[nzlug] encrypted IMAP storage?

[Nick Rout]

IMO you are not really wanting gmail for its imap support, but for its
storage capacity.

GmailFS allows you to use your gmail account like a hard drive (albeit
slow from NZ). Presumably you could run encryption on top of it like you
can on any other file system.

Of course universal access might be difficult - you need a machine with
gmailfs and the encryption tool installed to make use of your data store.
A USB key bootable system might be the way to go for that.

Nick.

On Mon, December 10, 2007 6:42 pm, Guy K. Kloss wrote:
> Thanks so far for the made suggestions. Unfortunately it's not really what
> I
> was looking for. But what did I expect, web searches didn't reveal
> anything
> so far either ...
>
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 2:20:50 pm Steve Holdoway wrote:
>> ISFR an user-space mounter for gmail, built on top of fuse??? Yup,
>> google
>> suggests that gmailfs is available...
>> http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem-in
>>stalling.html may help. Follow that up with a quick dose of
>> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_GmailFS to encrypt on the fly and you
>> should
>> be good.
>
> Have been thinking about GoogleFS together with encryption before, too.
> The
> solution I was *hoping* to find somehow would have been some configuration
> that would wrap all IMAP4 entries and store them transparently encrypted
> for
> me on the IMAP4 server. Of course then the client would know how to
> decrypt
> the content, and the client would need to be able to handle the content
> ...
>
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 5:53:34 pm Andrew Simpson wrote:
>> I'm using S3 as a backup with Duplicity.  Duplicity supports PGP
>> encryption
>> out of-the-box.  My only issue was the complete lack of documentation
>> with
>> Duplicity and S3. The other issue is the incredibly slow upload speed of
>> NZ
>> broadband...
>
> Same as with above solution. Speed and simplicity through a direct IMAP
> integration without the need of a remote file system backend would have
> made
> the charm of an encrypted IMAP storage backend. I just want Google, Yahoo,
> my
> university, my future employer, ... NOT to have total access to my
> content.
>
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 1:51:30 pm Jim Cheetham wrote:
>> The email provider will always have to have the ability to decrypt
>> your messages when interacting with your IMAP client, in which case
>> the presence of an encrypted filesystem becomes irrelevant. The only
>> way around this would be to try and make sure that all messages going
>> into Gmail were encrypted first, e.g. by PGP.
>
> Something along those lines was what I hoped for: OpenPGP or whatever
> open/good encryption of the content before it gets dumped into the IMAP
> server's hand. But ideally also encrypting mail header information (e. g.
> recipients, senders, date, ...), not just the content body.
>
>> You couldn't enforce this at the Gmail end, because inherently all the
>> non-encrypted messages would have been received by them first and are
>> therefore compromised (and form a great corpus for a plaintext
>> attack); therefore you have to enforce this policy at the sending end.
>
> Absolutely true. That's why I'm not sending/receiving mails through Gmail.
> But
> I've got a Gmail account, and it's just sitting there with no content,
> even
> though I believe 2.8 gigs or something like that would be possible. So my
> idea was to just shove my content onto the Gmail IMAP server. I use IMAP
> heavily for mails, contact information/address book, calendar, etc. And I
> love it for its simplicity with regards of multiple points of access with
> its
> synchronisation characteristics between various computers.
>
> So in the end it would be just a storage backend, not for
> receiving/sending
> it. Therefore that big company could not harvest all my traffic for
> "their"
> purposes, or the purposes of a government in the company's home country..
>
> Guy
>
> --
> Guy K. Kloss
> Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences
> Te Kura Putaiao o Mohiohio me Pangarau
> Room 2.63, Quad Block A Building
> Massey University, Auckland, Albany
> Private Bag 102 904, North Shore Mail Centre
> voice: +64 9 414-0800 ext. 9585   fax: +64 9 441-8181
> eMail: G.Kloss at massey.ac.nz  http://www.massey.ac.nz/~gkloss/
> _______________________________________________
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>


-- 
Nick Rout