From: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
To: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>,
Jeremy Nickurak <not-much@trk.nickurak.ca>,
Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net>
Cc: Notmuch Mailing List <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>,
Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@debian.org>
Subject: Re: Feature suggestion. Indexing encrypted mail?
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 01:25:29 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <53438849.5050500@fifthhorseman.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87d2gsonne.fsf@qmul.ac.uk>
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On 04/07/2014 05:06 PM, Mark Walters wrote:
> I think it is worse that that: I think (from what people said on irc
> some time ago) that the index contains the word and the position of that
> word so essentially the whole message can be reconstructed from the
> index.
Agree with Mark here, the warnings around such a feature should clearly
say "this stores a cleartext equivalent of your message in the notmuch
index."
Even if the index weren't structured in this way, modern natural
language processing techniques and a plausible training corpus should be
able to come very close to the original cleartext message, so it should
be treated as such.
fwiw, the workflow i outlined should make it so that users can receive
all messages encrypted; when they read each encrypted message, they get
a choice about whether to store a cleartext-equivalent in their notmuch
index. (note of course that it's possible to store your notmuch index on
an encrypted filesystem itself, for a different flavor of
confidentiality protection for the data once it's come to rest).
This per-message decision mechanism lets a thoughtful user make that
tradeoff on a piecemeal basis (it also allows for blanket
(mis)judgement, of course). There are certainly some messages that one
might never want store in a cleartext index, while other messages might
be less sensitive to exposure while being more valuable to the user if
stored in a well-indexed, searchable local archive.
I think this is a feature worth having, despite the warning labels it
probably needs.
--dkg
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prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-04-08 5:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-04-05 16:38 Feature suggestion. Indexing encrypted mail? john.wyzer
2014-04-05 17:10 ` David Bremner
2014-04-05 18:35 ` Jeremy Nickurak
2014-04-05 19:03 ` john.wyzer
2014-04-05 19:09 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2014-04-06 9:15 ` Guyzmo
2014-04-06 22:16 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2014-04-07 8:08 ` john.wyzer
2014-04-07 15:57 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2014-04-07 20:15 ` Jeremy Nickurak
2014-04-07 20:31 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2014-04-07 21:06 ` Mark Walters
2014-04-08 5:25 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor [this message]
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