Show HN: End-to-end encrypted email, based in Switzerland

You can go pretty far with policy and law alone.

The danger is that you are back to trusting the server. If they are compromised, you could get served special crypto code that uploads your private pass phrase the next time you log in.

The crypto code needs to come from a trusted third party, and the protocol with the server must be dead simple and strictly arms-length, with no logic of any sort downloaded from the server. More like FTP than HTTP/HTML/JS.

You can have crypto primitives in the browser: AES, RSA, ECDSA, etc. So given a private key and cyphertext you can decrypt it and given a public key and a piece of cyphertext you can encrypt it. The actual crypto code is just a callout to libssl. In this regard, you can do this right now: simply wrap libssl from within Chrome's JS engine and you are done.

Now what? What can you actually do with this stuff? Well, you could create an email client: one that downloads a message over XHR and decrypts it. That's great, except the code to run this app is unsigned and downloaded from a remote server! I can pwn the server, add my own code that will backdoor the app and send me your private key as soon as it's in memory.

"BUT!" you say. "I can sign the code!". I say to that, how will you verify that signature? By downloading the piece of code from a remote server? I'll just pwn the server and add my own code to accept my signatures, then add the code to send me your private key.

"BUT!" you say. "I can have the signature verification code built into the browser. Look ma, no remote code download that's not signed!" I say to that, how do you know that the developer was not forced by the NSA or another powerful adversary to give up their private key or just coerced into created a backdoored package to own you specifically? You don't. You didn't grab the source and compile it. Instead, you downloaded and ran a code blob.

The solution to all of this already exists and it does not involve the web. It's called package management. Your distro already does this: multiple people review the source code that goes into every package and every step of the way is cryptographically signed. The binaries are built on trusted machines and distributed with yet more signatures. There is peer review through and through.

Compare this to a closed-source web application you are trying to secure. In this case the best you can do is say "if you trust me (the developer), and you trust that I know what I'm doing so my servers don't get pwn'ed, and you trust that I have not been coerced by the NSA/other gov't agency, then you can trust this code".

Except, you don't need client-side crypto for that. You already have HTTPS which provides the same guarantee without re-inventing a square wheel. QED.

Signed extensions are a decent step today (although installing an extension is potentially about as heavy as installing a client app, depending on how locked down your environment is).

CSP and some future extensions can be helpful.

There's server-side stuff which can help, too.

WebCrypto is a useful step.

The problem is it's going to be a long process involving a lot of parts, controlled by different parties. So it's responsible to say "we're going to build a webapp which is as secure as we can make it today; these are the known vulnerabilities". Some users are in a good position to evaluate the risks, others aren't. I care a lot more about things doing what they say they're doing than what in particular they say they're doing. The scary thing is when the people building something don't seem to know the well-known vulnerabilities.