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Comment by wakamoleguy | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody use an extension like this for their email? I have always been turned off by horror stories of Chrome extensions being bought out and injected with malware[1]. I would love to have my email encrypted easily, but not at the cost of opening a new attack vector that could bypass that encryption. What open source extensions are there that can be installed locally?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/malwa...

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All chrome extensions can be copied and installed locally...Assuming the source code doesn't protect against something like this. You could take this extension, copy the obfuscated source, then load it locally to avoid auto updating in the future.

Chrome generally doesn't like apps that load their bg page scripts via web requests to help increase security. So it's likely that they aren't doing this.

FlowCrypt dev here. The sources are available at https://github.com/FlowCrypt . You can just install it from the sources, but you'll lose the security updates.

What do you mean by "extensions are there that can be installed locally"? Depends on what mail client you are using. Thunderbird can do this. I use mu with emacs mu4e and it just works. You need gpg installed, that's all.

FlowCrypt operates as a Chrome extension, so I assumed that the email client in question was the Gmail web client (or Inbox by Gmail). One can install extensions from the local filesystem rather than the Chrome store, which removes the threat of autoupdating into adware or malware. However, I don't know of any open source crypto extensions built to be installed that way. FlowCrypt might work, but the licensing terms don't seem amenable to that approach.

FlowCrypt dev here. You're free to get the source code from https://github.com/FlowCrypt and load the extension that way. If you plan to also edit the code, just cross-check to stay within the bounds bounds of https://github.com/FlowCrypt/flowcrypt-browser/blob/master/L...

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