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Comment by bitdizzy | Hacker News Reader

I use proton mail just for the privacy guarantees enforced by social pressure on their brand. They hold your PGP keys (you can't give them a subkey of your own private master key) so there's no reasonable security there. In general, I don't think PGP encrypted emails provide much security anyway. If I need to send a message securely, something like Signal provides better cryptographic properties like forward secrecy.

All I know is, I would hear about it very quickly as soon as Proton Mail is discovered to violate my privacy, and that's all I can expect of email. To be honest, the fact that their API is not open sourced and I have to use their web client or mediocre IMAP bridge would make me seek alternatives if I were to reconsider email providers. It would have to be one that has as strong of a privacy-conscious brand, or self-hosting.

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I avoid ProtonMail, and encourage others to do the same, because of the reasons you stated. They have all the keys. It's security theater, just like pre-2013 Lavabit used to be. Unlike pre-2013 Lavabit, the fact that they have the keys doesn't even result in usability benefits like, you know, being able to use plain old IMAP with my favorite email client.

ProtonMail has been dragging their feet for so long in the interoperability department, it almost feels like they're aiming for vendor lock-in. If they truly were serious about interoperability, they've had plenty of time to create an open standard around their protocol (like FastMail and post-2017 Lavabit has done), or release patches to make their protocol available in widely used open-source email clients like Thunderbird. Instead they've got that mediocre IMAP bridge you mentioned. No thanks. When I choose an email service I want to retain the ability to export all my data and leave on short notice, without having to depend on non-standard tools.

"I use proton mail just for the privacy guarantees enforced by social pressure on their brand."

There are no such guarantees. Social pressure on their brand did not stop Enron or Madoff from committing fraud. Nor did it stop millions of others from committing various crimes, atrocities, and other unethical acts throughout history.

In the realm of email providers, the case of Hushmail[1] serves as an instructive example.

Hushmail is an email provider that provides a service similar to ProtonMail, but:

"Developments in November 2007 led to doubts, amongst security-conscious users, about Hushmail's security, specifically, concern over a backdoor. The issue originated with the non-Java version of the Hush system. It performed the encrypt/decrypt steps on Hush's servers, and then used SSL to transmit the data to the user. The data is available as cleartext during this small window of time; the passphrase can be captured at this point, facilitating the decryption of all stored messages and future messages using this passphrase. Hushmail stated that the Java version is also vulnerable, in that they may be compelled to deliver a compromised java applet to a user."

and

"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of United States v. Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."

Incidentally, despite all this, and what you'd expect to be "damage to their brand", Hushmail is still around, and I'd expect many of their users have never even heard of any of this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...

To be clear, I am connected enough to security-conscious social media that I think I would hear about it if someone found it out. I agree with you that someone who isn't at least a little bit diligent would miss news like this.

Let me also reemphasize that I don't consider email to be a secure or confidential medium of communication at all, even with PGP. I only want that my inbox is not sold to advertisers and the security practices of my provider aren't utter garbage. Maybe the fact that they're in Switzerland helps me in some ways, but if I had a state adversary I wouldn't bet on it.

The problem is that ProtonMail could violate your privacy by sending you Javascript that gave them your keys and you'd never know about it.

Relying on hearing about compromises in the news only sort-of works when:

1 - such compromises are revealed

2 - they're big enough to make news in the first place

3 - your own data hasn't yet been stolen, so you have time to change services after you hear about the compromise

None of these is guaranteed to happen ever.

And even if you did hear about some compromise in the news, it could be far too late for you, as your data (the data ProtonMail is supposed to protect) could already be in somebody else's hands.

> The problem is that ProtonMail could violate your privacy by sending you Javascript that gave them your keys and you'd never know about it.

I think we don't agree on how proton mail works. As I understand it, they already have my keys. You can't even give them just a subkey, it only works if you upload a set of PGP keys including the master secret key. What is your understanding of how it works?

As for your other concerns, unless I am conversing only with myself, the attack vector for my data is the entire e-mail ecosystem. Even if I only talk to people who use encrypted email, they are also part of my threat model, even if I don't trust a provider with my keypair. e-mail is simply not secure. It wasn't meant to be secure; security cannot be bolted on top.

What is your threat model and how do other providers or self hosting achieve your desired level of security?

"As I understand it, they already have my keys."

From: https://protonmail.com/security-details

"ProtonMail's zero access architecture means that your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to."

That is a very interesting claim on their part considering that they hold the private PGP keys used by their service. I'll have to figure out what they mean by this.

Edit: Ok I see. They store the PGP keys encrypted with your password. Like you said, they could just as well inject javascript to phish your password from your session.

But this does seem to mean that if one uses their API directly it would be possible to securely use their service. Thanks for the heads up. There is a third party open source bridge that reverse engineers their API. I think I will look into it to see how authentication is done.

https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide

Depends on where you live and who is your potential adversary.

For someone from Belarus and opposing Lukashenko, ProtonMail is fairly secure service. For Edward Snowden, probably less so.

>... something like Signal provides better cryptographic properties like forward secrecy.

Forward secrecy only works up to the point your end point gets compromised and only for messages you have not kept. So for the vast majority of people it provides very little value.

It provides no protection against someone who breaks your encryption and something like the Signal Protocol's much greater complexity provides more opportunities to do that.

PGP isn't any better on the first point and on the second point, I would bet the money in my pocket that GPG (being the most dominant implementation of PGP) is far more complex and bug-ridden than Signal's cryptography or implementation are unsound.

GPG is an implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Signal Messenger is an implementation of the Signal Protocol quasi-standard. Comparing like to like, OpenPGP is much less complex than the Signal Protocol. GPG is much less complex than the Signal Messenger.

I'm a happy Protonmail user, but The lack of quality of their bridge and import/export tools will cost them quite a lot on the long term. It's a bit sad to see. The UX work is really lacking there. On the other hand their current web interface is quite fast and straightforward.

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