Insecure Email Is Here to Stay: Let’s Fix It

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/insecure-email-fix-it/

In his thoughtful parsing of what email is and will become in The Atlantic,
Alexis Madrigal writes that email is the “exciting landscape of freedom
amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.”
Email is easy, open, and ubiquitous. We spend as much as 80% of our workday
in our email inbox and use email for important personal communication. The
Radicati Group reported in 2012 that 144.8 billion emails are sent every
single day. That’s 38 trillion emails a year. Email is here to stay.

Few would consider email to be a new technology. It’s been around for more
than 30 years, but remember that it only started to take off in the 1990s
alongside the Web. Most people started using it 20 years ago, and in three
decades email hasn’t had much of an upgrade, especially when it comes to
security.

Every email we send is insecure by default. While Google and Yahoo have
taken positive steps to encrypt traffic, the basic protocols are still all
plaintext, and forget about controlling the emails you compose after you
hit send. While an email address routes your message to a recipient,
there’s no ability to recall or encrypt messages baked into this
30-year-old standard.

Email is here to stay, but what’s also here to stay is the steady stream of
gaffes and scandals created by the lack of security and control. Email is
insecure by design. From Snowden’s leaks to Wikileaks, to every scandal
that hits the newswire, all of these stories are rooted in email’s weak
approach to securing information.

Case in point: just a few weeks ago Goldman Sachs mistakenly sent a
sensitive email with account information to a random Gmail user because
someone fumbled some keystrokes and sent to a “gmail.com” account instead
of a “gs.com” account. The email contained such sensitive information that
the only recourse Goldman had was to get a court order to require Google to
retract the message. Just this month, the UK’s Information Commissioner
“sounded the alarm” for lawyers in an attempt to get them to realize that
unencrypted email is an unacceptable risk for privacy.

Recipe for Viral Success: The Embarrassing, Inadvertent Email

On a personal level, everyone who uses email understands the blunders and
glitches that lead to sending an inappropriate email to the wrong
recipient. Everyone understands what happens when people forward
embarrassing emails to a larger group. While some have retreated to
messaging apps that only allow messages to live for 10 seconds like
Snapchat, most are still relying on email for both personal and
professional communication.

Sending an unencrypted email with secret or embarrassing information in
2014 is not unlike placing a sensitive phone call to a small town in 1956
served by a shared “party” line that was typical for rural telephone
service in the last century. Then as now, the potential for eavesdropping
and for privacy violations is very much the same. The difference is that
email blunders in 2014 are much, much riskier than a party line call was in
1956. An overheard phone call could lead to embarrassment or hurt feelings
— an intercepted email can go viral.

> From the Deranged Sorority Rant to a product rant from Bill Gates to Oxford
University mistakenly emailing a list of the 50 worst performing students,
this list could be extended to fill an entire page with illustrations of
email’s inherent lack of security. Some of these incidents are famous, but
most are not. The common theme is that they never needed to happen. If
everyone agreed to start using sensible tools built atop standard email to
give senders and recipients some semblance of control, these gaffes would
be a thing of the past. Sure, we’d have less entertaining email scandals,
but we’d all be more secure in the end.

Moving Beyond Trust, Securing Email

When you send an email, that email is plaintext and stored on someone’s
servers. You are trusting the IT administrators at your company or your
provider to not read through your email. When you send a highly personal
email to a friend or loved one that contains information you wouldn’t want
shared with the world, there’s absolutely no guarantee that your message is
protected in transit or at rest — and, worse, there’s no ability to take
back an embarrassing email sent to a recipient if something changes.

We need to use technology that can enforce access control and encrypt. When
you send a message it should be cryptographically signed and verified as a
matter of course. We need to make the idea of sending unencrypted emails
that can’t be revoked or controlled seem as antiquated as an old telephone
party line, and we have the technology to do this. Email needs an upgrade.
Insecure standards need to be retired, and security and privacy need to be
a priority. Whether you are motivated to act because of the security of
your business or family, or you want to help put an end to government
overreach and mass surveillance, it’s time to put our party line email
system away and start encrypting end-to-end today.

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