into packet formats and field layouts, I want to read more about the basic operational model.
I watched Citizenfour yesterday and one of the really disturbing parts of movie was Lavabit founder talking at European Parliament about why he had to shut it down. I am glad that something good is coming up.<p>But can we please change name from 'dark' to something like 'secure, encrypted etc'? Dark inherently sounds negative, at least in my part of the world.
I don't think email encryption will ever be more widespread than it is today. People simply don't care, and even those few that can be convinced to use it will invariably do something that invalidates the whole exercise like bring their key to a public library, use it on their phone, resend the entire conversation in plain text accidentally, lose the key and generate a new one with you having no way to verify that it's not actually mitm, etc. All of this has happened to me.
So who will be able to use this wonderful protocol?
Because I don't think it will be available on gmail(or any other big provider). How it isn't going to end like a pgp right now, when I can sent encrypted emails only to myself, because no one in my circle uses encryption?
I'd love that e-mail encryption became widespread, but I'm doubtful that it'll ever happen. I think keeping private keys private may prove to be an impossible task. Systems are too insecure. Even security experts may fall victim to sophisticated attacks. Let alone the other 99.9% who are not security experts.
I truly wish them all the best with this project. It would be a momentous win for privacy to have email encrypted by default and easy enough for the general public to use and that is no easy task. Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if they can get some quality email companies like Fastmail onboard early on.
As others have mentioned, I think a new name is necessary. It wouldn't be fair to the project to handicap it with such as name.<p>Name it after Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Locke or similar.<p>Interestingly, a previous HN discussion also suggested a name change:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157922" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157922</a><p>(The abbreviation DIME, Dark Internet Mail Environment, sometimes mentioned is also terrible. Hiding 'dark' with an abbreviation isn't enough)
.info domain, SSL cert but no HSTS, email list subscription posts to non-SSL endpoint, empty forums. Is this real? WHOIS info appears real and it's over a year old, but still...
Who cares what the name is? End users aren't going to see it anyway... Bittorrent has a completely neutral name, yet it didn't stop it from getting a bad rep with people who don't know better, and that bad rep hasn't stopped it from being hugely successful.<p>The chances of this project succeeding or failing has nothing to do with the name. There are much bigger barriers which they need to overcome.
HTTPS appears available [1], interesting that they don't force a redirect.<p>[1] <a href="http://darkmail.info" rel="nofollow">http://darkmail.info</a>
I appreciate detailed spec, but it would be nice to have some TL;DR version of how is this supposed to work.<p>I do like putting names on the front page though.