Kali Kaneko - Against the silos: usable encrypted email & the quest for privacy-aware services
At the LEAP Encryption Access Project we aim to make secure
communications both easy to use and easy to provide.
We bring some tales (and some, hopefully, tools) from the quest for
user-friendly crypto software. How to make people love the email
experience in the 21st century, without risking their privacy. How to
encrypt data locally, sync it to servers that you can lose, and still
be sexy.
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Technologies that allow for privacy in the communications, allowing
the escape from the pervasive massive surveillance, have been there
for some years now, but yet its use by the general public is far from
widespread. The challenge, in our view, can be defined by one of
making usable crypto. Usable for the end user, usable for the sysadmin
and for the fellow application developer. In the quest for massive
adoption of encryption technologies, we've been forging several python
packages to solve different problems, always standing in the shoulders
of giants.
We bring some tales from the trenches to share, from our humble
experience trying to deploy clients and servers to provide Secured
Encrypted Internet Tunnels and Encrypted Email. This includes
interesting challenges dealing with key management, automatic and
secure software updates, and processing of email while using stock
cloud providers, while still being resistant to hostile environments.
We'll show a webmail email user agent based on this architecture, a
promising future for decentralization and privacy.
We'll also talk about how to store locally encrypted data, and will
present Soledad (Synchronization of Locally Encrypted Data Across
Devices). Soledad is a library with server and client components that
allows the development of different applications based on client-side,
end-to-end and cloud-syncable encryption of private data. We'll play
with some toy apps to showcase its features and potential. |