E2EMail research project has left the nest

Posted by KB Sriram, Eduardo Vela Nava, and Stephan Somogyi, Security and Privacy Engineering

Whether they’re concerned about insider risks, compelled data disclosure demands, or other perceived dangers, some people prudently use end-to-end email encryption to limit the scope of systems they have to trust. The best-known method, PGP, has long been available in command-line form, as a plug-in for IMAP-based email clients, and it clumsily interoperates with Gmail by cut-and-paste. All these scenarios have demonstrated over 25 years that it’s too hard to use. Chromebook users also have never had a good solution; choosing between strong crypto and a strong endpoint device is unsatisfactory.

These are some of the reasons we’ve continued working on the End-To-End research effort. One of the things we’ve done over the past year is add the resulting E2EMail code to GitHub: E2EMail is not a Google product, it’s now a fully community-driven open source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the industry have already contributed.

E2EMail offers one approach to integrating OpenPGP into Gmail via a Chrome Extension, with improved usability, and while carefully keeping all cleartext of the message body exclusively on the client. E2EMail is built on a proven, open source Javascript crypto library developed at Google.

E2EMail in its current incarnation uses a bare-bones central keyserver for testing, but the recent Key Transparency announcement is crucial to its further evolution. Key discovery and distribution lie at the heart of the usability challenges that OpenPGP implementations have faced. Key Transparency delivers a solid, scalable, and thus practical solution, replacing the problematic web-of-trust model traditionally used with PGP.

We look forward to working alongside the community to integrate E2EMail with the Key Transparency server, and beyond. If you’re interested in delving deeper, check out the e2email-org/e2email repository on GitHub.