Improving maps in Nigeria — all the way from Kreuzberg. This was made possible on August 14th in our Berlin-located Posteo Lab, where a new Missing Maps Group hosted their first German mapathon. With guidance from Missing Maps, volunteers improve online maps at mapathons by plotting villages and streets on satellite imagery. At the events organised by Missing Maps, OpenStreetMaps of crisis regions are improved upon. This can, for example, aide relief organisations in planning their operations more effectively.

Missing Maps is a humanitarian project that was founded in November 2014 by the American and British Red Cross, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and Doctors Without Borders. Since then, Missing Maps has regularly organised mapathons in various European countries. About 17 interested parties participated in the first German event at Posteo Lab. #more#
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The focus of the event in Berlin was satellite imagery of Niger State in western Nigeria. Currently there are active teams from medical relief organisations that need more precise maps of the region for their work.

The mapathon began with a detailed introduction by Marcel Werdier from the organisation Missing Maps. He clearly explained in a presentation how mapping works. He also demonstrated the required programs and outlined the most important rules for plotting maps to the volunteers.

After the presentation, the volunteers could immediately apply their newly gained knowledge and began plotting maps on the laptops they had brought with them. They analysed satellite imagery and plotted streets and villages with just a few clicks. The team from Missing Maps helped the participants and answered all questions that came up.

At the end, there was a final presentation where the volunteers could see the progress of their collective efforts made on the maps. The knowledge they gained from this experience can continue to be applied when mapping in private.

The team from Missing Maps was very satisfied with their premiere mapathon in Germany. There are plans to organise more evenings like this one in Berlin.

Background Information
Because we want to strengthen social engagement, we regularly make Posteo Lab available to charitable associations and organisations free of charge. It’s important to us that the events hosted at Posteo match our values in sustainability, technology, democracy, open source, internet politics, IT security and privacy. If you’re interested in hosting an event here, send us an inquiry at veranstaltungen@posteo.de.

Posteo is financed 100 percent by user fees. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our user for making our social engagement possible.

Dear Posteo customers and interested parties,

In the name of transparency we have updated our donations page, where we document the organisations that we financially supported during the previous year (2017).

During last year, Posteo donated a total of 34,600.00 EUR. Of this, 33,022.05 EUR constituted voluntary donations by Posteo. The remaining 1,577.95 EUR came from users that donated remaining credit when terminating their account.
In comparison with the previous year, we were able to increase our donations in 2017 by 5,000 EUR.

It is important to us that we encourage social engagement and take responsibility as a company.
Because of this, we donate to selected charitable organisations in the areas of environment and climate protection, internet politics and freedom of opinion, as well as refugee aid. #more#

Posteo donated to the following organisations in 2017:

BUND:
Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) is one of the largest German environmental organisations. Throughout Germany there are more than 2,000 voluntary BUND groups engaged with regional environmental topics. BUND is also engaged with climate protection, ecological agriculture and protection of threatened species, forests and water. BUND is the German member of the international environmental network, “Friends of the Earth”.

German Red Cross (DRK):
The German Red Cross (DRK) is one of the largest German help organisations. The DRK is active worldwide and can be present anywhere in the world in co-operation with partner organisations. In the face of the threat of climate change, the DRK has realised multiple projects along with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to support people internationally who suffer from the effects of climate change. Our donations go towards a project in the Amazon in Peru, where 1.3 million people are acutely threatened by the increase in extreme weather events due to climate change. The donations are used to set up houses with secure architecture on raised platforms. In addition, blankets and hygiene kits are distributed and a health service set up.

ECCHR:
The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is engaged with legal measure for human rights. The ECCHR lawyers’ aim is to hold state and non-state actors legally accountable for grave human rights abuses. Among others, the ECCHR was founded in 2007 by human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, who represents whistleblower Edward Snowden in Germany.

netzpolitik.org:
netzpolitik.org is a journalistic platform for digital freedom rights and presents the most important debates and developments on the topic of the internet. The platform documents how politics is changing the internet and society through regulation and the continued expansion of surveillance laws. With its work, netzpolitik.org wants to encourage people to become engaged for their digital freedom rights and an open society.

Reporters Without Borders:
Reporters Without Borders engages itself worldwide for freedom of the press and freedom of information. The organisation documents violations against freedom of the press and supports journalists that are in danger. Reporters Without Borders combats censorship and restrictive media laws.

UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe:
UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe is the German offshoot of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It ensures the survival of refugees in acute crisis situations with life-saving emergency measures. UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe thus provides for sufficient supplies of water, food and medicines in refugee camps or regions that are hard to access, for example.

In addition to these donations, Posteo also sponsored taz.panterstiftung.

Posteo does business sustainably and is independent. Our service is financed entirely by our customers’ account fees. There are no investors or advertising partners at Posteo.
You are what makes our involvement in these projects possible. We thank you very much for helping to make a difference.

Best regards,
The Posteo team

Update on May 15, 15:30:

We have an update for all users of Mailvelope:
The open source encryption plug-in Mailvelope is not affected by the critical Efail vulnerabilities and can continue to be used. Mailvelope communicated this information earlier this afternoon. With Mailvelope, PGP can be used in Posteo’s webmailer. We are in contact with the Mailvelope developer, Thomas Oberndörfer.
Nevertheless, he announced that they will improve the plug-in’s handling of HTML emails in regards to privacy for example by making the loading of external content such as images optional.
He recommends that users update to today’s release (Version 2.2.2) as minor problems have been fixed.

May 14, 18:40:

Dear Posteo users,

Today, the media has reported vulnerabilities within the end-to-end encryption standards, PGP and S/MIME.

We only became aware of the investigation today. Because of this, we cannot make any final assessments about the publication yet. We’re currently examining the document for you and are getting assessments from security experts. Furthermore, we have made contact with developers from current encryption software.

We’d like to respond to some questions we’ve received and also provide some initial tips for users of PGP and S/MIME. We will update this blog entry with any news.

Summary:
1.) If you do not use end-to-end encryption with PGP or S/MIME then you are not affected by this issue.
2.) If you use PGP or S/MIME, disable HTML rendering and external content from being loaded. (We’ve provided instructions on how to do this at the end of this blog entry)
3.) All participants of an encrypted communication must take the measures described in point 2.) of this summary.

Is email encryption unsafe now?

No, as a generalisation this is not correct as there is no “singular” form of email encryption. In general, emails nowadays are simultaneously secured through various security and encryption technologies. For example, end-to-end encryption does not protect the entire email communication even if many people believe it does. It only protects the content data.
The email’s metadata and subject are protected by the providers’ transport route encryption.

In reality, the security of an email correspondence depends on the combination of various technologies. When one encryption technology is viewed separately, it doesn’t say much about the actual security of a specific email communication in practice.

Attacks are only possible under strict conditions

The creators of this investigation presume in their scenario that an attacker already has access to an encrypted communication. However, nowadays email providers utilise security technologies that effectively prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and unauthorised access to encrypted communication.

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) also describes the conditions for an attack (German text):
“An attacker has to have access to the transport route, the mail server or the email account of the recipient to exploit the vulnerabilities.”

The fact is that providers today are constantly improving secure transport routes, mail servers and accounts. We always utilise state of the art technology. Users should also secure their end devices as well.
Here’s an example of how we secure transport routes. In 2014, we were the first provider to implement the innovative technology DANE that eliminates the current vulnerabilities in transport route encryption (TLS). A combination of end-to-end encryption with a DANE-based transport route encryption results in a very high level of protection.
Tip: In Posteo’s webmailer you are notified before sending an encrypted email whether it will be protected with DANE or not .

We protect email servers with numerous technologies and an infrastructure that particularly protects our internal network and customers’ mailboxes consistently from external access. You can protect your account with a strong password. We encrypt every access to your account with the latest technologies. You can achieve an even higher level of protection if you activate two-factor authentication with additional email account protection. By activating the TLS-sending guarantee, you prevent your emails from being transferred to another email server without transport route encryption.

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) describes another condition for an attack:
“Additionally the recipient would have to allow active content, or in other words, the rendering of HTML code and in particular the loading of external content.”

Because of this, users of end-to-end encryption should immediately review and adjust their settings for loading HTML code and external content accordingly. This should avert any acute dangers.

Guide for disabling external content from being loaded or HTML rendering

Thunderbird:
Disable HTML rendering:
1. Click on the sandwich-button in the top right corner of Thunderbird.
2. Click on “View”.
3. Under “Message Body As” select the menu item “Plain Text”.
Disable external content:
1. Click on the sandwich-button in the top right corner of Thunder and open “Options” / “Preferences”.
2. Open the menu item “Privacy”.
3. Under the category “Mail Content”, remove the tickmark “Allow remote content in messages”.

Apple Mail:
1. From the menu bar click on “Mail” and open “Preferences”.
2. Open the menu item “Viewing”.
3. Remove the tickmark from “Load remote content in messages”.

iOS:
1. Open “Settings”.
2. Touch “Mail”.
3. In the category “Messages”, deactivate the switch next to “Load Remote Images”.

Outlook:
1. Click on “File” and on the side menu on “Options”.
2. Open the menu item “Trust Center” and click on “Trust Center Settings”.
3. Click on “Email Security”.
4. In the section “Read as Plain Text” place a tickmark next to “Read all standard mail in plain text” and also by “Read all digitally signed mail in plain text”.
5. Confirm the changes with a click on “Ok”.

Best Regards,
The Posteo Team

Dear Posteo users,
dear Thunderbird users and interested parties,

We have a security notice for everyone who uses Thunderbird or the encryption add-on Enigmail.

It is our goal to make popular open-source solutions more secure. Hence, last autumn we entered into a cooperation with Mozilla’s SOS Fund to commission a security audit of Thunderbird with Enigmail. This was the first security audit for Enigmail ever.

The goal of the audit was to identify vulnerabilities in the tested software and to make the software safer consistently. The current audit showed multiple vulnerabilities. The developers of Enigmail have already fixed all the problems that were discovered. Some of the security issues have already been fixed in Thunderbird, as well – but most improvements will only be available with future versions of Thunderbird. In addition to these vulnerabilities, there is a problem within the architecture of the Thunderbird add-on system.

All Thunderbird users with all providers are affected, including Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo.

We are asking all Thunderbird and Enigmail users to carefully read our security recommendations in this article. If you follow our security recommendations, you will already communicate more securely.
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24 days, 8 security researchers, 22 vulnerabilities

The thorough audit of Thunderbird and Enigmail in autumn 2017 was conducted by independent security researchers (Cure53). The audit was financed in equal parts by Posteo and the Mozilla SOS Fund. It took 24 days and a team of 8 researchers to carry out the project.
The test covered the fields “Incoming Emails with PGP Signature / PGP Encryption”, “Incoming html Emails”, “Key Generation & Crypto Setup”, “Calendar, RSS and other features with Rich-Text Usage” as well as “Default Settings”.

In total, 22 security relevant vulnerabilities have been discovered, of which 3 were classified as “critical” and 5 as “high”. The developers of Thunderbird and Enigmail were involved in the audit and were informed immediately after the security audit.

The security researchers summarize the conclusions in their report as follows:

“A detailed look at the implementations of both Thunderbird and Enigmail revealed a high prevalence of design flaws, security issues and bugs. (…) In short, secure communications may not be considered possible under the current design and setup of this compound.”

Among the critical issues regarding Enigmail was the fact that it was possible to fake signatures as well as identities. Furthermore, the encrypted communication of users can be intercepted by third parties and could be compromised further on under certain conditions.
The Enigmail developers have already fixed all identified vulnerabilities and provided a new Enigmail version (1.9.9). We would like to thank Enigmail for their work.
However, Enigmail relies on Thunderbird, which will receive many of the improvements only in future versions.

Thunderbird add-on architecture puts your data at risk

This spring, architectural vulnerabilities in Firefox were confirmed as part of a Posteo audit. We then presumed these architectural vulnerabilties could also be found in Thunderbird, which is confirmed by the current audit:

The add-on architecture of Thunderbird allows an attacker to obtain your email communication through compromised add-ons. The add-ons are insufficiently separated and have access to the user content in Thunderbird. This includes end-to-end encrypted communication: Even a user’s private PGP key can fall into the hands of an attacker. Here, even Enigmail cannot improve the situation. It is even possible for an attacker to use compromised Thunderbird add-ons to gain access to parts of your device and your sensitive data.

The report advises caution:

“Assuming that a vulnerable or rogue extension is installed, an attacker acquires multiple ways of getting access to private key material and other sensitive data. (…) Henceforth, users are asked to be aware that extensions in Thunderbird are as powerful as executables, which means that they should be treated with adequate caution and care.”

Firefox has rebuilt the architecture in the current version 57. For Thunderbird it is not foreseeable when the add-on architecture will be changed.

RSS feeds can act as spies

The audit discovered profound security problems in connection with RSS feeds, which are expected to be fixed entirely in Thunderbird version 59. Due to security reasons, the actual attack will not be described in this post. The use of RSS feeds in Thunderbird can endanger and reveal your entire communication and other sensitive data.

Please consider the following security recommendations:

For all Thunderbird users:

• Update Thunderbird to the latest versions as soon as they are available. The new versions will remove several of the vulnerabilities that were revealed in this audit.
• Use Thunderbird preferably without or at least with verified add-ons until the architecture of Thunderbird has been rebuilt.
• Do not use RSS feeds in Thunderbird for now. There are critical security problems threatening your entire communication.
• Do not accidentally install add-ons through phishing, since rogue add-ons can be used to attack you.

If you follow these security recommendations, your communication will be notedly more secure.

For Enigmail users:

• Update Enigmail immediately to the new version 1.9.9. This update removes all vulnerabilities identified in this audit.
• Update Thunderbird to the latest versions as soon as they are available. The new versions will remove several of the vulnerabilities that were revealed in this audit.
• Do not install any other add-on except for Enigmail until the add-on architecture of Thunderbird has been rebuilt.
• Do not use RSS feeds in Thunderbird for now. There are critical security problems threatening your entire communication.
• Do not accidentally install add-ons through phishing, since rogue add-ons can be used to attack you.

If you follow these security recommendations, your communication is notedly more secure.

Audit report to be published after vulnerabilities have been fixed
Due to security considerations we will publish the report after all identified vulnerabilities have been fixed, since the report describes the researchers successful attacks in detail. However, the report was made available to the participating developers, Posteo and Mozilla.

Posteo supports open source software
Posteo supports open source software with transparent code for security reasons. We are convinced that transparent code is essential for the security and democratic control of the internet. At any time, independent experts can identify vulnerabilities and backdoors, making software more secure step-by-step. With intransparent code there is a need to trust each provider’s or developer’s security statements, which are not reviewable by the public. For us, this is not an option.

Open source projects need your support

- Donate to the Thunderbird project to support further development of Thunderbird: https://donate.mozilla.org/en/thunderbird/
- Donate to the Enigmail developers to support further development of Enigmail: https://www.enigmail.net/index.php/en/home/donations

After the audit: what the participants say

Enigmail developer Patrick Brunschwig extends his thanks:

“Enigmail is one of the most widely used tools for OpenPGP email encryption. Yet it took 16(!) years of development until the first security audit was performed. It was more than overdue, and I would like to thank Posteo for taking the initiative and co-financing an audit report together with the Mozilla Foundation. Not very surprising for such an old project, the audit report revealed a number of important issues that were addressed now.”

Mozilla regards the audit as a success:

“Mozilla’s Secure Open Source Fund, a MOSS program, provides code-read security audits for key pieces of open source software. We are very pleased to have been able to collaborate with Posteo to audit one of the main software combinations used for secure email, and are glad that users’ data is safer and more secure as a result.”

Dr. Mario Heiderich from Cure53 hopes for a reopening of the bug bounty program of Thunderbird:

“In closing, once all relevant issues reported here by Cure53 have been fixed, it should be strongly considered to re-establish a bug bounty program for Thunderbird. This approach would help keeping the security level at an acceptable level instead of allowing it to deteriorate and move towards a stale state of datedness.”

Patrik Löhr from Posteo asks for changes in the add-on architecture of Thunderbird:

“We want to make open source software and end-to-end encryption more secure: security audits are the best way to achieve this aim.
It is a success that all discovered vulnerabilities in Enigmail have already been resolved.
The add-on architecture in Thunderbird, on the other hand, requires more work to achieve an up-to-date secure setup. Thunderbird is an essential tool for many people who work with email and communicate with end-to-end encryption. Therefore, the effort pays off.”

Best regards,

The Posteo team

Dear Posteo users and interested parties,

In the name of transparency we have now updated our donation page, where we document the organisations that we financially supported during the previous year (2016).

It is important to us to encourage social engagement and to take responsibility as a company. We therefore support selected charitable organisations in the areas of environment and climate protection, internet politics and freedom of opinion, as well as refugee aid.

During last year, Posteo donated a total of 29.600,00 EUR. Of this, 28.002,00 EUR constituted voluntary donations by Posteo. The remaining 1.598,00 EUR came from users’ remaining credit. #more#

Compared to the year before we were able to increase our donations by 5,250.00 EUR for 2016.

As per the previous year, recipients of Posteo donations included Reporters Without Borders, UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe, Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) and Netzpolitik.org.

A new addition is a German Red Cross project in the Amazon, where 1.3 million people are acutely threatened by the increase in extreme weather events due to climate change. The project sees houses set up on raised platforms with secure architecture. In addition, blankets and hygiene kits are distributed and a health service set up. The project sustainably contributes to ensuring the existence of people affected by climate change.

In addition, we support the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) since 2016. The ECCHR lawyers’ aim is to hold state and non-state actors legally accountable for grave human rights abuses. Among others, the ECCHR was founded in 2007 by human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, who represented whistleblower Edward Snowden in Germany.

Posteo does business sustainably and is independent. Our service is financed by our customers’ account fees alone. There are no investors or advertising partners at Posteo.

You are therefore what makes our engagement possible – you make a difference, for which we thank you very much.

All recipients of Posteo donations can be found on our donations page.

Best regards,

The Posteo team