Abstract
As demonstrated by the revelations of Edward Snowden on the extent of pervasive surveillance, one pressing danger is in the vast predominance of unencrypted messages, due to the influence of the centralizing silos such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. We present the threat model and architectural design of the LEAP platform and client applications, which currently provisions opportunistic email encryption combined with a VPN tunnel and cross-device synchronization.
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Notes
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To try, follow instructions on http://demo.bitmask.net.
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Such as Thunderbird, Evolution, or Outlook.
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Note that parts of Sect. 3 are modified versions of material available on the LEAP wiki at http://leap.se/en/docs.
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The Android version tends to lag behind development compared to the Linux version due to the design having to be re-coded in Java.
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See work by Debian on reproducible builds that LEAP is applying to its code: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds.
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Details at https://leap.se/nicknym.
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The source code for Pixelated is available here: https://github.com/pixelated-project/.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are supported by NEXTLEAP (EU H2020 ref: 688722) and the Open Technology Fund.
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Sparrow, E., Halpin, H., Kaneko, K., Pollan, R. (2016). LEAP: A Next-Generation Client VPN and Encrypted Email Provider. In: Foresti, S., Persiano, G. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10052. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48965-0_11
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