• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • lastweakness@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio
    1·
    7 months ago

    One key aspect that you seem to be missing is that Proton encrypts every mail, including those sent by or sent to unencrypted providers using your pgp key before storing them on the server. This isn’t a case scenario that can be handled without using a bridge. Thunderbird or any other mail client won’t know how to handle that.

    What you described only solves the end-to-end encryption portion of the problem Proton is trying to solve. Not zero access.

    Yes, mail headers are unencrypted. They never claim otherwise and neither did I. If it were encrypted, it wouldn’t be interoperable, which is something you want it to be as well right? I’ve always been talking about the mail content itself. Unencrypted mail headers don’t make it “not zero access”.

    I feel like you’re just not the target audience for Proton. I just use Proton because I’m fine with the web UI and Proton Unlimited is mostly good value for me. I do also pay for Purelymail as i have a few domains and they’ve been wonderful too.

  • lastweakness@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio
    1·
    7 months ago

    The bridge does the decryption using credentials you give it locally. Sorry for mentioning “auth”. I should have mentioned encryption instead.

    Regarding the rest, it comes down to the zero access mailbox encryption’s implementation details. In all described scenarios, you’re not really using your master password as the “key” for your mailbox. But in proton’s and similar services’ case like Tuta, this is true. Any “zero access” service provider offering IMAP access without a bridge is simply lying to you as IMAP (the protocol itself) requires server-side decryption of the content, even if SMTP doesn’t. (Btw, SMTP is really an artificial limitation. Just not IMAP. If they give you smtp access, it wouldn’t send encrypted mails unless specifically configured to do so but would otherwise be the same.)

    What you described is encryption at rest, but not zero access encryption (which is what Purelymail does btw).

    Whether all this is needed and all depends on your threat model. I think most tech-savvy folks would be happy with something like Purelymail or Migadu tbh…

  • lastweakness@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio
    1·
    7 months ago

    What Proton is doing to e-mail is about the same that WhatsApp, Messenger and others did to messaging - instead of just using an open protocol like XMPP they opted for their closed thing in order to lock people into their apps.

    PGP is not closed. What proton has done is make a really cool JS library for PGP as part of their Web UI (openpgpjs.org) which other projects, even those unrelated to Proton have used, like Mailvelope. They’re also pushing the PGP standard itself to support stuff like post-quantum encryption. So this is really odd to hear as Proton is, without a doubt, the most open and interoperable of all the properly encrypted providers.

    Lavabit

    With Lavabit, you were simply trusting them mostly blindly on their claims. Yeah it worked out that one time but could have gone very wrong.

    Yes, they have it because GDPR does require it.

    They’ve had it since far before GDPR took affect. They’ve also had bridge which has always allowed external backups and is in fact real time. They now also support forwarding mails, which should also suffice for your use case.

    Open sourcing the server software is desired ofc, but would it really mean a lot for security? Not really. All the relevant bits are already open source. And none of it is really non-standard. But i do still wish for that for the sake of transparency. And yeah i wish they would move away from this almost source-available model.

    Regarding SMTP, yeah i agree. But they do provide that through bridge and also for business users based on a per-request basis.

    There are definitely a few artificial limitations and stuff that really pisses me off, like the limit on aliases in custom domains and SMTP for normal paid users, but a lot of the talk I’m hearing on lemmy about proton is just FUD.