Towards More Secure Emailing

Email has been declared dead several times but refuses to die. It remains the backbone of the web and remains the largest federated open social network to date. However, most people and organisations rely on a few big email operators which fund their operations through advertisements and user tracking. But is it neccessary to hand off email messaging operations to large operators? Is dealing with unsolicited email (SPAM) still too maintenance intensive to deploy it by yourself? Is handling secret keys to unlock encrypted mails still a nightmare? Are there somewhat secure email hosting solutions?

In recent years there have been renewed efforts to renovate the state of world wide email infrastructure with initiatives such as the “Dark Mail Alliance”, “FreedomBox”, “Mailpile”, “Mail-in-a-box” and the “LEAP encryption access project”. Some of them are using Python to provide security to users both from criminal, corporate and state level attacks and could use help from experienced python programmers.

The talk concludes with highlighting current ongoing research (Panoramix and NEXTLEAP) funded by the European Union over the next couple years. They try to ease and automate key management and provide “encryption by default” among other goals. After this talk you’ll end up having a better understanding of how you can use existing technologies for yourself or your organisation and how you can possibly help to improve them and make life for users and activists safer world-wide.