Presented at
HOPE X (2014),
July 18, 2014, 9 p.m.
(60 minutes)
The Dark Mail Initiative represents a collaborative effort to bring about a new generation of standards designed to provide automatic end-to-end encryption for email. The presentation will cover the "dmail" architecture, with a focus on the key elements of the design that allow it to overcome some of the most problematic traditional usability issues, all the while preserving a world-class guarantee of security. Dark Mail stands in a unique position against most competing technologies because of its commitment to complete transparency, both in the proposed open dmail specifications and in the open source implementation that is targeted for release later this year. The talk will also include a short discussion of the Lavabit legal saga that precipitated the dmail development effort, the design goals of the project, and an explanation of why these goals are important, both to the computer security community and to society at large. The discussion will conclude with a short update on the status of the reference implementation development effort.
Presenters:
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Stephen Watt
Stephen Watt is the lead developer of Dark Mail's reference implementation. He is best known for his 2009 conviction for the TJ Maxx data breach. For merely writing a piece of software that was used by others to sniff customer data, he was given a two year federal prison sentence and ordered to pay $171.5 million in restitution. Because he refused to cooperate at all with the federal investigation into himself and his friends, he emerged from prison with his pride intact. Since his 2011 release, Watt has spoken at several security conferences about his extraordinary legal experience. By joining the Dark Mail initiative, he hopes to continue a lifelong pattern of developing massively disruptive software with complete indifference to getting rich from it.
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Ladar Levison
Ladar Levison is the founder of Lavabit, LLC. Founded in 2004 (and originally named Nerdshack), Lavabit served as a place for free private and secure email accounts. By August of 2013, Lavabit had grown to over 410,000 users, with more than 10,000 paid subscribers. He created Lavabit because he believes that privacy is a fundamental, necessary right for a functioning, fair, and free democracy. On August 8, 2013, he made the bold decision to shut down his business after "refusing to become complicit in crimes against the American people." Presently, he is serving as the project manager and lead architect for the Dark Mail Initiative, while continuing to vigorously advocate for the privacy and free speech rights of all Americans.
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