full-disclosure - Re: Hash

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Message-ID: <24589.1185544181@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:49:41 -0400
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To: Tremaine Lea <tremaine@...il.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: Hash

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:23:37 MDT, Tremaine Lea said:

> Apparently you've never heard of a mail administrator tagging  
> outbound email for all users. It's pretty common.  Of course, you may  
> lack the experience of dealing with large companies.

The fact a large company does it doesn't make it any less stupid.  And you
think a large company could afford their own mailserver rather than making their
people use Gmail (now wrap your head around the concept of "confidential mail
anywhere *near* a Google-owned server"... ;)

To pick up on a part of the sig that Nick didn't rip into publicly:

> "and delete it from your system"

Presumably, Tremaine, in his self-claimed role as "Security Consultant"
*and* "Paranoia for hire", realizes that it quite likely sat on my site's main
mail server for anywhere from several seconds to several hours (in fact, there
are probably copies on *3* different servers in our mail cluster) - and that
until some *other* piece of mail happens to land on those same blocks of storage,
the text is quite easy to recover by any decent computer forensics practitioner.

On the other hand, actually going in and overwriting the affected block(s) is
quite challenging, especially when it's a 10 terabyte mailstore handling
several million messages a day for 100K users.  We'll be happy to do it - *IF*
Tremaine's company is willing to indemnify us for the downtime.

So there's 2 possible outcomes here:

1) The request has zero legal standing, and Tremaine's company is relying on
the kindness of strangers rather than using PGP or S/MIME to actually secure
their mail.  This sort of thing is usually called "lack of due diligence",
and I don't think any company wants to be flaunting it.

2) The request *does* have legal standing - in which case Tremaine's company
may indeed have some liability to pick up any and all associated costs.

Particularly interesting is the legal question of what happens when a
"please delete all copies" request is attached to something that's sent to
a company that is required to retain copies of *everything* for regulatory
compliance (as is true for some financial-sector companies).....

Content of type "application/pgp-signature" skipped

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