When encrypted email providers Lavabit and Silent Mail suddenly shut shop back in August, many thought that the days of being able to securely send information online were behind us. But an official statement has now come from both services, announcing a collaborative project called Dark Mail Alliance. The new protocol being developed by the companies promises to keep your online conversations out of the hands of clandestine government surveillance programmes while avoiding court orders. The new system, according to the post, will be a private, next-generation, end-to-end encryption alternative. The alliance has dubbed the system “Email 3.0”, and said that this is an urgent replacement for the current email protocols. According to The Verge, the new system will provide sophisticated encryption coupled with a red-light/green-interface to show whether an email has been sent via unencrypted channels. The developers have said that this design will give the common user easier access to underlying security principals and help them understand which messages are encrypted and which are not. Instead of replacing the existing services that were being provided before, the alliance is setting up the new system as an open protocol so that other email services can sign in to integrate Dark Mail into their services. While there are no official partners yet, Silent Circle executives were reported saying that they know of six companies that will integrate the new protocol as soon as it launches.
Silent Circle and Lavabit have now joined hands to come up with a new encrypted service
According to the report, the new protocol comes with the same ephemeral-key encryption that has been seen in many of Silent Circle’s other products. The main technical change is a rejection of SSL. Developers, after finding out the earlier protocol can be passively decrypted, have put all the SSL-encrypted data under another layer running on Silent Circle’s native SCIMP algorithm. The protocol will also reportedly limit metadata, the information that is used to track the sender and recipient of each email. Dark Mail, like most other email services, will route messages through a central hub so that observers will only be able to see traffic entering and exiting the system. This basically means that while a mail will be seen as sent to Dark Mail, there will not be any way to know how it is being routed within the system itself. Dark Mail will also clean up the routing information as much as possible. It is difficult to comment about how secure the new protocol will be until the developers reveal the system. The two companies have said that they will be putting out the code for review in the next few months. The team will reportedly be releasing a white paper in the next two weeks that will come with technical details about the new protocol. The official launch for the new service is slated for the second quarter of 2014, and the team hopes to rope in as many as two dozen providers by that time. For now, you can sign into the service to get updates from the team.
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