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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Cybersecurity
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The only issue with it is that it allows attackers to determine that a given person has an account on a site. Which if the site is pornhub or similar, could be embarrassing (try sign up to pornhub with your local politicians email).
The way around this is to do something like:
"We need to verify your email is correct, by sending you a code"
This doesnt tell the attacker anything, but if there already is an account, the email itself can just say "You already have an account, here are the links to reset and login".
Side note: encryption is reversible, hashing is not. Passwords should be stored hashed, but email only need to be encrypted (or plaintext, but less ideal). And because its reversible, they can get the original value back. They cannot reverse a hash to get the password back, so if a site ever tells you info about your password, that is a sign they might not be hashing it correctly.
Given many people use the same password.on many sites, it can allow the bad actor to "guess" their password based on data from other leaks.
Then whatever is inside that account may be accessible, such as financial info. Even protected data like cc info might show the last 4 digits, which can be used when talking to an agent to verify identity etc.
This is the way.
If you're going to encrypt the email, you need to be careful about how you use and store the key. Doing any operation with the email will be a lot more expensive, and you'll lose the benefits if an attacker that can access the db also has access to the key.
I personally don't think it's worth it and would prefer to spend more time hardening the app, especially if the email is displayed on the site (i.e. it gets decrypted frequently).
It probably makes sense when there's sensitive data (bank, medical care, etc), but for most things it's overkill.