Hackers
exploited connected "smart" devices for massive cyberattack to disrupt major websites across
U.S. Private security group says Russia was behind John Podesta’s
email hack, email has proven to be an
embarrassment of ways to conveniently communicate with one another. Let’s analyze
the basic mystery buried in the emails: Why were all these people discussing so
much over email in the first place? The answer, of course, is that email is as
tempting as it is inescapable, for Mrs. Clinton as well as for the rest of us.
More than 50 years after its birth, email exerts an
uncanny hold on all of our internal affairs.
The
sudden exposure of the Clinton campaign email cache is perhaps the ultimate
evidence that we have all overcommitted to email — we have put too much in it,
expected too much from it, and now, finally, we are seeing the spectacular
signs of its impending destruction.
Email is
simply not up to the rigors of modern political and business life. It lulls us
into a sense of unguarded security that it never delivers. It entices us to
spill our darkest secrets, and then makes those secrets available to any
halfway decent hacker. There are several alternatives that could take its
place, without the same pitfalls, and the Clinton cache shows why we would be
wise to adopt one of them.
What about iMessage?
Let’s
pour one out for email, which has had quite a run and move on to something else.
Picture yourself, the Clinton campaign uses iMessage to convey news, to set out
tactics and strategy, to theorize, to push back, to gossip. It is used in place
of phone calls and face-to-face meetings; it is used as a daily calendar and a
collaborative whiteboard. Having a single place to discuss everything makes
teams more efficient.
Millions
and millions of people use iMessage every day. But how many people know exactly
what’s going on behind the scenes, or what happens to a message once you send
it?
To over
simplify it: imagine you have a mail box. This box has two keys. One key lets
you drop mail into the mail slot, and one key lets you take mail out. The input
key and the pickup key are entirely different; one can never be used to replace
the other. You can give away a million copies of your input key, and no one
could use it to do anything but put mail in. Unless they find a copy of your
pickup key or find a weakness in the way your mailbox was designed, your
message is safe.
This is
the thinking behind iMessage and public-key cryptography. Your “public key” is
like the mail slot key. You can share it with the world, and anyone can encrypt
messages to send to you. But the public key only works in one direction. Once a
message is encrypted, that public key can’t be used to decrypt it, or reverse
the encryption. Once encrypted, your private key (the mail pickup key) is the
only way to restore the message to its original readable form.
How iMessage works?
When a
user first enables iMessage, your device creates two sets of private and public
keys: one set for encrypting data, and one set for signing data (verify that
the encrypted text has not been modified after it was sent to the server. If
these two things ever do not match up, red flags start going off.)
Your
public keys are sent to Apple’s servers. Your private keys are stored on your
device. Apple never sees your private keys.
When someone
starts an iMessage conversation with you, they fetch your public key(s) from
Apple’s servers. Before that message leaves the sender’s device, it’s encrypted
into something that only your device knows how to decrypt.
Apple
quietly released a document in May 2016 that breaks it all
down.
Now you
can select a shared file created by Ohanae (.oha) from Dropbox from within
iMessage, and share your work in-line while you are chatting with teammates.
While
the Apple iMessage provides enterprise-grade security for content at rest,
those protections stop the moment files are shared, emailed, or downloaded from
the iMessage. That’s where Ohanae steps
in to protect your files anywhere they travel, giving you full visibility,
control, and assisting your compliance with mandatory government regulations.
Ohanae
alleviates data-sovereignty concerns by making it easier to encrypt data and
control the encryption. Eventually,
everyone will come to their senses and realize that the real solution for data
sovereignty is encryption, not building data centers in various countries.
Download
a copy of the Ohanae Technical Overview here: Ohanae for Salesforce on AppExchange
