Google Workspace Updates: Send Gmail End-to-End Encrypted Emails to Anyone
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workspaceupdates.googleblog.comTechstory
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Email EncryptionGoogle WorkspacePrivacy
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Email Encryption
Google Workspace
Privacy
Google announced a new feature to send end-to-end encrypted emails from Gmail, but the community is questioning the true nature of the encryption and the authentication process required to read the emails.
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Pretty sure admins can still audit emails even if they're E2EE.
And it means either Gmail or the actual email stores decryption keys, so what is the threat model in which E2EE is useful here?
The only "advantage" I see is that now recipients must manually archive these "encrypted" emails if they want to keep access to them in the future (so most of them won't). That would be consistent with Google's strategy with AMP's editable emails.
They'll probably just force external recipients to create a Google account and verify control over the independent email address...
And it makes sense. It's the logical way to prove you have access to the email account.
This is likely about regulatory compliance. Many industries require encryption and transit.
> The only way that would work if Google could decrypt the message!
Not necessarily a threat model that benefits you
This is about the last kind of thing a company or engineer or PM would build just for fun.
This is a feature that will be genuinely used a bunch. Its use gets mandated, in fact.
This is a feature for the sending org, not the receiving org.
It's not something that could be done previously.
But it can't be intercepted with any kind of MITM, it can't be read in case of a data leak, and it can't be forwarded accidentally. These matter.
It doesn't matter if it's "true" E2EE (which has different requirements in enterprise anyways), or that the other party can still take a photo of the email or whatever. It still provides tangible benefits.
And it doesn't open up anything new in phishing. I already get emails like this from health care providers, asking me to open the email contents on their site. Obviously you need to figure out if the URL is legitimate, the same way you always have.
Yes it does. If sending an almost empty mail with a link to somewhere else becomes the norm, a link that must be clicked because it's most probably going to contain an important message, you are just making it much more of a routine to open links like that. And those could be phished (yeah, like everything else, that's obvious)
The "Assured Controls" add on put keys on smartcard / hsm not owned by google.
The one thing I've learnt in security after many years is there are no shortcuts. If you don't understand the basics, you can't have security. Things like "end-to-end encryption" are just trying to avoid teaching people the basics by using nice words.
People understand if someone has a copy of their front door key then it's no longer secure and they need to change the locks. So it should be simple to understand encryption too. But most interfaces try to hide away the existence of keys, which is the most basic principle of all. If you don't know where your key is, how can you be secure?
S/MIME? Yeah; the tragedy is no-one could figure out a user-friendly UI/UX for the whole thing.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879...
(quite something for microsoft)
> preserving enhanced data sovereignty
As in you need google in order to view any of your data?
> end-to-end encrypted
Ah yes end (googles server) to end (also googles server) encryption. Very useful.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this genuinely seems completely pointless at best. It's middleman to that same middleman encryption solving the last mile delivery problem by not sending the actual message.
Now we will get a slowly introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open", but will be carefully controlled so that it is slightly broken for everyone except Google. Several years down the road we'll wake up in a world where people will be annoyed that you can't receive their E-mail and will tell you to "just use gmail".
Replace "Google" with "Microsoft" and "Gmail" with "Outlook" and it's the 1990s all over again.
OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.
It works. For E2EE, I have GPG setup on all of my devices. It costs me a little over €1/month for paid account as I use my own domain.
The experience has been good, and something I absolutely advocate for and promote.
I've had a good time with them so far and am a happy customer. You can add as many domains you want and just easily leave if you're no longer happy.
Personally I think Gmail UI is meh - but I no longer use email that much - so terrible UI/ux and no proper quoting/threading support isn't all that problematic.
I was looking at ProtonMail. Now FastMail seems good too. So, wondering what is the best option between each.
As a data point and reminder, running your own E-mail server works just fine, in spite of FUD being spread around sometimes. I've been doing it for the last 25 years or so. Stick to Ubuntu LTS releases, use postfix for SMTP, dovecot for IMAP, and SpamHaus for spam filtering[1], and you'll be fine.
[1] these are becoming less and less useful, as most spam these days goes through Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and these companies couldn't care less about abuse reports, as you can't block them because they are too big.
I should give this another try. But next time, maybe a VPS would be a good idea?
The only dilemma that I have now is whether to use my own domain name or proton.me, pm.me, etc. I currently use the latter.
Reducing the number of emails in my Gmail inbox to zero was a happy day for me. "Do no evil" my ass.
One minor issue is their JMAP[1] protocol if you want to automate email sending - its intention are good just that no one else supports it.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8621.html
I'd suggest you avoid protonmail. Maybe look into mailbox.org, they actually have a pretty good service.
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the technical knobs that Google Workspace and MS Office 360 provide over mail routing. Clearly they have enough large customers with in-house IT staff that demand this level of control and “the rest of us” get the benefit. Once you leave their platforms it’s easy to be disappointed. I can’t say that their platforms are good just technically feature rich; Google’s insistence on silently discarding “duplicate” messages is infuriating but other platforms will have a different set of problems.
If you don’t need enterprise control… Lately, I’ve been on MXroute.com, mostly because the team seems dedicated to trying to make something good. It’s not polished yet. They are opinionated. It’s designed for you to point your MX at them and check your mail via IMAP and send via Authenticated SMTP, that’s it, nothing more. Sure, they have extra features that will work but clearly that’s not their focus.
iCloud+ is also worth looking at and is often underrated. Many folks already have a paid iCloud+ account. Here, you can just turn on “Custom Email” as a set it and forget it option.
While I’m writing non-sense, I’ll ask what others are doing for inbound mail control and spam filtering. Prior to moving to MXroute, I was using SpamStopsHere that offered incredible flexibility and control. It was acquired by Zix and then dismantled.
Easy cancellation, doesn’t go crazy on you if you have a problem with credit card, super fast and light ui, can use your domain so you don’t get locked in
You could say the same about Signal, how is signal more open than Gmail.
https://signal.org/docs/
https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal
Setting aside whether what you wrote is true, we are not talking about Signal here.
The article is literally about cross-vendor E2E email encryption. I mean, we all understand that you mean to invoke the Standard HN Litany Against Google here. But surely you at least should nod to the fact that the linked article stands as a point against your position, no?
We have seen this played out over and over and over again. It’s tiring, and it would be great for more people to be aware of these market capture tactics to make them less effective.
Slack and Discord aren't Google though? Not understanding the point here. You can use this argument against any product from any manufacturer, it seems like. Are you arguing against interoperability in general? Or taking an absolutist free software position that proprietary tools are never acceptable? Doesn't seem to me like that was the position upthread I was responding to.
It's not proprietary tools, it's the fact that they lure you in with open protocols and then rugpull to a proprietary one.
I don't see an RFC defining that "cross-vendor E2E email encryption" as a standard, so calling it "cross-vendor" is just fluff at this point.
> without the hassle of exchanging keys
> access the encrypted message via a guest account
Feels like shifting the goalposts and trying to brand a new working definition of E2EE
https://support.google.com/a/answer/14757842
As I read it[1] - Gmail users are given a hidden s/mime key pair, possibly with secret key stored in a hw token/on device.
I can only assume that when mailing an external user without guest/Gmail account, Gmail will generate a (temporary?) key pair for the recipient, encrypt the message under temporary public key of the recipient - then when recipient creates the guest account - either generate a new key pair and re-encrypt or assign the key pair held for the user? To allow Gmail to decrypt the mail in the browser? As well as implicitly trust the sender key for verification?
I struggle to see how this is e2e in any meaningful sense?
When I log into a public terminal at my library - how will the browser access my keys?
[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/13317990?sjid=1138879...
Just nowhere private on the sender side since they won't even keep the keys private.
Now much less private on the receiver side since they have for "reasons" to login into a gmail hosted server and give them data like their IP address and permit other things like browser fingerprinting.
Fantastic, from the title I almost believed they'd be adding private messaging as done by other email providers almost 30 years ago. But not yet.
There you enter the password and unlock the content.
"secure mail" my ass.
Organizations may need ways to store, archive and manage received email content from others.
I don’t understand what problem this solves for organizations and how.
Microsoft Outlook 365 has a somewhat similar feature where the email is just a link to hosted content on its servers (this kind of functionality isn’t new or recent on other platforms). It doesn’t require any authentication by the recipient. IIRC, the sender can also decide on the expiry of the content.
You log in with a Google account associated with the recipient address. You prove you control the email by putting in a code Google sends you.
> What happens if the email is forwarded with the link?
They can't open it because they don't have access to the Google account associated with your email address.
> What should one do to forward the email to someone without this encryption?
Obviously, encrypted emails are not meant to be forwarded. Nothing prevents you from taking a photo though. Maybe copy and paste will work.
> Organizations may need ways to store, archive and manage received email content from others.
Organizations can't control how they receive information. It doesn't matter what they want in this regard. If a judge orders them to do something about it, that's for the judge to figure out.
> I don’t understand what problem this solves for organizations and how.
It keeps messages private. You don't see why organizations in e.g. health care, law, or the military want increased privacy of messages in a way that is super easy to use? And where recipients can't accidentally forward sensitive messages? A lot of this is determined by compliance requirements too.
They stopped that a long time ago. Close to a decade ago IIRC.
A pop-up where you need to authenticate with credentials...
I'm sure no-one will abuse this.