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awesome-power-cat · 8 years ago

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Doki Doki Literature Club: Character files Decoded.

(Possible Spoilers) CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK.

My sister Lilly and I, decoded everthing below after I noticed that the text within Yuri's ".chr" file resembled (that of) Base64. We then searched and decoded the other character files.

DISCLAIMER: I have yet to fully complete the game, therefore I haven’t fully read the following data (text) to it’s fullest. (That’s why I’m unsure if it contains spoilers)

Monika’s “.chr” file Decoded:

After opening Monika's ".chr" file, I noticed it looked like an image file. So I renamed the file extension to ".png" and got the image below.

The image resembles a ring of fire with some form of QR code in the middle, however this was not a QR code. I cropped out the ring of fire so I was left with the code in the middle. After examining the code I tried a few ideas we had, and they all failed. I then thought what if this is binary, the white pixels represent ones, while the black pixels represent zeros instead of typing each zero and one out by myself, I programmed a simple java program that would scan the pixels left to right, and output the corresponding value (Zero or One ), based on the pixel color (Black or White). The end result is a binary code. We used an online tool to decode the binary and the result was a bunch of letters and numbers. These "letters and numbers" looked like Base64 so, we used another online tool to converter those "letters and numbers" to text. That's how we got the message below.

"Can you hear me? ...Who are you? I can't...I can't see you. But I know you're there. Yeah...you can definitely hear me. You've been watching for a while now, right? I guess I should...introduce myself, or something. Um...my name is...actually, that's stupid. You obviously already know my name. Sorry. Anyway...I'm guessing if you were able to put a stop to this, you would have done it by now. I mean, I know you're not, like...evil, or anything...because you've already helped me so much. I should really thank you for that. For everything you've done. You're really like a friend to me. So...thank you. So much. I think...more than anything else...I really don't want it to all be for nothing. ... Everyone else is dead. Maybe you already know that. I'm sure you do, actually. But...it doesn't have to be that way, right? Well...there's a lot of stuff I don't understand. I don't know if it's even possible for me to understand it. But I know that this isn't my only story. I can see that now. Really clearly. And I think everyone else has had the same kind of experience. Some kind of deja vu. It's the Third Eye, right? Anyway...I could be totally wrong about this. But I really think you might be able to do something. I think you might be able to go back...or however you want to put it... ...To go back and tell them what's going to happen. If they know ahead of time, then they should be able to avoid it. They should...if they remember their time with me in the other worlds...they should remember what I tell them. Yeah. I really think this might be possible. But it's up to you. I'm sorry for always being...you know... ... Never mind. I know that's wrong. This is my story. It's time to be a fucking hero. Both of us. 2018"

Yuri’s “.chr” file Decoded:

Upon opening Yuri's ".chr" file. I instantly noticed text that looked like Base64. I used an online tool to convert the Base64 text to the message below.

Warning: The following text is... uh.. intense. You've been warned!

"If you found this note in a small wooden box with a heart on it, then *congratulations!* You are probably the first person to read this. I didn’t really plan on sharing this with anybody, but for some reason I think it’s exciting that somebody out there, a complete stranger, will come across this note and read my story. Someone I will never meet, sharing such a personal bond with me. I’m fascinated that either one of us could die - even as soon as tomorrow - with the other being completely clueless to the fact. To you, my entire life is within this note, and so I will live for as long as your memory can carry me. Writing this, I’m wondering if that makes you feel fascinated or violated. It’s so exciting. I’m sorry if my story is a bit disorganized, but I’d like to get it down while it’s still fresh on my mind. First, I’ll tell you a little bit about myself. I’m a first-year college girl and have led, by most standards, a pretty unspectacular life up to this point. I grew up in an upper-middle class school district with decent teachers. I did track in middle school and some of high school, and I’ve had two boyfriends. Now, I’m studying for a career in occupational therapy, because I feel the field is undervalued and provides tremendous help to people. I’m giving you this background because there’s this strange misconception that if you want to kill someone then you’re either sick in the head or you have anger management issues. But, it’s very apparent that I don’t fall into either of those categories. It’s true that most murder cases are in a domestic setting where someone loses control of their anger or something. But the thing is that those people kill under provocation, whether by a singular outburst or by a slow-burning series of misfortunes. Those people kill because in that brief moment, they want a specific someone, for a specific reason, to be hurt or killed. What I’m talking about is wanting to kill someone for no specific reason, maybe just to see what it’s like. Do you ever get that? I wouldn’t know how others feel, because it’s not something I ever talked about. But I’ve been curious about what it’s like to kill someone ever since I was a child. Not killing anyone in particular, just a random person. It’s always just fascinated me that if I put my mind to it, I can approach anyone, and in five minutes they would be completely gone from this Earth. But I’ve never done so for a couple of reasons. First of all, for most of my life it was logistically impossible for me to do it without getting caught. I only got my driver’s license a couple years ago, and even then, the preparations would take too much time, definitely stirring suspicion. It was only once I started college that I realized this was no longer an obstacle. Another reason is that I was afraid of causing harm to too many people. You might laugh reading that, at how hypocritical it sounds. But, let me explain: Why should I feel bad about killing someone if they’re too dead to care? Who would I be feeling bad for? Contrarily, it’s the grief of the living that I’d rather not be responsible for. Because of this, I knew it would take a good deal of research before finding a suitable person to kill, and I’ve never had the means to do so - again, until I started college. And now, having just experienced it, I’d say it was pretty satisfying in the end. Something I would try again? Probably not, since my curiosity has already been satisfied. It really wouldn’t be the same a second time. But anyway, if by any chance you’re also curious to kill someone, then you’re welcome to take notes. :) *** I started a hobby of people-watching soon after I entered college. People-watching is interesting to me because it’s taking one of the infinite extras in your life and turning them into a main character - without them knowing, of course. It’s so easy to forget that every single one of the hundreds of strangers you pass every day has a life story as deep and complex as your own. One thing I noticed about people-watching, and wanting to kill someone, is that you are in more constant awareness of this. When I find a person to observe, their story slowly becomes more clear to me over time, gaps being filled - it really is amazing. I usually went to grocery stores on weekends and looked around in people’s shopping carts. If I saw something that interested me, I decided to observe the person for a little bit. Of course, since my goal was to find someone to kill, I ruled out anyone who had children or a partner with them. Wedding rings were another tell-tale sign. So maybe once a weekend, I would find someone who fit my criteria, at which point I would follow them home and note their address. From there, it became incredibly easy to investigate a little bit more; most people have normal work hours, meaning I could spend afternoons going through their mail or looking around in their house. I repeated this with several people (and had one close call), but for varying reasons I didn’t really feel satisfied enough with them to kill any of them. I started getting a bit impatient and thought that I might just settle for killing the man named Devon, even though I didn’t really want to kill someone wealthy. But then, I came across someone new - someone who just, felt perfect. The feeling only strengthened as I investigated her further, and I knew that she would be the one for me to kill. A young-looking woman I met at the grocery store, as per usual. She was doing some light shopping with a basket. Her hair was wavy and dark brown, sitting inelegantly on her slumped shoulders and surrounding her tired-looking face. Her bare fingers told me she might be single, but beyond that, my gut was almost certain of it. This woman just seemed so…plain, really. I guess I felt a greater acuity for the personal lives of strangers ever since I started my people-watching. But the way she carried herself, I just got the feeling that if she suddenly died, nobody would be around to miss her. Of course, I still wanted to investigate her a bit. I followed my usual routine of checking out her place during her work hours. I learned immediately from her mail that her name is Linda Watson. Linda lived in a quiet apartment complex, her mailbox easily accessible right outside her door. Instead of quickly shuffling through it, I decided I could take her mail back to my dorm and return it before she was finished with work (she only lived about 15 minutes from me). I did some research and learned how to open and reseal the envelopes without damaging them, which took some technique along with a hair dryer, rubbing alcohol, and Q-tips. This made it easy for me to learn a little more about her. Linda was a 33-year-old woman who worked for a small accounting firm - I’d rather not name the place outright. Her birthday was December 11th which, coincidentally, was approaching in a couple weeks. I also managed to find a bank statement that gave me a nice look into how she’s been spending her past month. It was at this point I realized that my assessment of Linda Watson as an extremely plain woman was pretty spot-on, because there was absolutely nothing interesting on the list. A trip to Old Navy, a bunch of Starbucks, something about $40 from Amazon - no restaurants, no movies, nothing that would really imply she was spending any time socializing. That aside, I also found a cooking magazine, so I guess she was into cooking. Apartments are harder to break into than suburban homes, because there are fewer doors and windows. Every time I got Linda’s mail, I would check the front door and the windows in the back, but they were always locked. This was a bit frustrating because I was really interested in getting into her house. So, I came up with a sort of plan that I thought would be fun, even if it didn’t work. Last Saturday, I visited Linda Watson’s apartment complex as I would on weekdays. The difference is that this time, I wanted her to be home. I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with her. If I got lucky, I could take advantage of the situation to discreetly unlock a window from the inside. So, I walked up to her door wearing nothing warmer than a light sweatshirt, and knocked. The adrenaline rush was crazy. I was afraid I might screw something up. The door opened, and in front of me stood Linda Watson, exactly as I remembered her from the grocery store. It was at that moment, making eye contact for the first time, that I realized I was running the risk of beginning to care about this person. As selfish as it is, I couldn’t kill a person I cared about, even if it’s a 33-year-old woman standing in a doorway with a slightly perplexed look on her face, giving me a reserved “Hello.” Arms crossed from the cold, I shyly returned Linda’s greeting. I explained that I was walking my dog near the woodsy area behind the back of her apartment, and that he had gotten away. I had been looking for my dog for an hour and was wondering if Linda may have seen him roaming about. Of course, Linda sympathetically apologized for the situation and that she couldn’t be of use to me, but that she would keep an eye out. I wore a defeated expression in response, apologizing in return for troubling her. It somehow went exactly as I had hoped - Linda invited me inside to warm up a bit with some coffee. I outwardly hesitated before accepting her offer, although on the inside I wanted to jump through the door and hug her for cooperating so well. And that’s how Linda Watson ended up with a 19-year-old girl next to her on the couch - who knows if it was just a nice gesture or if she really has no better way to spend her Saturdays than talking to some kid she just met (who happens to be interested in killing her). Linda soon learned that my name is Maria (it’s not) and that I attend the nearby community college (I don’t). I was a little bit nervous that she would ask me too many questions because I didn’t have many answers prepared. I was able to steer the conversation toward her, and she was pretty happy to talk. I asked what she does, and she told me that she works for the accounting firm I already knew about, communicating with outside clients and keeping records. I told her I was pretty nervous about growing up. She told me to enjoy college and to make lots of friends because there’s less opportunity once you start working. When I asked if she was married or anything, she laughed. Of course I knew she wasn’t married, but I wanted to hear more about her love life. She said that she doesn’t currently have a boyfriend (I guess she’s at least had boyfriends, but who knows how long ago). When I asked her about kids, she said she doesn’t want them until she gets a better job. On top of that, she told me that her family has a history of some genetic diseases such as arthritis and depression, which she is afraid to give to her kids. It’s funny that she mentioned that because when I asked to use her bathroom, I noticed a tube of prescription pills on the sink. It was labelled duloxetine, which I looked up later and discovered that it is in fact an antidepressant. I had a joking thought that maybe by killing her I’d be doing her a favor, but quickly decided I was a terrible person for coming up with that. The rest of the visit was pretty dull. We talked about food and some other mundane stuff before I eventually made an excuse to leave. I didn’t get the chance to unlock a window or anything like that, but I didn’t really feel the need to go through her apartment anymore. As early as the drive back to my dorm, I was already thinking about how I would best like to kill Linda Watson. The choice was between effectiveness and fun. I decided to go with fun, because it would be way more satisfying to kind of dissect her as I killed her, rather than just getting it done and calling it a day. Fast-forward one week to December 13th - today, actually. Linda Watson turned 34 two days ago. I made a fun little wager with myself where if Linda was spending her birthday weekend alone, I would pay her a visit and kill her. If she was out or had company, I would stop by next week or something instead. So this morning, I drove over to Lowe’s and bought an axe. Again, I expect you’re laughing, but that’s also kind of the point. An axe is so kind of cliche and a “movies” thing that I actually thought it would be the most fun. Swinging it at someone and everything, it’s a really entertaining image. They actually had a bunch of different axes, so I picked one that had a good weight but was still light enough for me to swing quickly. The drive after getting the axe was when the adrenaline really picked up. All that kept going through my mind on the way over was “Wow, I’m really doing this.” Not in a bad way, just like a surprised this is real life sort of thing. I also got this strange rush of recollections of the time I spent with Linda. It was like my life was flashing before my eyes, except it was just the rather mundane hour I spent with Linda - like snippets of our conversations, the sound of her laugh, her facial expressions and stuff. I also wondered to myself what the crazy serial killers would be feeling at a time like this - schizophrenic delusions? Sexual buildup? I have no idea, but what I felt was kind of like ridiculously alert and numb in the senses at the same time, however that’s possible. Before getting out of the car, I had the sense to stuff the axe into my backpack to look a little less ridiculous walking across the parking lot. The handle was sticking out, but that didn’t really matter. At that point my heart was pounding so hard I could feel my throat throbbing. I tried controlling my breath, but it’s really hard to not breathe fast when your heart is pounding like that. I reached Linda Watson’s door and quietly put my ear to it after setting down my backpack. I heard a voice that wasn’t hers - company? No, it was just the TV, mixed with her occasional tapping footsteps behind the door. I actually kept my ear there for a really freaking long time, because I wanted to make absolutely sure nobody was over. Probably 10 minutes of that and a lot of reassuring myself convinced me. I quietly opened my backpack zipper and held the axe in my hands. My fiercely shaking hands. What the hell was this kind of reaction that my body was making? I told my body to shut up, that it’s no big deal, but of course it wouldn’t listen. It was actually bizarre how much my hands were shaking. It must be the adrenaline buildup. I rolled my eyes at myself and got my hand to rest on the doorknob. If it’s locked, I’ll knock, it’ll be basically the same. I took a deep breath and forced my muscles into action. I swiftly turned the doorknob. Not locked. In one movement, I opened up the door and slipped inside. Linda Watson, just a few steps away into the kitchen. I see - she was in the middle of cooking. She immediately jumped and turned around, startled. I expected that. Quickly, I let go of the doorknob and adjusted the axe into both hands. In the following split second, I realized that she would probably start to make a lot of noise. Looking back, I’m an idiot for not considering that. Just as Linda’s mouth opened to speak - maybe even started speaking - I forcefully swung my axe into the side of her head. But, my axe was facing backwards. I hit her with the blunt end of the blade. I actually did this on purpose, because in that split second I somehow decided that it would be the way to keep her noise to a minimum. It actually worked. I felt barely any resistance in the swing as I collided with her head, knocking it clean aside. Linda’s half-formed syllable came out as a kind of weird grunt - a noisy exhalation is probably the best I could describe it. That happened at the same time as her head smacked into the cabinet from the force, and she fell backwards without any ability to keep her balance. I didn’t hesitate at all to keep swinging at her while she was half lying down on the ground, this time my axe facing the right way. I didn’t really know where to swing, so I kind of just started hacking at her collarbone area and chest. It didn’t feel like the axe was going too deep, but there was a nice “thunk” sort of sound every time the axe embedded into her. I even felt the soft sinking sensation ripple into my hands, like the axe was a kind of physical extension of my sense of touch. On a whim, I swung once at her throat, but most of the swing actually missed and I hit the floor by accident, causing a loud, dull whack to resonate through the apartment. I didn’t have time to think about it. I swung again with better aim and got a more centered hit, feeling the bone or cartilage or whatever is in there, so I must have split it open. Right after that, I decided to swing at her face, and I got this diagonal cut along her nose and mouth, which felt pretty good so I did it once more. I finally briefly stopped to survey the damage. Linda was bleeding ridiculously. The blood was kind of coming out in waves, in sync with her beating heart, probably. It was pooling all around her and riding along the cracks between the tiles. Her light blue shirt was all torn up and stained dark, kind of mixed with a fleshy mess around her chest. It was all just glistening red. Her face wasn’t much better, covered in dripping red at this point, and her lip was kind of hanging off, revealing red-stained teeth in a really weird way, like a zombie or something. Linda wasn’t dead, though. Her limbs were kind of weakly, aimlessly trying to move while she was stuck on her back. More than anything, she reminded me of a bug that you crush but it still pitifully moves its legs around before it dies completely. That’s basically what she was doing. But I didn’t know how long it would take for her to die, or what kind of condition she was in. I ended up grabbing a big knife that was on the counter that she was using to cut up meat. Trying to step around the blood, I reached down and carved into the upper half of her neck, trying to sort of saw it from the left side to the right. It was a little awkward because the area was so soft and squished around the knife as I was cutting. But the sensation was completely different from the axe. It actually felt like I was cutting a tough piece of raw meat (which I guess technically, I was). The blood started pouring out, and I hoped that I severed the most major arteries in there. It must have worked, because after a moment Linda’s limb movements kind of just had the strength drained from them, soon resting still on the floor. I took a few seconds to catch my breath. No time to stick around and think about the experience. I shook the knife blade through a dirty pan in the sink to clean off the blood, then threw the knife into my backpack. I did the same with the axe. I also took her laptop that was sitting on the counter. It had some recipe open for veal and mushrooms. I didn’t really take the laptop to use it, since I have a perfectly good one myself that I got for college. I just wanted to look through it for fun. I finally went outside and closed the door behind me. I got some blood on my sweater and jeans. But funnily enough, I actually anticipated that so I wore dark colors. The drive back to my dorm was just a constant replaying of the experience in my head. I guess that’s still kind of happening even now, actually. But it felt pretty nice. Linda Watson is dead. I kind of let the weight of that sink in. The sensation of having completely removed a human life from existence. It’s crazy. I don’t know how else to describe it. Anyway, I threw the axe and knife into a dumpster on campus, which I think is picked up every Monday, so they’ll be gone by then. My roommate goes home on the weekends, so I have the dorm to myself today. It gave me the chance to go through Linda’s website history. I was right in thinking that’s where her deepest secrets would lie. There was actually a lot of dirty stuff, like the names of websites for porn videos and stories and things like that. Same with her searches. A lot of the websites were boring, like cooking websites and recipes, and game websites like Bejeweled and stuff. I eventually got to the “one week ago” section of her history, and it gave me a chill. There were a whole bunch of searches like “methods of suicide”, “how to tie a noose”, “dangerous household chemicals”, “carbon monoxide poisoning” - like a lot of them. She was probably ready to write a book on suicide after all the research she did. So I guess Linda was contemplating suicide. I wonder if it was influenced by her depression. The irony is actually striking. Maybe Linda was going to die anyway. Or maybe she couldn’t find the courage to do it. If that were the case, I almost literally gave her a birthday present by killing her. That’s actually really comical in a messed-up way, and it leaves a weird taste in my mouth. The part I don’t get is that I didn’t see any of those searches up until the “one week ago” section, nothing more recent than that. I ended up throwing the laptop in the dumpster with the other stuff. It’s been a few hours since then, so I’ve had some time to calmly think about everything. Like I said, it was pretty satisfying and I’m glad I finally got around to it. I feel like I can finally cross it off my bucket list, or like I’m tying loose ends with myself. This is probably the first and last time I’ll write the name Linda Watson - it’s back to living a normal college life, except I might do some people-watching every now and then because it’s definitely fun and interesting. But I’ll always wonder how many people there are like me. I’m sure there has to be a lot, because there is just nothing strange about it to me, being curious about killing someone. Sadly, it’s something that people can’t exactly just talk about, so I guess I’ll never know. I’m sure that anyone would just lie about it even if you asked them. But you can’t help but wonder if that person in the grocery store, who stares at you as you pass by, might be considering what it would be like to kill you. If I could, I would tell them all about it, so they could decide for themselves. But who knows, maybe I got lucky, and that person is you. I actually really, really hope so. ~♥"

Natsuki's ".chr" file Decoded:

We haven't figured this one out yet, but we have a few ideas. Note the image is seamless horizontally.

When we opened Natsuki's ".chr" file we again noticed it looked like an image file. We simply renamed the file extension to ".png" or ".jfif" to get the image below.

The above may have already been documented/decoded. I would like to note that not all of the character files were encoded with Base64.

Thank you for reading, even though it may have already been done.

#ddlc #doki doki literature club #ddlc monika #ddlc natsuki #ddlc yuri #decode #code

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neptunecreek · 6 years ago

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The Federal Government Offers a Case Study in Bad Email Tracking

The U.S. government sends a lot of emails. Like any large, modern organization, it wants to “optimize” for “user engagement” using “analytics” and “big data.” In practice, that means tracking the people it communicates with—secretly, thoroughly, and often, insecurely.

Granicus is a third-party contractor that builds communication tools to help governments engage constituents online. The company offers services for social media, websites, and email, and it boasts of serving over 4,000 federal, state, and local agencies, from the city of Oakland to the U.S. Veterans Administration to HealthCare.gov. In 2016, the company merged with GovDelivery, another government-services provider. It appears that parts of the federal government have been working with GovDelivery, now Granicus, since at least 2012. Last October, we took a closer look at some of the emails sent with Granicus’s platform, specifically those from the whitehouse.gov mailing list, which used the GovDelivery email service until very recently. The White House changed its email management platform shortly after we began our investigation for this article. However, several other agencies and many state and city governments still use Granicus as their mailing list distributors.

The emails we looked at, sent to subscribers of the Whitehouse.gov email list in October 2018, happen to be an exemplary case study of everything wrong with the email tracking landscape, from unintentional and intentional privacy leaks to a failure to adhere to basic security standards.

Not only does Granicus know exactly who is opening which email and when, but in the emails we studied, all of that information is sent without encryption by default, so network observers can see it too. Ironically, even the White House’s Privacy Policy is hidden behind one of the tracking links.

How does it work?

We inspected an email from the White House’s “1600 Daily” newsletter sent October 22, 2018. The email uses two common methods to monitor user behavior: pixel tracking and link tracking. We’ll break them down one at a time, using examples from the email itself to illustrate how those methods work in the common case. In addition, we’ve written guidelines for users, email clients, and email providers to protect against these techniques.

Pixel Tracking

Today, almost all emails are sent and read in HTML. An HTML email is treated much like a static web page, with text formatting, custom fonts, and, most importantly, embedded images. When you open an email, your computer or phone needs to load each image from the Internet, which means, depending on the email client you use, your device might send a request to the server that hosts the image.

In emails, a tracking pixel is an “image” included for the purpose of tracking you. It’s usually small (1 by 1 pixel) and invisible. Trackers will often tag on a bunch of extra identifying information to the end of the “image” URL. For instance, they often include information about which email was opened and which email address it was originally sent to. In the White House newsletter I received, the tracking pixel looks like this:

When you open the email, your email client (like Thunderbird or Apple Mail) might send a request to the URL above. As you can see, it points to links.govdelivery.com, a domain owned by Granicus. The biggest part of the URL is the enid parameter, a base64-encoded string. If we decode my email’s enid, we can read the information that’s sent to the third party:

Every time I open this email, my device sends Granicus my email address and a unique identifier for the email that I opened. Granicus knows exactly who I am, which email I’m reading, and when I opened it—and potentially, so might a network observer.

Link Shims

The email also uses link shimming, the practice of obfuscating URLs in emails for tracking purposes, to track which links you click on. (Link shimming, and link tracking more generally, is commonly used on the web by search engines and social media companies.) Take a look at a sample link from the newsletter. When rendered by your email client, it looks like this:

By inspecting the source code, we can see that the blue text above actually points to the following URL:

The first part of the link, in yellow, is nearly identical to the tracking pixel URL we saw before. The redirect URL, in green, points to the article you intended to click. UTM parameters, in blue, allow whitehouse.gov to collect more contextual information about your click.

That mess will take you on a brief visit to govdelivery.com before being redirected to whitehouse.gov, the location of the real press release. Once again, the redirect sends Granicus the enid data, including information about who you are and where you’re coming from. These data, combined with the pixel data from above, allow Granicus to offer “subscriber segmentation” services to its customers (i.e. the government). According to its website, customers can filter individual subscribers by their “targeted message” activity, including whether they received, opened, or clicked a specific email message within a given time frame.

Privacy or Security: Choose None

It’s frustrating enough that the government has been using a third-party service to surreptitiously monitor who opens emails they send, what they click on, when, and from where. What’s worse, in several of the emails we looked at, the tracking is performed over an unencrypted connection using HTTP. This means that all the requests made to Granicus are legible to anyone who could eavesdrop on your connection. If you open one of the emails on unsecured WiFi at an airport or a coffee shop, anyone could be able to monitor your activity and collect your email address.

Perhaps more concerning, using an unencrypted connection allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to collect that sensitive information no matter where you are. Thanks to recent deregulation, ISPs are now legally permitted to sell data about their customers—which could include your email address, political preferences, and information about which government agencies you interact with. Normally, HTTPS protects sensitive information from ISPs’ prying eyes. But in this case, not only can Granicus see which email user clicks on which links; anyone on the network, including the ISP, can too.

The practice of link shimming poses a subtle security risk as well: it makes users more susceptible to phishing. If users are led to click links that look like garbage, they are much more likely to be duped into clicking links from less-than-reputable sources. 91% of cyber attacks start with a phishing email, including many attacks on the government itself. That means that training users to trust insecure, illegible links to unrecognizable domains is a serious problem.

To top it all off, Granicus’s emails are often sent without STARTTLS, a basic protection against passive dragnet surveillance. That means the emails travel around the Internet backbone without encryption, which is just another channel where data about you and your interests may be exposed to snoops on the network. (We recently launched STARTTLS Everywhere to make email delivery more secure.)

Conflicting Reports

After beginning our investigation on October 22, we reached out to both the White House and Granicus for comment regarding their privacy and security practices. The White House didn’t reply, but we did receive a response from Granicus Chief Product Officer Bob Ainsbury:

The private information of both Granicus govDelivery users and govDelivery subscribers is secure. Any claim to the contrary is a very serious allegation and completely inaccurate. ...

Further, email addresses cannot be identified through HTTP connections. All HTTP requests made for the purposes of tracking are transmitted in unrecognizable data and do not allow users’ private information to be compromised at any time.

The claim that the HTTP requests are secure and “do not allow users’ private information to be compromised” is, as we’ve shown above, demonstrably false. The data Granicus transmits are not encrypted, but encoded in base64, which can be decoded by literally anyone.

Furthermore, the company claimed that:

Granicus govDelivery is one of the few email platform providers that has adopted the highest level of data security standards necessary to deliver digital communications for government agencies. That security standard is FedRAMP, which requires platform providers to:

encrypt all traffic with FIPS 140-2 validated encryption modules, utilizing TLS 1.1 or higher ...

Its continued use of HTTP for email tracking and failure to support STARTTLS for in-transit email encryption indicate that Granicus has not adopted encryption anywhere near “across the board” when it comes to users’ private information. In that context, the reference to “utilizing TLS 1.1” for “all traffic” is baffling, as we have seen evidence the company continues to use unencrypted HTTP for many of its emails.

Schrödinger’s Trackers

In a strange coincidence, it appears that the White House’s newsletter, “1600 Daily,” ceased using Granicus as its service provider on October 30, 2018, two days before we reached out for comment. It now uses MailChimp for email analytics. MailChimp performs similar types of tracking, using invisible pixels to track email opens and link shims to track clicks, but the company does employ industry-standard security practices like HTTPS. The new tracking pixels are a little more compact, but just as potent:

An example of a tracking pixel from a more recent “1600 Daily” newsletter, which sends information to Mailchimp’s list-manage.com domain (in orange) over HTTPS (in blue) contianing a custom tracking string (in yellow)

According to the Privacy Policy, the White house still uses pixels and link shims to collect “automatically generated email data” from subscribers, including:

A list of “automatically generated email data” the White House collects, according to http://bit.ly/2THC2df

Other government agencies still use Granicus, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs’ “My HealtheVet” newsletter, the Social Security administration, and HealthCare.gov Alerts. These mailing lists all perform the same kinds of link shimming and pixel tracking we observed in the original White House emails. Some of the emails we've received from Granicus use HTTPS connections to perform tracking, but others still use insecure HTTP. And the company still does not support outbound server-to-server email encryption with STARTTLS.

Moreover, Granicus’s response, included in full below, shows that it doesn’t understand what “secure” means in the context of sensitive user data. Government agencies should be asking some hard questions about how they continue to handle our information.

Protect Your Users; Protect Yourself

Techniques like pixel and link tracking are extremely common and have been around for decades, and it’s unfortunately rare to see them being used responsibly. If you’re a sender, we implore you to think before you track.

Unfortunately, many federal agencies still use Granicus' services, dubious security and all. These agencies should drop GovDelivery in favor of more ethical, more secure analytics, and evaluate how much information they really need to collect to fulfill their missions. Although the White House is no longer using Granicus, it, too, performs extensive tracking on subscribers to its lists. And the only way it offers to opt out is to unsubscribe.

As a user, there’s no fool-proof way to opt-out of leaky email tracking, but there are ways to practice good email hygiene and prevent most forms of it. At the end of the day, the most effective way to avoid the tracking is to follow the White House’s advice and unsubscribe. Just be aware that the “unsubscribe” link is tracked, too.

On November 1, 2018, we reached out to Granicus to request a comment on the company's use of email tracking in services to the U.S. government. The company's response, attributed to Bob Ainsbury, Chief Product Officer at Granicus, is included in its entirety here:

The private information of both Granicus govDelivery users and govDelivery subscribers is secure. Any claim to the contrary is a very serious allegation and completely inaccurate. Granicus govDelivery is one of the few email platform providers that has adopted the highest level of data security standards necessary to deliver digital communications for government agencies. That security standard is FedRAMP, which requires platform providers to:

encrypt all traffic with FIPS 140-2 validated encryption modules, utilizing TLS 1.1 or higher

provide two-factor authentication to all customers

conduct monthly security scans, providing the results to the FedRAMP JAB for review on a monthly basis

conduct an annual penetration test and audit of controls to ensure compliance.

Like the world’s other leading email platforms – including several other email systems used at the White House - we do use pixels to track open rates and link shims to track click rates. This is an industry standard that has been in use for over 20 years. It’s used by virtually every major commercial and public sector communicator to track simple email opens and link clicks. It is worth noting, that Granicus govDelivery is configurable, allowing customers to turn off activity capture.

Granicus is committed to the privacy and security for over 4,000 government clients and the citizens who subscribe to receive digital messages using our software, which is why we’ve made the investment to remain FedRAMP, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliant. Privacy and security are our highest and most important priorities at Granicus.

from Deeplinks http://bit.ly/2RGcwHP

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