Instead of, being in possession of user’s data and sometimes providing data to governments sometimes appealing.
As an example, can you implement a VPN service such that you don’t hold IP or DNS records at all (ie, not both simultaneously)?
I believe it has them already? There's no reason they can't put an inline transparent Tor bridge in front of their mail infra to anonymise all inbound traffic i.e. TCP/IP->Tor Node->Tor Node->ProtonMail so it could only ever capture IPs coming from it's own Tor-node if compelled to do so. However it would still have an ability to log on the TCP/IP transparent endpoint. This risk could be mitigated by using their onion address [2] and using someone else's tor nodes.
The data-at-rest already is zero-access[1]. There is encryption of data-in-transit but no zero-knowledge network layer.. maybe they could work on this since they have support for tor [2]?
[1] https://protonmail.com/blog/zero-access-encryption/
[2] https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...
But PM needs to lead the tech world in privacy technologies instead of spending efforts in justifying why it should be trusted.
Another thing, data at rest is not quite end to end encrypted. If an email comes from a non-PM account to PM account, it’s received in plaintext and then encrypted. Thus PM has that data.
Apple's private relay feature is good but they also suffer from recent trust issues.
Regarding the last point, yes if you send PM-Non-PM there will be plaintext email sitting in the Non-PM's inbox/sent items. But you do have the ability to send non-PM recipients password protected email where they have to read the email over at PM in their browser. Only a link to it sent by email and they need to know the password to access it.
Obviously it depends on your threat model, but if you're doing anything that sensitive you should probably not be using email as there's no way of truly making it secure to use.
Some people will be using protonmail just because they don't want their provider scanning their emails or targeting them with ads. PM do offer a free tier so they're not a bad choice for that use case.
That’s because, PM servers receive plaintext data. Then, they encrypt it. But there is no proof that plaintext is not logged.
It’s same as in VPN: trust us, we don’t log your data. No, invest in zero knowledge technologies please.
I can point out to many other possibilities for improvements in their email and VPN service. But they should lead us not other way around.
Ah yes this is a good point. The only way to be sure is to client side end-to-end encrypt your data before you send it to any upstream mail service. E.g. using S/MIME or PGP. At this point you can then use any free mail service as you now “only” need to worry about leaked mail header meta-data.
A bad actor could place a proxy upstream, the problem has nothing to do with protonmail.
What protonmail tries to solve is your mail being encrypted at rest. It succeeds there.
Statements about "but they can read it" or "they can capture everything before..." is a separate issue, one of trust and different methods of state interference.
Firstly it wasn’t me that made that observation but..
I don’t think fairness comes into it. If you’re concerned with that risk, use something else. All security comes with a set of trade offs and knowing which risks you’re protected from and which you are not, helps you make that choice.
ProtonMail are also very good at publishing their threat model, architecture and technical implementation as well as large parts being open-source.
> What protonmail tries to solve is your mail being encrypted at rest.
Actually it does better than that. It uses message-level encryption using PGP keys to provide that encryption at rest. Which in theory gives them zero access. Lots of services which tout encryption at rest are actually encrypting the block storage which mitigates against fewer and less likely threats.
The only reasonable way(i can think of) to make it a bit harder for this to happen would be to have a second(and maybe a 3rd)unrelated entity/company in an adversarial country that you can use as a relay. In this case use it as a VPN service to access the e-mail on Proton servers.
Anonimity is inconvenient these days... and next to impossible if any govt agency is out to get you. The only way you can make it hard(er) is to spread over multiple jurisdiction and rotate accounts/discard them after a few uses. A system similar to one time pads of sorts combined with PGP.
Switzerland has no "gag orders", that's a exclusive US-open-democracy-thing ;-)
In UK we have something like that(can't remember the name of it though). The courts can forbid all parties involved to have any public discussions, They can ban topics from reaching the public through normal mass media means. To make it even worse, they can prevent individuals to do this sort of thing too. Prison time and/or fines if you don't comply. Democracy at it's finest.
Well there is no direct gag-thing (because it would undermine free speech) BUT it could be interpreted ~sometimes and in "theory" as "obstruction of a police investigation", so it's a case to case thing and not direct law.
Super-injunction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English_l...