Gwebs Cryptographer

When I started my work at Gwebs, this was one of my first questions. I mean, so far that our own products don’t support mobiles, smartphones, pdas, etc.  Anyhow, our product co-operates nicely with all software that use GnuPG (GPG), it’s tested with quite wide scale of applications.

I wanted to know how I can access my encrypted messages whenever and wherever. I just got so dependent on mobile usage of email from my previous job at one telecommunications company, sometimes you just have to be there 24/7 available, for your colleagues all around the world, your customers and clients. This is it what’s going on right now within IT-industry. Although, no-one is paying me 24/7 salary, but it just integrated for me as a habit. And now, sometimes I found myself at the bus stop reading my email, thanks for the reasonable price of data transfer.

I made some research about this topic and found out that encryption with GPG in smartphones is not so common than I thought. Although, nowadays, when smartphones are having Windows Mobile, Linux, Android, Apple, Symbian and maybe some other operating systems too. It seems to be easier to find a solution for encryption from PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

I found out that Symbian used to have one component, made by Nokia, but no-one really knows is it still usable or not. About Apple and Android I really cannot say so clearly, ’cause both systems are pretty unfamiliar to me. So far Apple seems to have quite much research and development around iPhone, so I’m pretty sure that there are some encryption software as well.

Windows Mobile then, there seems to be a huge gap between versions (5.0/6.0/6.1/6.5) while searching supported applications, anyhow there are some software for encryption available. I haven’t tested these yet by myself, but will do later. At first I’d like to have the official update for WM 6.5.

Well, Linux is another chapter of it’s own. There are so many free, open-source encryption software available that it will be more difficult to find the one which suits the best for your needs, than just find one.

The other solution for encryption in mobile devices is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), it’s not open-source and normally these applications are not free. But this also makes the difference to availability. There are so many PGP applications available for all these operating systems that I mentioned earlier. And of course, while the software is not freeware, you can expect some support for troubleshooting and equivalent for your money.

Anyway, I think that this is one of the main things nowadays while talking about email security and privacy. Because so big share of today’s business emails are sent by mobile devices, it’s really needed to have some software to obtain privacy within this communication way too. And for covering usability issues, it’s nice to have a software which co-operates with the same encryption method as while using a PC.

I’ll let you know later about my testing, WM 6.5 + PGP or GPG encryption software + MailCloak in PC. Having my own key in every single device (work, laptop and smartphone). And then testing it out, how it works and how easy it is really to use. But that’s going to happen after the Windows Mobile 6.5 release, which suppose to be soon.

Gwebs, PGP, Security, email, encryption Android, Apple, email, Email Encryption, Email Security, encryption, GPG, Gwebs, linux, Mobile, PGP, privacy, Symbian, windows

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!

MailCloak, Security, email, email encryption, encryption, personal comparison, email, Email Encryption, email encryption software, Email Security, encryption, letter, MailCloak, postcard

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.

MailCloak, Release, Security, email, email encryption, encryption Beta, Email Encryption, email encryption software, Email Security, Release

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.

Security, email, email encryption, encryption Email Encryption, Email Security

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

I recently read an interesting article by “security guru” Bruce Schneier (with more interesting comments) discussing tourist scams.

Its’ not just tourists that get scammed though. Scammers and phishers are everywhere, in real life, and on the internet, trying to find a way to separate you from your money.

Recently I have noticed a wave of SMS (text) messages asking for money. The other day I got one claiming to be my girlfriend - the writer said they had lost their wallet and phone and could I please transfer $1000 to such and such a bank account.

Another day I was having dinner with a friend who’s father called. My friend’s dad was worried sick - he had gotten a text message from someone claiming to be his son, asking for money because he was in trouble with corrupt cops. My friend laughed, screaming over the din of the convivial hotpot restaurant, that he was perfectly ok.

Aside from SMS scams, there are lots of other kinds of scams. Check out the email above, which is an obvious part of a phishing scam. First of all, you should notice that the URL or Link doesn’t point to HSBC.com, but rather to “accountmaintenance.com” - and aside from that, you should know that no bank would ever send you an email like this. But, if for some reason you think they might be telling the truth, remember the golden rule: always login to the bank the same way - type their address into the location bar of your browser.

This could Watch out for SMS scams, email scams, phishing scams, and read more, more, and more.

Security, encryption Email Security

Recently, all of the big email providers in the consumer arena, including Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and MSN Live Mail have begun to offer “security solutions”.  Google Apps, Microsoft’s Live Admin Mail, Bluetie and Rackspace also offer business security solutions for both small and large enterprises.
But what are these solutions, and how does our new product, MailCloak, differ from them?  In this blog post Sarah Yu, Global Web Security Systems’ (gWebs) marketing executive, interviews gWebs CTO and lead programmer Jin Anderson to discuss what’s happening in the email security space and how MailCloak differs from the security solutions already offered by these providers. I have translated this post from the original Chinese.

“Let’s take the metaphor of snail-mail. The username and password authentication system is a lot like the key to a mailbox. If this key is copied or stolen, all the mail inside can be stolen and read. But MailCloak is like a steel envelope. It will protect the message even if an intruder guesses or steals your login credentials.”

Read more…

Security, email encryption, encryption, interview, software Email Encryption, Email Security, gWebs Team

Here at Global Web Security we have been working round the clock to bring our users a new, brighter, better, more functional and more interesting website. Our homepage has undergone a complete rewrite and redesign.

We’ve added a forum and tons of information about our MailCloak software (which provides strong encryption for webmail), as well as brief introductions for products that are in development: PassDancer our biometric authentication software, DriveCloak and DocCloak. In-depth documentation is coming soon!

Also MailCloak is now “open” for beta testing. Sign up here!

About MailCloak: MailCloak is Strong encryption software for Webmail. MailCloak utilizes GnuPG to encrypt email on Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and re em

Security, email, email encryption, encryption, software Email Encryption, email encryption software, Email Security, Gwebs, MailCloak 3.0, MSN Live!, Webmail Encryption, Yahoo! Mail

Here at Gwebs, the makers of the world’s easiest encryption software, we’ve been hard at work on a new, completely re-written and altogether better version of WebmailSafety. So much about this product has changed that we’re even changing the name!

Gwebs WebmailSafety, which offers email encryption for Webmail and desktop clients, is now called MailCloak, and with version 3.0 on the way webmail users are in for some great surprises.

Like what?

The world’s easiest encryption software just got even easier!

Here are the basic features:

• Free!
• Automatic protection for emails and attachments.
• Supports Internet Explorer、Firefox and Outlook.
• Supports Gmail, Hotmail, Live mail, AOL Mail, Yahoo mail, 126 mail, QQ mail and 163 mail.
• Auto-update keeps you secure with the latest features and bug-fixes installed as soon as they are available.
• Simplified backup.
• Automatic Key Management.
• No Adware, Spyware, or Malware.
• Easy invitations.
• Automatic draft encryption.
• Enable/Disable with a single click.
• Supports English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and French.

Read more…

Security, email, email encryption, encryption, google, personal Email Encryption, Email Security