Why isn't there an end-to-end encryption standard for email so that we can get rid of fax machines?
Why isn't there an end-to-end encryption standard for email so that we can get rid of fax machines?
That's the reason we have to still use fax machines right?
I know there are ways to do encryption like PGP on your message directly or I think email sent over TLS? But that isn't the default right and that's why I can't send a picture of my license to the insurance company directly over email?
Lol no, faxes do not have encryption. However, they are transferred over old school phone lines, which are not exposed to the internet, therefore making them harder to intercept. Also, federal wire tap laws are pretty beefy so risk in doing so is higher. That’s pretty much it though
therefore making them harder to intercept.
You mean far, far easier to intercept? You used to be able to just stick a coil around the wires.
The main issue is just a lot of countries governments' don't trust computers still. In Germany they insist on fax and post as it's the only thing they can use as proof of signature in court, etc.
But it's government laws and regulation that is behind. It's not so much of a technical problem (although E2EE email standard would be nice!).
But it's government laws and regulation that is behind. It's not so much of a technical problem (although E2EE email standard would be nice!).
No. Government had nothing to do with it, these are separate issues. WhatsApp was never approved by the government, yet it's widely used and it has E2E. OTOH, German government accepts email for lots of things. I know of some public sectors requiring email with PGP even.
The actual problem is that both email and PGP are really bad. This on my opinion describes it very well: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html
On top of that these days most phone calls are routed over the internet at some point too.
Phone systems are all digital these days. A phone tap is easier than ever, and in higher quality.
Also playing back the sound of a fax can reproduce a fax, with the right tools.
Most companies now use fax severs which use the same SIP trunks that phone calls to the business use. Even if they are using old POTS lines the fax machines themselves are usually not in a secure area, but out in the open where anyone can walk by and pick them up.
I had to have a discussion with our cyber group that didn’t understand this and insisted that we encrypt our digital fax sever. I tried many ways to convince them that it simply was not possible to encrypt faxes when we were getting or sending faxes to random people in the general population. It really tested my patience and my ability to stretch the truth so they would drop their idiotic request.
Fax isn't encrypted. What keeps it alive is just inertia.
As for why your insurance company won't take emailed photo, that probably has more to do with whatever system your insurance is using for their backend.
Email content can be end to end encrypted by GPG and S/MIME as well as through a few other standards. Email in transit can be (but not always is) encrypted via TLS.
The reason encryption is not default is because (I think) of backwards compatibility. E-mail originated at a time when almost nothing electronic was ever encrypted, including the username and password you used to log into a system with. Most of the encryption we use of today has simply been "bolted on" to standards that were already in place at the time and it did take a few tries to get it right.
When the internet was first getting started, few people, if anyone, thought it would become as invasive (possibly the wrong word) as it has become. Everyone on the net knew each other. They were friends, why would they ever need to hide anything from each other. /s
That and the early systems couldn't really spare the processing power for encrypting and decrypting things.
Insurance won't take it because no one is going to work hard to make sure you get paid.
Yeah, but you can just deny email that hasn't got TLS. Many businesses that do business with eachother do this by creating rules in their mailserver.
It’s very easy to E2E encrypt stuff you’re sending via email: zip it up in a password protected archive. Even the email client won’t know what it’s sending.
And even if that isn’t good for whatever reason, there’s no reason to use email. A web form via https is secure and encrypted, and cuts out the email middleman.
That’s not the reason we still use fax machines. The reason we still use fax machines is because someone very old and set in their ways is the one in charge of making the decision to move away from fax machines.
How secure are password protected zip files?
Zip files aren't very secure by default, however you can specify better encryption with better zipping tools. It would be more accurate to say you should put the content into an encrypted archive file.
Probably shouldn’t have been so specific, as I don’t know how deeply encrypted zip files can be in terms of bits. Broadly speaking, there is definitely some kind of encrypted archive file that would be secure when sent over email
PGP is already that answer. We just need a common trusted CA. It would be nice if the government did this and issued certs with your driver license or ID. We could replace our reliance on SSNs with actually good cryptography.
I'm sure there is a much more sophisticated explanation from the lawyers' end, but more fundamentally, I'm pretty sure that encryption is not part of the basic protocol. Privacy is not actually a basic feature of the internet, so something as basic as email does not include it. Anything that uses email to do private coms would have to be referred to as ________ over email.
PGP/GPG has been around as an option since the 90s, but it's rather clunky to implement and you need to know how to keep your private key safe. So, the problem has long been functionally "solved" for the competent, and there we stay; you and anyone you want to talk to privately will always be free (possibly not legal, but free) to generate a key pair each, share your public keys, and then talk privately using those keys for as long as you can keep your private keys safe.
And really, I personally find the idea fairly silly, that some company is going to keep my key for me and respect my privacy. No, if someone wants to keep your private key for you, they want to know your business, all of it. You don't ask to hold anyone's keys anymore than you ask to hold their johnson for them when they piss. I do use some corporate encryptions, signal for things I don't want the DEA to know about mainly. Oh also FUCK THE DEA
anymore than you ask to hold their johnson for them when they piss
Noted.
In the States, fax is required by HIPAA because legislators don't understand technology. Which is hilarious because I, like many providers, use a fax service which emails me a PDF of the fax.
That’s not necessarily true, my hospital uses google services (gmail, chat, etc) and it is hippa compliant. If I need to send an email with PII I need to append the subject line with “-phi-“. Now whether you trust google encryption is another thing, but HIPPA says nothing about only using fax
Generally, fax is still considered more secure. It's a direct connection. It can't be intercepted without physical access to the phone line. Encryption can be broken and not just brute force, which is always possible given enough time. The more common issue is poor implementation and insecure storage of keys. And the way email works, there's no opportunity to exchange keys like with SSL/TLS. So you have to find a way to get your public key to the recipient in a way that they can trust it before you send the message and they have to store it securely so it doesn't get tampered with. Email just isn't designed to support that kind of thing.
It's kind of true. But so many places are replacing physical fax lines with VOIP or even just automatically sending the fax to email via a copier, it's hardly more secure in my experience
A lot of VOIP is local. So a phone line carries the signal to the office building, and a modem converts it to be emailed or whatever. At least in secure places like in healthcare or finance. On the consumer side, VOIP that you get from say a cable company, also doesn't travel over the internet. It travels on the same local lines to the cable company, but from there it takes a different route. True the middle might still be digital, but it's not using internet infrastructure. That would be a waste because there's no need to be able to send that signal to any given device on the internet. There are a lot fewer landline phone numbers than internet connected devices.
True, but physical access to phone lines is trivially easy.
Not if you live on the other side of the world. Sure tapping a phone line is easy. But physical presence it required. It would be pretty suspicious if 10,000 people were digging in your yard, but not so hard to imagine 10,000 people targeting an email account that is likely to have lucrative secrets.
To a specific phone line, yes. But even that is very time consuming. And not something that can be accomplished on any kind of scale...
PGP is the solution, but the problem is, that noone likes to use it. Or it's "too complicated", because it's another password they need to remember. Or, whatever. It would literally solve nearly all of the problems we currently have with emai 🤷 No more spam, because you could filter out all unsigned or untrusted mails, no problems when your email account is hacked, because the mails are encrypted on the server. No Mailserver admin spying on your mails...
Let's be honest, PGP has major usability issues. I mean, a standard that just tells you to "figure it out" with regards to key exchange? And while I'm sure there's plenty of people who've tried to make central services to handle the key exchange part, none have actually gotten any significant usage or seemingly even agreement.
I don't think it would much reduce spam, though. If you use email in a closed environment of sorts, you already can reject email from people you don't know. If they use trusted email providers and you require SPF and DKIM (as most modern webmail does), spoofing isn't really a concern, at least not if you have an allowlist of senders. And if you're not in a closed environment, presumably you'd have to share your public key very widely, making it accessible to spammers too.
Spammers can sign mails
Protonmail (which offers free accounts) lets you click on a padlock icon to this. You set an encryption password and a password hint for the recipient, and can then send a pgp-encrypted email. The message does not require a protonmail account as it directs the recipient to a web page where they enter the password. They can reply to you from that page with a message that is also itself encrypted.
It's not quite what you're asking but it will get your ID securely to your insurance company. I haven't found anyone yet whose employer has blocked this ability.
Anything we want to add to the e-mail system has to be a backwards-compatible with the older system. Otherwise, few people will actually use it.
Antiquated laws/regulatory environment gives fax special treatment even though it's quite possibly the worst mechanism available to send a message.
This is why I don't understand the people that really want more "AI regulation".
I don't want a bunch of 70-year olds telling me what I can and can't do with computers.
90% of email sent today is encrypted between servers but even if it’s not, it’s probably 1000x harder to intercept an email than a fax.
You could impersonate a telephone company worker, twist a speaker to a phone line, and literally record the noise with your phone to get a reproducible fax image.
Email is going to be a lot harder. A lot.
There’s barely any analog phone lines anymore anyway so you could say that probably made fax more secure, but that has nothing to do with fax being inherently secure. It’s the opposite of that.
I love how people think it's SO easy to go mission impossible and get access to phone lines. Or more to the point a SPECIFIC phone line... Having spent a fair amount of time in commerical buildings wiring closets. Doctor fubar's fax line isn't label as such...
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I have no idea about the technical stuff (I can’t really decipher your second paragraph), but there is a legal advantage for fax machines.
Emails don’t count here as “ in writing“, so if something needs to be in writing you need to send a signed letter - or a fax.
Fax is like a signed mail, but In almost real time. So if you send legal relevant stuff, you have proof what you sent and when the receiver got it.
However, you talk about Encryption, I don’t know if E-Mails can be encrypted, fax are definitely not. They go through a normal landline with those beep tones similar to a normal modem made when dialling into BTX or the early internet.
I've seen something about emails being signed and stuff like that. I guess I'm out of the loop. I had a coworker once PGP sign their emails and it would have a signature at the bottom that I (and probably everyone else) ignored.
Why couldn't email just be encrypted ala https? Make a TLS connection, send message, end, move on. Or really just make TLS connection, POST a message, move on.
I know it's more complicated than that but not by much really.. why haven't we just made a new secure standard based on https?
Your email likely is already delivered over a TLS or SMARTLS protected channel. That's not the (only) problem PGP addresses. PGP provides message authentication in addition to encryption.
To take your colleague as an example, his email was cryptographically signed by him. A function that requires his private key, and possibly a passphrase to unlock the key. The signature includes a hash of the message, and requires that private key to generate. On your end, your client hashes the message again and compares the signature. If it isn't identical, someone has tampered with the content. Presuming you met up ahead of time in person or through another trusted channel, and shared public keys, seeing the valid signature also gives you confidence that this email was actually written by the person you expect, and not anyone else with access to their device or account. (If the senders key is still safe anyway.)
It is. When you send an email a startls session is created between the servers as its a point to point protocol. That session is then used to send the message. You can downgrade to plain text which is where the problem lies.