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Comment by parable | Hacker News Reader

I find it very hard to trust any email service that claims to be E2EE without an audit by a reputable firm like Cure53 or Trail of Bits.

I signed up to give it a brief test and immediately noticed that emails are returned from the server in plain text. This means that the emails are decrypted on the server, which defeats the entire purpose of E2EE. The encrypted email contents and metadata should be returned to the user and decrypted on the client.

It's also painfully obvious that the entire thing is vibe-coded. While that in itself isn't an issue, it raises scrutiny. If the author doesn't have a full understanding of the code their LLM generates, some nasty bugs could be lurking.

Not very promising.

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I'm not wild about this benchmark. There are well-known firms (definitely not saying that about Trail! no experience at all with the other one here) that issue public-facing audit docs that read the same no matter what the project scope was.

If you're keying off 3rd party assessment, which is sane, you should be evaluating the combination of the testing team (the best firms will publish reports with the names of the consultants on them) and the scope and depth of the results. The company shouldn't matter; the scope should matter a lot.

A meaningful security assessment for an "E2EE mail service" is nosebleed expensive.

Did not expect this post to get all this attention. I've done a little digging and found the operator on X. Had some DMs and he(?) said that they've had 1 black box and 3 white box audits. I'm not going to speak for anyone, so maybe you can ask them directly.

I don't really care beyond continuing to nudge people away from this idea of "seal of approval audits", which have been an industry curse for decades. I don't think E2EE email is a good idea to begin with.

I guess we need to coin a new term, something like VibeE2EE. As in "we asked to make something E2EE but we have no idea what it has made, nor we asked anyone to audit it (because it wouldn't pass a code review, let alone security audit)"

The E2EE claim is BS, unless qualified by saying that the platform supports GPG-encrypted emails only. Proton makes the same claim and it’s just completely false. E2EE is not possible with existing email protocols.

The main point they try to make is that once emails land, the platform itself can't read them because they immediately encrypt it with your key, of course, this process is impossible to know for sure. And of course, using PGP or whatever is already a secure medium on all email providers, nothing to really solve here.

Even as some says, even if Cure53 or whatever respectable company does an audit, it still guarantees nothing. Only real way today is with Enclave with proper implementation of attestation and more, anything running server-side can't be checked.

It's quite disappointing that we find many good developers today that still trust ToS of a service as if it was any form of real security, it worth nothing outside of the legal aspect, ToS has nothing to do with code.

Ah yes, the good old “E2E”E. Is it the kind where they say the Server is an “end” and therefore that makes it E2E?

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