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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

I can see all sorts of criticism leveled at ProtonMail, but this seems a bit disingenuous. They're trying something different than GPG, which had 20 years to prove itself and failed to gain any traction.

Sure, you have to trust their software, but is that fundamentally different than trusting the GPG software, or did you do a full audit of that?

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GPG, when used correctly, is theoretically secure. Protonmail, like Lavabit, is insecure by design. They make no mention of this; they claim the inability to read your messages, which is trivially false.

GPG has a track record of being secure against many adversaries, including the NSA. It's used by most Linux distributions for package signing, so you probably already depend on it -- even if indirectly.

I don't expect GPG to be completely secure. But it's not based on deception.

The trivial attack is based on them sending you compromised code, right? Because that seems to comparable to an attack on GPG where their downloads are compromised.

I get that there's a difference in degree, i. e. GPG binaries being checked against hashes and having a long track record as an organization, but is that fundamentally different?

I could see ProtonMail evolving to, for example, using a browser extension that allows you to use a known-good version of the crypto library, and informing you of changes.

Point being: it isn't perfect and I'd prefer something based on standards. But e-mail encryption has failed, even though it is often more personal than websites where TLS has been successful. ProtonMail is a legitimate attempt in a space that seems to need a new approach.

I think it's different, because Protonmail can target you, individually, at any time. Like, for example, upon receipt of a NSL.

GPG is used asynchronously. In many cases, everyone would need to be compromised to go after one person. That raises the chance of discovery.

A browser extension is a fantastically better idea. Google previously prototyped most of the work for this: https://github.com/google/end-to-end

The difference is that, any time you check your email, a basic TLS MitM could exfiltrate your entire inbox without your or ProtonMail's knowledge — exactly the same threat model as Gmail or any other webmail provider.

Further to that, I'd trust Google's infrastructure to withstand compromise much more than I'd trust a datacenter run by a small company that I know much less about. (Tinfoil hat: sure, I have to assume that the NSA has a copy of my Gmail inbox, but god knows who else may have owned ProtonMail.)

When's the last time you downloaded GPG? For me: years ago.

How often do you download ProtonMail's Javascript code? Several times per second, as long as you're using it.

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