Hushmail was always known as a secure, private webmail company that markets itself by saying that “…not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer.” But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.” So while the stored email is protected by the user’s passphrase, if this passphrase is authorized serverside by the user logging in via SSL the user is not using the more secure method with the Java Applet that they provide to have the passphrase encrypted (and I suspect hashed) before it’s sent over the wire. The advantage of the later approach is that the server never has the chance to see the ‘real’ password, but the user(s) gave up the ghost when they used the the SSL practice, which I suspect they never thought would lead to their downfall, especially when you look at how Hushmail markets themselves. So while not having to install that Java Applet is more convenient, it’s clearly less secure, “The rub of that option is that Hushmail has — even if only for a brief moment — a copy of your pass phrase. As they disclose in the technical comparison of the two options, this means that an attacker with access to Hushmail’s servers can get at the passphrase and thus all of the messages.” Continue reading →