The JS doesn't appear to be compressed so it's possible to view source and see what exactly it's doing. So if it was actually backdoored, somebody will actually find out.
And you have to do this every time you load any page on the site, and any time any of those pages asynchronously load any content.
So, no, contrary to popular belief, this doesn't work.
I don't understand what people's obsession with browser crypto is...but I don't know enough about browser's to think of a reason this solution is bad. Any guidance?
edit: I understand that this won't solve all the problems...but at least the problem that you are constantly being served this chunk of potentially unsafe code.
edit2: I've been doing some thinking. Even though I didn't really get a response I think the reason is that it doesn't buy you the ability to do anything new safely. You still have the old problems of other dom elements mucking with your dom elements that control the code, or whatever the site does...so it doesn't really buy you anything...it's just work for nothing.
I still think it would be a useful start to one day having safe browser crypto
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're echoing the problem that my question is asking if it solves...
Edit: Also, you definitely need more than the code to come from a "trusted third party", otherwise we would see SaaS startups on HN providing "crypto as a service" (god help us).
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.
This has been discussed many a times on here, by tptacek and others. In fact, at one point I had a similar discussion with him on here. It seems like it's something that people have to think through before they see the problem (which speaks to the complexity of the issue here).
Yes, having full source code is a sufficient condition for security. But you also implied that the hypothetical browser crypto primitives would allow one to do anything they want with the decrypted data, which might be too loose of an assumption.
For example, you could make the browser crypto primitives work so that you can only display unencrypted data (or a private key) but not be allowed to ship them off to servers.
The key idea is that you are still in control of the browser core, and that core has more control over the code shipped by the server. So you can make that core stricter than Javascript.
For example, about the problem of "other dom elements mucking with your dom elements that control the code" you can make the browser disallow this.
If I'm missing something, it's something related to these primitives. Can anyone help figure those out?
What exactly is theoretically impossible about browser crypto?
Actually, it does: closures (and WeakMap in ES6 has similar properties). They're pretty foolproof for information hiding, if used properly. (But this is irrelevant to tptacek's point about the security of crypto in JS, of course.)
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.
The site even helpfully asks you to identify yourself with ANOTHER username and passphrase first, making it even safer for the attacker.
It seems ProtonMail actively scans the code on the backend for unauthorized changes. It's not 100% secure against a very determined attacker (NSA), but for the citizen that wants more privacy without the hassle of PGP, it's pretty good until we can replace SMTP.
You can go pretty far with policy and law alone.