My dad always insists I send him secure information via fax instead of email, because he thinks faxing is more secure. Is this backwards?
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M$4 Answers
"Most U.S. long distance telephone and fax communications goes via the air waves -- and any signals in the air can be and frequently are intercepted."
Email can be sent encrypted with many readily-available clients, so it might be the better choice.
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M$Darron
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M$Ask your father to learn how to use GPG/PGP, which will keep your communications secure for the near future. Just make sure that he isn't lazy and uses a weak passphrase, otherwise all this effort is wasted. GPG/PGP with a strong passphrase is pretty much secure from everyone in the world except maybe NSA, and even if they have been able to brute force it, they won't be able to do this in real time for a while.
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M$
It isn't more secure. All it takes to intercept a fax is tap the line.
That is great insight but looking back to the original question you see that it was whether or not faxing was more or less secure than email. Now someone of that thinking will not be tech savvy enough to employ top level security protocals for email or internet data transfer. Nothing is truly secure unless you live inside a farraday cage and are completely disconnected from the grid. Seriously I am sure that nobody will the skills to intercept the father's data could care less about the information and since modern encryption is not completely user friendly yet he should continue to fax if it makes him feel safer.
Email in not inherently secure, and you would have to take some serious steps to make it remotely as secure as faxing.
This site has useful info on email security issues:
http://www.itsecurity.com/features/25-common-email-security-mistakes-022807/
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15. Sending personal and financial information via email.
Banks and online stores provide, almost without exception, a secured section on their website where you can input your personal and financial information. They do this precisely because email, no matter how well protected, is more easily hacked than well secured sites....
This same rule of avoiding placing financial information in emails to online businesses also holds true for personal emails. If, for example, you need to give your credit card information to your college student child, it is far more secure to do so over the phone than via email.
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Apart from the risks of interception, there are non-obvious complications, like a copy of your confidential info is likely left sitting on your PC, or on a mail server. And unless you are careful to get rid of it, if anyone gets access to those, they'll have your info.
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M$
