Given Proton Mail’s fashiness coming out of the woodwork, lots of folks are looking at switching away — but they have a reasonable concern: Aren’t Proton Mail’s privacy features special, different from a normal mail provider?

Paul Cantrell

A very good point from @august here:
https://macaw.social/@august/113839019107602863

Proton Mail’s core product isn’t really technology; it’s •trust•.

And with a few rash words, their CEO has severely damaged that core product.

Yes, it was only a few words — but what else do we have to go on? If they’re doing something shady behind closed doors, we won't know about it until it’s far, far too late. The best we can do is just assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Shawn Wilsher

@inthehands I didn't think this is quite correct. They don't have an SMTP server that they host. You can run a bridge locally that let's you use a standard client, but they do not host an SMTP (or IMAP) server.

scrottie (he/him/they)

@inthehands Pardon the footnote, and in no way to meant to defend ProtonMail (I did a "fuck ProtonMail" post the other day), but LTS/SSL is great for protecting you from random baddies but not powerful state actors. We believe the NSA has the power to crack the popular recommended ECDSA curves used, and VeriSign has just signed certs for the FBI, which is a massive backdoor. I don't know if GPG/PGP's encryption has held up, but that was what we were using (and some people still do) for E2E email

Paul Cantrell

@sdwilsh
Ah, that is useful, thank you! My understanding had been that the local bridge was optional, but indeed, looks like you •have• to use their mobile app.

scrottie (he/him/they)

@inthehands That doesn't give you privacy on who you are talking to (and also doesn't guard against disclosure after recipients have decrypted email from you) and the whole identity thing is bad as much as some people like key singing parties. But it isn't a black box, and doesn't attempt to do dodgy key escrow like stuff that ProtonMail does. So maybe I'll go put my public key in my profile or something again. "Move discussion elsewhere" is a good idea but it's also often observed that...

Chris Mackay 🇨🇦

@inthehands @august As Alex Lindsay pointed out in the latest episode of TWiT (https://overcast.fm/+AAZarRN184U) — in the context of Sonos — trust arrives on foot, but leaves by horse.

Paul Cantrell

@tantramar @august
That’s a great quote.

scrottie (he/him/they)

@inthehands with things like Signal, the platform you're running it on may be the weakest link. Broadcom etc broadband processors are considered back doored even if you install a 3rd party Android fork and trust the 3rd party app store's apk.

scrottie (he/him/they)

@inthehands Someone suggested in response to my thread that this might be badjacketing of ProtonMail to shepherd people to less secure things; that makes me wonder if ProtoMail itself wasn't an attack to steer people away from GPG.

Sophie Schmieg

@inthehands @august don't forget that in the case of using a web interface, you have no guarantees that the JavaScript sent to you is the same JavaScript that was sent to someone else, or even the same that was sent to you yesterday. So if you want to target an individual, you can just ship a special version of the code that includes a line saying "and now send the private key unencrypted to the NSA", and you're unlikely to ever notice.

With downloaded apps such as signal (even signal desktop), this attack is far more difficult to pull off (but not mitigated fully if you want updates regularly)

Paul Cantrell

@scrottie
Bottom line is (1) you •have• to trust someone somewhere if you want secure communication, and (2) there’s basically no upper limit to the amount of paranoia about technology that can find technical justification if you’re willing to speculate.

I don’t •necessarily• assume, for example, that Broadcomm is backdoored. Passive void “considered” doing a lot of work there; considered by whom? But if I were, say, doing human rights work targeted by a hostile state actor…then yeah, I would have to start working under the assumption that Broadcomm could be compromised. No upper limit.

Nazo

@Tutanota @heymarkreeves @inthehands I have one: what protections do you offer to your users against "Five Eyes"?

ShadSterling

@inthehands the basic problem with that kind of “encrypted” “email” is that it’s only one of those at a time; it’s either encrypted end-to-end and delivered some other way, or it’s encrypted per-hop and delivered as email. None of those services do both at once. It should be possible to do both at once using GPG or S/MIME, but for that to actually work every provider would have to handle it well, and AKAIK none do.

It still baffles me that banks haven’t been pushing this

mcc

@inthehands I just wish they could put E2E textareas in the browser. It would be hard to do right and even harder to clearly present UI for, but it could fundamentally Work js crypto can't

bob

@mcc @inthehands the issue here is that if the provider can push new javascript code then they can be compelled to push javascript code that leaks secrets (that's what happened to hushmail). you'd need some way to pin the html and javascript code and not allow it to update without user consent

Helge Heß

@inthehands Email has e2ee since essentially forever. The claim it not being designed for this is a little misleading.
Is it supported well? No! Why? Because the vendors either want your data or promote a different platform for secure communication.

mcc

@bob @inthehands The proposal in the previous post is that browsers allow for textarea elements whose contents are managed by the browser and inaccessible to JavaScript except to extract an encrypted version on teardown.

Paul Cantrell

@helge
Agreeing in general spirit, is there an e2ee layer for email that’s part of the protocols, and not a bolt-on like GPG?

Paul Cantrell

@mcc @bob
Right. I think Bob’s point is that the server still has to •serve• such textareas?

But maybe the proposal is that they would be visibly indicated in the browser somehow, in a way pages can't spoof…??

Fluchtkapsel

@inthehands That made me ask myself: If some smart people were to design a secure, E2E supporting, distributed mail system, how would that look? Maybe some people already have and nobody noticed?