[Cryptography] How to prove Wikileaks' emails aren't altered

[Ray Dillinger]

On 10/27/2016 07:34 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

>  Why is it
> news when information readily available on the FEC web site is taken from a
> 'leaked' email?

Mostly I think because the leaked email seems a likely source of
supplementary context such as key people's judgments or evaluation of
that public domain information, or the development of tactics leveraging
that public domain information.  The information itself is 'cold' but
the story of what humans felt about it or hoped to do with it is 'warm.'
 Most people can't pay attention to something without some kind of
emotional focus.

It's flatly amazing what's in the public domain, and vitally important,
but simply hasn't been found or noticed yet by people whose job is
bringing public attention to focus on important things that affect their
present and future lives, for want of that kind of focus.  Public domain
or not, information included in those leaked emails may have never
previously received the attention it merits.

> In conclusion, we have to fix the damn email system. We need to make end to
> end security the default for all mail. And that means that it has to be as
> easy to use the encrypted system as the insecure one.

But first you have to decide what you mean by 'security.'  What is your
threat model?  There are a lot of security requirements for email, and
many of them are in direct conflict, as we can see by the passage of
retention laws.  The people doing mail delivery have one set of
requirements, the people relying on mail delivery have a different set,
and the people drafting laws seem to have a third set.  You need buy-in
from all three groups to fix this.

Not so long ago, it would have been considered extremely poor security
practice for emails to remain on the server, at all, once they'd been
read.  What isn't there can't be stolen.  But not very long before that,
the decision was mostly about how much precious disk space could be
allocated to the mail spool, and that former security norm was a
follow-on from common practice established then...

The post office doesn't keep a copy of every piece of paper mail that
passes through the system, after all.  People would be shocked and
offended by the idea that it ought to.

People are shocked and offended when they learn that images of every
piece including sender and recipient names and addresses, and MAC id's
of network-capable devices, are retained by publicly available delivery
services.  It wasn't *THEIR* security requirement that drove that decision.

				Bear

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