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Comment by pksadiq | Hacker News Reader

> And if you forget your password, or lose your hardware login keys, you'll have to jump through more hoops than ever to regain access ...

'Advanced Protection'?

In any case, if passwords can be reset and if USB keys can be changed, there is always a flaw... No matter what Google say.

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Don't know why this is being downvoted. If humans at Google can help recover the account, then it is potentially susceptible to social engineering. There's no way around that.

Because most people don’t consider ability to recover to be a “flaw”. The idea that Google is fucking up by not permanently locking someone out is absurd. There is no technical way for Google to even implement this. Someone at Google with sufficient access could always go poke the DB directly to change a locked-out user’s password hash and replace whatever hypothetical keys are in play. The most Google could do would be to force a purge/loss of any current user data encrypted at rest. This would of course not prevent a successful attacker from sending or receiving new emails.

I think that is the point, a Googler who is moonlighting for spooks in any country can spy on their behalf. In other words, people are cautiously pointing out it is not “only someone with the key” who can gain access to your emails.

I get that, but an account “reset” is always possible. Even if Google encrypted all of your mail and other content with a key you exclusively control, it would always be possible to simply drop the encrypted data, update all keys/passwords, and regain access to any incoming email. This is a smaller attack surface but still significant.

It’s also not actually possible to be an email provider and have no access to read plaintext and the point of send and receive. It can be encrypted at rest but you have to allow read for transmit which means a Googler working for the “spooks” could simply intercept there instead of at rest.

Well, you should be able to encrypt the subject/body of the email without encrypting the headers, so the mail vendor never sees the content of the email, only the to/from addresses and such. But that encryption has to happen in the browser/application. ie Mailvelope plugin for Chrome and others like it. and I think there is an android mail client that will also do pgp/gpg encryption/decryption.

Sure. You could absolutely have an entirely different protocol that doesn't work with all the existing email clients/services out there. It's certainly been done multiple times. Obviously it's not caught on, though, because compatibility is sort of a big deal.

I agree with your point. I also feel people think this is a panacea. The reality is this will just move the attack vector from phishing or key logging to an HID server feature in RAT software.

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