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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

> so for a period of time, people working for Proton were employed by Tesonet, since Proton had no local subsidiary that could hire them. These were not "shared employees", they worked exclusively for Proton. In 2016, Proton created its own subsidiary, and these people are now employed by Proton. But for this historical reason, the ProtonVPN keystore on Android still lists Tesonet as the organization name, even though it is fully controlled by Proton.

So either:

1. Tesonet/Nord are loose with their private keys.

2. Proton isn’t being truthful.

Anyone who understands crypto and key management knows “not your keys, not your _____.”

If those staffers worked for Proton and not Nord, why did they have Nord’s key?

This level of negligence with private key management really can’t be explained away.

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Proton explains this here:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/prot...

I suppose you're free not to believe them, but I'm unsure what exactly you believe is happening here and what exactly Proton is lying about. Tesonet secretly owns them and has been running a decades-long misinformation campaign to trick you into thinking they don't? To what end? It's not like Tesonet is some nefarious company we should all be afraid of. What would they gain from lying about this if it were true?

And how can they make such an obvious mistake with their certs and then not make another one for the next decade? It's just not plausible.

At some point, you've gotta use some common sense.

My comment still applies regardless of any level of “explaining” [1]:

1. Either Nord/Teso are loose with keys (horrible)

2. Proton isn’t being truthful.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything that it is Tesonet/Nord. Rather, the problem is you cannot trust someone with your privacy if they can’t even manage their own keys.

[1] The explanation is poor at best and doesn’t explain why they worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence (all of which was archived already). Additionally, nothing can explain away the lack of security with key management across these two orgs.

The people who couldn't handle their keys were at Nord. The people you trust are at Proton.

> worked so hard to try to delete all of the evidence

The cert is still there. Apparently, they didn't work nearly hard enough.

They worked pretty hard as detailed in an archived article changing names and any records they could [1], but you're right - not good enough [2].

As pointed out on this reddit post [3], Proton's appears to contradict itself a number of times.

It's a good thing trust based VPN's are obsolete. After all, trust isn't constant [4] as seen in this article showing how Proton supplied IP addresses to "authorities."

[1] https://archive.ph/wG8t8

[2] https://archive.ph/4bzBm

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8x9aik/protonvp...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...

> Created by supposed MIT and CERN scientists

This is a hilarious way to start an ostensibly serious investigation. It's not as if you could easily figure out the answer to that.

At some point, you have to acknowledge that you're a clown.

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