Gwebs Cryptographer

Security issues have been at the news recently and all the time more and more things are coming up. So many people are interested about their own security, when spending time with online societies and communicating with others, but just so few people are really using any software which is offering better security. The most of these people are just waiting the easiest one to use and cheapest one to buy, the whole field of Internet security seems to be offering too many options and choices. “Do I really need this? Which one is best for me? It’s too difficult to use, isn’t it ?” These questions are common among people, who have interest but don’t know where to start.

It seems to be that the most of the people have a belief that “e-mail is pretty secured service”, and “anyway no-one is interested about my e-mails”, but in fact there are so many people who have interest for normal users’ accounts, and information. And e-mail itself, is not secured at all. Even if the user’s own computer is having anti-virus software and firewall doesn’t guarantee that outgoing or incoming messages are secured. The following table (Table 1.) shows a little comparison between postcard, e-mail, registered letter and encrypted e-mail. This kind of comparison is quite common while talking about security issues among delivering messages from person to another. In my humble opinion I think this comparison is pretty close to truth, and gives you the idea, how messages are really going “out-there”.

The following picture (Pic.1.) shows how message can change on the way and how come neither sender or receiver cannot be sure that if the message has been tampered or not, if any kind of encryption is not used. This case represents also the postcard. Posting a letter or encrypted e-mail, then the possibility that message changes on the way is decreasing significantly, it’s represented in a picture (Pic.2.).

Pic 1. Postcard / E-mail without encryption

Pic 2. Letter / E-mail with encryption

The animations above are representing the situations of sending a message via postcard and letter / or e-mail with and without encryption. In both cases sender and receiver are not aware which kind of picture the other one is seeing. They can just believe that “This is the picture the receiver will see. / This is the picture the sender wanted me to see.” So it is very difficult to prove afterwards that was the message changing on the way or not. Well, common sense says: “How about I give him/her a call and ask about this?” But are people really willing to do it after every single message? I am not. Then the whole idea about sending an email is basically useless, if it’s not sure whether the message is going through without changing on the way.

Whenever people are sending their personal information, job applications, contracts, what ever that contains any piece of personal information, like name, social security number, address, phone number, etc. Why not using encryption ? Well, at least I’m not willing to put those pieces of information to the postcard, are You ?

There was earlier a bit similar post in our blog: “The Difference Between A Stolen Mailbox and a Steel Envelope: An interview with gWebs CTO Anderson Jin.” Please check it through also!

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It’s autumn time - time of changes. Some of you might notice that Gwebs’ website (www.gwebs.com) was updated last week. New layout and updated information about our products and services. That was a big change for us, and needed a lot of work to do. That was one reason why the blog didn’t got updates for a while.

But now the new website is published, so we thought to update our English blog to face readers’ demands better. Being honest, I - myself don’t like the current layout, it’s just too difficult to browse all the information and try to find interesting posts. Our new layout will be similar with our current Chinese blog (blogcn.gwebs.com). I believe that this update will increase the usage of the old data and make those posts easier to reach, for everybody.

Also our blog’s focus will change a bit in near future. The new focus will consist e-mail, SaaS, document and statement encryption, safety and privacy issues. Without forgetting useful tips, hints and tricks.

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MailCloak Pro is now in Public Beta!

MailCloak for Pro is a combination of all of Global Web Security Systems’ breakthrough encryption programs, and a little more. Download MailCloak Pro here!

MailCloak Pro = MailCloak for Firefox + MailCloak for Mail Clients + MailCloak for Internet Explorer (only available in MailCloak Pro)!

MailCloak was designed from the ground up to be the first encryption program for browser-based email, and POP3/SMTP email. MailCloak Pro supports ALL mail clients, while making GnuPG public-key encryption so simple anyone can use it! And everyone using it is the goal, That’s why MailCloak works with today’s most popular webmail systems as well.

Now you and your contacts can easily exchange encrypted email, and it doesnt matter what they use - Gmail on Firefox? Hotmail in Internet Explorer? YourCustomDomain.Com with Outlook (custom domains are only supported in Outlook and our upcoming SMB version)? They’re all supported! And MailCloak works with cross platform systems too -  that’s because we use the Gnu Privacy Guard MailCloak compatible with tons of other GPG programs on any platform you can think of. Mac, Linux, even legacy DOS users can exchange email with MailCloak users.

Key features include:

Automatic Key Exchange: MailCloak’s automatic key exchange feature automatically attached your public keys to outgoing emails, and automatically imports your contact’s public keys from incoming emails.

Automatic Encryption: Just turn MailCloak on and send email as usual - if you have already done a key exchange, your email will be encrypted.

Respect for Privacy: MailCloak stores your keys on your computer, not ours. So you can be confident that only you and your recipients can read MailCloak encrypted emails

End-to-End Encryption: MailCloak encrypts your email on your computer, and decrypts it on the recipient’s computer. Absolutely no one else will ever be able to read your email. See my previous post to understand the difference between HTTP/S encryption and End-to-End encryption.

Here’s an animation of MailCloak working in Mozilla Thunderbird:

MailCloak Pro is tested and works with the following email clients:

• Outlook 2002
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook2007
• Foxmail 5
• Foxmail 6
• Outlook Express 6
• Koomail 5.32
• Thunderbird 2.0.0.21
• DreamMail 4.4

If you don’t see your email client on the list, don’t fret, MailCloak for Mail Clients  works with most (all that we’ve tested) Windows XP POP3/SMTP Mail clients- so go ahead, download MailCloak and give it a spin.

MailCloak has also been tested on following web browsers:

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 - 3.1b (not included in our current beta, but can be added seperately with a free download and will be included in future releases.)

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6， 7

And all Trident based browsers, including (but not limited to):

• Avant Browser  11.0
• gisoon 1.0
• GreenBrowser 5.0
• maxthon 2.0
• MyIE 3
• Tencent Treveler 4
• The World Browser 2

Download MailCloak Pro here!

If you would like to report that MailCloak works with your email client or browser, or if you experience any problems installing or using MailCloak, please let us know!

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MailCloak for Mail Clients now in public beta!

MailCloak for Mail Clients, a cross-compatible cousin of MailCloak for Firefox, is the first GnuPG encryption plug-in which works in any email program, and it’s super easy to use too! You just install it on your Windows XP or Vista computer and then continue sending email with your current email client.

MailCloak supports: Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Foxmail, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Lotus Notes, and more (we haven’t tested all email clients, but it works with everything we’ve tested).

To start using MailCloak for Mail Clients, you don’t have change a thing, just download, install, do a key exchange, and start sending strong GnuPG encrypted emails! MailCloak even works with your existing PGP keys.

Click here to go to the MailCloak for MailClients download page.

MailCloak for Mail Clients allows users of any POP3 or SMTP email service to use MailCloak’s GnuPG email encryption. GnuPG is strong PGP encryption with up to 4096 bit public keys, and MailCloak is compatible with all other GnuPG encryption programs, so with MailCloak you can send secure email to anyone on just about any platform.

MailCloak supports Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, and more (we think it supports all POP3/SMTP mail clients, but we can’t test them all).  If you use webmail, like Yahoo! mail or Gmail, try MailCloak for Firefox!

We worked really hard to ensure using MailCloak for Mail Clients is easy as pie.

To use MailCloak for Mail Clients install it and fire up your mail client – which ever it may be.

At this point you should notice the MailCloak floating menu. Right click it to turn it on, and send an email. MailCloak will automatically attach your public key to this message if you don’t have the recipients public key, or encrypt the message if you do. When you are done sending encrypted messages, simply turn MailCloak off and write emails as usual.

To make MailCloak even easier, we’ve created an automated testing program called Cryptobot. Turn MailCloak on to attach your public key to all outgoing email, send Cryptobot an email, and wait for a reply to see what happens!

After you give MailCloak for Mail Clients a whirl, please tell us what you think on the MailCloak Encryption Forum. You can also use the forum to ask us your questions. We’ll do our best to answer your questions and help you through any problems you might have.

You also can find documentation on our email encryption wiki.

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gWebs Website Updated!

Just a quick note to say that we have updated our home page and some of our product pages.

Please check out the new design and comment to let us know what you think!

Gwebs Gwebs, updates, website

No Surprise: MailCloak earns Softpedia “100% CLEAN” AWARD

While it doesn’t come as a surprise to us that MailCloak has no Spyware, Adware or Viruses, we are proud to announce that MailCloak for Firefox has been awarded Softpedia’s 100% Clean” Award.

Softpedia says:

Softpedia guarantees that MailCloak Firefox 1.0 is 100% Clean, which means it does not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

We knew we wrote good software using secure programming techniques and respecting user rights in every way possible, and this award simply affirms that we are not malware, however, it is nice to have get an award from a third party.

awards MailCloak

Misguided Impressions.
A majority of the people I talk to mistakenly think that email is safe. The slightly more tech savvy among us – people who read about things like email security in Wired or Cnet or Lifehacker, believe, incorrectly, that HTTP/S encryption will protect their email from eavesdroppers. Yet only the true security aware understand that it takes “end-to-end” and “data-at-rest” encryption to truly protect an email message across its entire life cycle. These individuals also understand that whole accounts are practically impossible to protect – so they concentrate on protecting the important messages.

While it is true that “data-in-motion” encryption like SSL and HTTP/S will protect emails from internet-café wireless eavesdroppers; we should be cognizant of the fact that that’s about all they protect us from. As the notorious Sarah Palin incident so poignantly illustrates, it doesn’t matter how you connect to your webmail, using just data-in-motion encryption is not enough.

So let’s get things straight. HTTP/S, SSL and TSL protect your messages as they travel from you to your email service provider or vice versa – usually the first fraction of a second in an email’s online life. During the rest of the email life cycle, HTTP/S encrypted emails exist in plain text. Only true end-to-end encryption, encryption like MailCloak, FireGPG, Enigmail and PGP provide, can protect an important email for it’s entire life cycle.

The Email Life Cycle:
Below as an outlined the life cycle of a typical email. As you’ll see, an email passes through a lot of hands (routers) between sender and recipient – and there’s no way to tell how clean these hands are. We will use the example of you, a gmail user, sending email to your friend Alice, a Yahoo! Mail user, to make things more concrete.

1.    You write an email and click send.

2.    The email travels from your computer over your LAN to your router, it then “hops” to your ISP, and then over the Internet to Google’s nearest gmail data center. The connection between your computer and Gmail may be encrypted with HTTP/S. If so, your message will be protected across these hops (I usually count 12-15 hops on a traceroute to gmail). If you didn’t use HTTP/S, each of these routers could (and many of them do) copy and index your message – you have no way to know.

3.    The message arrives at Google, and is indexed and saved on redundantly backed up servers. You can now see your message in your “sent” mailbox.

4.    Google now sends your message across the Internet to Yahoo’s datacenter. You can’t do a traceroute from Google to Yahoo, but you can assume that the route takes at least a few hops. At this point your message is traveling in plain text, so each router between Google and Yahoo can copy and index your message. And of these routers may be located in a government surveillance center.

5.    Yahoo! receives and indexes your message, then transfers it to Alice’s inbox.

6.    Alice now connects to Yahoo! and downloads the message. Again, the message hops over a dozen or more routers or computers before reaching Alice.

7.    Alice reads the message.

8.    The message and attachment resides indefinitely on Google’s and Yahoo’s servers. Anyone who logs into either your or Alice’s account can search the account, and if they search the right keywords, they will find your message.

Protecting an Email Message Throughout its Life Cycle.
It turns out that with minimal changes to this life cycle and the user experience, a message can be permanently protected from any and all eavesdroppers. All one has to do is encrypt (cloak/scramble) the message between steps one and two (after clicking send, but before the message goes out over the network), and decrypt the message between steps six and seven (after downloading, but before reading) and the message will always be safe, because it will never be exposed to the internet in plain text. This is called end-to-end encryption because your message is only in plain text at the endpoints. It’s also called data-at-rest encryption, because the email is only stored as an encrypted message.

MailCloak and Standards-Based Encryption
MailCloak, along with a host of other OpenPGP based programs, will all help you to encrypt your messages with end-to-end encryption. When we wrote MailCloak, we chose to use GnuPG OpenPGP encryption because all OpenPGP programs can talk to each other – and there’s an OpenPGP program for just about every computing platform out there. If you have Windows XP and you use Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, or a standard POP3 Email Client, you can use MailCloak – MailCloak will be available for Vista and Windows 7 soon. If you have Mac or Linux we recommend FireGPG for Gmail on Firefox, Enigmail from your POP Mail.

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These great tricks will have you using Gmail with multiple accounts. And doing it in style: faster, easier, safer, and with less trouble then ever before. Check ‘em out and let us know your favorite tricks.

1. (Automatically) Reply from the same address the message was sent to.

2. Check your POP Mail NOW!

3. Label Mail by account.

4. Use Colorful Labels to make them stand out!

5. Choose the right email address when sending mail.

6. Add Email Encryption

And: Reader Tricks (in comments)

Read more…

Security, email, google email, Email Security, gmail

MailCloak Personal Edition, Email Encryption for Firefox is finally open for Beta Testers!

MailCloak is the new GPG based email encryption add-on for today’s top webmail services. MailCloak encrypts Google Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and MSN Live Hotmail with super strong 4096-bit key GPG encryption.

After you have installed MailCloak, you will be prompted to create a key pair, once that’s done you’re ready to go.

Check out our detailed quick-start guide if you want some hand-holding, otherwise go ahead and login to your web-based email account (This version supports Google’s Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and MSN Live Mail) and send someone an email. If MailCloak is turned on, your public key and an invitation to MailCloak will automatically be attached to this email. If the recipient is using GPG, PGP, or MailCloak, They will be able to send you encrypted email. When you get their key, you will be able to send them encrypted email. We’ve also created Cryptobot to make this easy to test.

Open Source Encryption, closed source connectivity.
We chose to build MailCloak on top of the industry standard, open source GNU Privacy Guard (GPG/GnuPG). GPG uses the OpenPGP standard, first written by Phil Zimmerman in 1982, OpenPGP-standard compliant encryption is used by 96 of the top fortune 100 companies, the Department of Defense, and millions of home and business users around the world.

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Last night I was at the Beijing Tweetup and had an interesting conversation with Rebecca MacKinnon and Andrew Lih about NGO and journalist security needs, which got me thinking this morning - NGO’s and Journalists really need an easy-to use-security tool designed to provide them with 100% fail-proof anonymity and security - and MailCloak - our new encryption tool, is perfectly positioned to help them out.

Why is MailCloak positioned to help? Because MailCloak allows you to send email from Yahoo, MSN and Gmail, and protect your messages with strong encryption. Yahoo, MSN and Gmail - are these known for anonymity? Well, maybe they aren’t known for it, but they are great tool because you can create disposable email accounts freely and easily.

Here are the steps, most of which I have previously documented:

1. Setup your proxy connection (and turn it on) to keep your IP address private when accessing services you wish to remain anonymous
2. Create a new free, disposable Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or MSN Live Hotmail account. Remember, don’t use any real personal information.
3. Download and install MailCloak on your computer, and have your contact do the same.
4. Exchange public keys and test MailCloak by sending trivial messages to make sure they go through encrypted. Only send important information after testing the encryption.

That’s it!

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