Subj : Re: Anyone using PGP/GPG in here?
To   : Vk3jed
From : StackFault
Date : Thu Nov 08 2018 07:15 am

 Vk>  St> Encryption is a beast by itself. Many focus only on the data-in-trans
 Vk>  St> aka network stream encryption (the TLS part) and often forget about t
 Vk>  St> data-at-rest aka storage.
 Vk> 
 Vk>  St> I've seen numerous times people spending countless hours securing
 Vk>  St> traffic, disabling weak ciphers and setting up strong keys, but keepi
 Vk>  St> the data in clear on the database backend once received.
 Vk> 
 Vk> Yep, encryption is only as secure as the weakest link, and unencrypted
 Vk> databases can be a particularly soft target.  The offline mail system
 Vk> was good in that regard, in that the plaintext message only ever existed
 Vk> as a temporary file.  On the BBS the message was still ciphertext. 
 Vk> Sure, one could forensically trawl the local HDD for the plaintext, but
 Vk> how many BBS messages are going to attract that level of scrutiny? (and
 Vk> if the spooks have your HDD, they have your private key as well anyway).
 Vk> :)

Protecting the keys is the biggest challenge, using a good passphrase can
surely help but it's more like a second stage.

I didn't know the offline mail files were encrypted, I tought it was just a
database of some sort (which is not plaintext) but could be accessed pretty
easily if you have the specifications.

You are touching another very point, which is temp files. On most systems
these are writtent in publicly available folders and most developpers don't
use the right permissions, allowing anyone to read from them...

Sometimes, we focus our attention at the wrong place...

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