can someone see encrypted email
hi everyone leo notenboom here for
askleo.com let's get right to this
question it contains a misconception
can sniffers be used with encrypted
email like gmail aren't https
connections secure even for public slash
wireless connections someone told me
gmail was hacked by china can they do
this
so i need to clarify one really really
really important misconception
gmail is not encrypted email
that the connection to gmail is
encrypted is good and important
but it does not mean that your email
itself is encrypted
we need to talk about encrypted email
encrypted connections and whether or not
china could have hacked their servers
encrypted email implies that the message
itself is somehow encrypted in such a
way that only the recipient can decrypt
it
as it turns out that is difficult at
best
it is cumbersome
while possible but it is not something
on which
the internet has really rallied around a
single standard the good news about
truly encrypted email is that doesn't
matter if your connection's encrypted it
doesn't matter if anything else is
encrypted if the message itself is
encrypted
nobody's going to be able to see what's
inside the bad news is as i said there
just isn't an easy to use common
standard that works across the board
yes pgp is good and be great if
everybody used it but it's cumbersome to
implement
yes there is something in the s mime
protocols built into email
but it requires that individuals get
certificates and do other things to
actually implement it and not all email
programs do
the result is that email truly encrypted
email is a rarity
now there are ways that you can encrypt
email that aren't too horrible my
approach has been to use protonmail
email between protonmail users is
encrypted natively they actually happen
to use pgp
if you converse with someone who knows
how to set up and use pgp protonmail
will let you do that and even if you
want to send email to someone who is not
using any kind of email encryption
themselves
you can do that it doesn't really send
email it sends a link to a webpage on
the protonmail servers so that they
control the encryption and how it's
exposed and you need to supply the
recipient with a password to that email
some other way
those are the pragmatic ways that email
encryption can really happen
but it's not
gmail it's not your gmail connection
happening to be behind https
as you point out https is great at
protecting the connection between you
and gmail
while your email whether it be plain
text or encrypted travels between your
computer and the gmail server
it's encrypted by https
that means it can't be snooped on by
someone in that open wi-fi cafe that you
happen to be at it can't be snooped on
by your isp it can't be exposed
accidentally any other way
only you and the google servers can see
it
encrypted email talks about what happens
after that
https is only about between you
and google
once the email travels on from google to
its intended recipient
if you didn't do anything to it that
https just doesn't apply
if you didn't separately encrypt it
using the other techniques that i've
talked about the fact that your
connection to google was encrypted
just had no effect on what happens next
and indeed depending on how that email
makes its way from google to your
intended recipient it could be traveling
across servers that are secure it could
be traveling across secure connections
but that's not a requirement
those connections could be open they
could be sniffable while your email sits
on other servers in transit to your
eventual recipient it could be viewable
by server admins or others so the fact
that https was used has no bearing on
the security of the email as it travels
beyond google servers
now to actually answer the question
directly could someone see encrypted
email and this time i'm talking about
truly encrypted email email encryption
using end-to-end pgp or some of these
other techniques that i've talked about
so that in theory only you as the sender
and your recipient can actually see the
email
well it's not quite that cut and dry
the obvious answer
is malware
if there's malware on your machine it
can see it if there's malware on your
recipient's machine
they can see it
if your recipient's machine is
i'll say
a machine that is part of
a corporation a company that has
monitoring software installed
in theory they could see whatever gets
displayed on that screen and that's how
your recipient is going to see it right
it's going to have to be decrypted at
some point for your recipient to view
the message
if that machine has either through
malware or spyware or corporate
monitoring software something that
records the screen that your recipient
sees then yes the encrypted email could
be seen that way that's why it's
important to keep all aspects of
security in mind it's not enough to send
encrypted email if the destination turns
out not to be secure now i do have to
address this one comment about google
being hacked
google was never hacked in fact to the
best of my knowledge google has never
been hacked the scenario or the story
that i think you're talking about
actually happened many years ago and it
was an attempted hack
we're all getting attempted hacks all
the time and in this particular case the
attempted hack apparently originated
from china and was delivered in the form
of
infected attachments
nothing new here and the infected
attachments were never actually executed
at google and their network was never
hacked
it's kind of unfortunate but one of the
reactions i hear from people frequently
is that they are absolutely convinced
that their email providers servers have
been hacked be it gmail be it
outlook.com at microsoft be it yahoo be
it one of the others they're absolutely
convinced that their mail is missing or
that something happened or that there's
just something going on that they don't
understand and they are absolutely
convinced that the email servers have
been hacked
as long as i've been doing this and
we're coming up on two decades here
that has never once been the case
it's always
always come back to something
significantly more mundane
involving either the sender or the
recipient of the emails involved
the servers at the providers have never
been hacked just needed to make sure
that that point was addressed because
it's not something i want to leave you
with as even a possible assumption to
make
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i'm leo notenboom this is askleo.com
thanks for watching
you