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ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

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Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#71

Post by pflanze »

vabmit wrote: post #61
moxie wrote: post #24

Some bad signs: 1. Hosted in Switzerland is advertised as a security feature. The point of e2e is that the servers are untrusted. If you need a "good jurisdiction" for your servers, it means they must be trusted. That's a problem, because sadly there are no good jurisdictions in today's world, and your jurisdiction doesn't help you if your servers are hacked. 2. It's webmail. That means the security of whatever e2e t…

Disclosure Note: I'm with ProtonMail. Please note that I don't officially speak for the company. But, I'm a crypto guy and this is Hackernews so... 1. While historically advertising a hosting location was a bit of a red flag for snake oil, the Snowden disclosures changed things for SaaS providers. Jurisdictional arbitrage is indeed a security feature of the service. I think you're missing the point a bit in that it g…

> I contend that these are the same vulnerabilities someone faces downloading GnuPG from it's distribution sites, downloading Firefox/Chrome/IE, or even applying Windows/Linux updates.

If you had in mind the typical Windows user who downloads programs from the internet without any security check, then you're right, but the typical Linux user doesn't do this and instead installs software via the package system provided by the OS.

I.e. installations and updates in reasonably secure Linux distributions (which AFAIK is the majority, including at least Debian) are signed through a key that's been installed at OS installation time. Which means that at least in the way you have worded it your statement is not correct. There is of course the initial OS image that you need to find some other way to trust (but this is the same in your case), and there are the package maintainers who download the source of these programs; hopefully the latter will take their job seriously and verify the authenticity of the source in some way (download from/to various places, find hashes done by others, check PGP signatures on source files provided by program authors, ask for hashes by talking to authors directly, inspect source diffs). A package maintainer working with an upstream author can ensure that users will get uncompromised programs, whereas you're dependent on an uncompromised CA and thus have an additional vulnerability risk.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#72

Post by MichaelGG »

junto wrote: post #69
MichaelGG wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's pretty corrupt. Apart from Wikileaks they've also decided to abuse their position and not compete by refusing to sell Apple TV or Chromecasts. Just get a 404. Their service reps deny everything and say it's just a temporary stock issue or that they "lack the contracts to sell such products". Scummy, and I'm very reluctantly cancelling prime over it, and I'm a customer of 13 years.

Can you explain the background to this story? This is because they only want to sell their solution?

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/9439281/amazon-ban-apple-t...

Their supposed explanation (though several CSRs denied this) is that people want Amazon Prime Video (heh ok), and Chromecast/AppleTV doesn't "support it". Hence they are refusing to sell these devices.

In reality it seems far more like a pathetic death throe of the folks running FireTV or a response to the (most likely?) low uptake of the poor Prime Video offering.

The thing is they are so entrenched (I spent a lot on Amazon, and Prime is a main reason) they can really shut hurt products by refusing to carry them. Ordering via someone else is a pain. (I used jet.com to buy Chromecasts and they're so, so, far from Amazon.)

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#73

Post by rbcgerard »

moxie wrote: post #24

Some bad signs: 1. Hosted in Switzerland is advertised as a security feature. The point of e2e is that the servers are untrusted. If you need a "good jurisdiction" for your servers, it means they must be trusted. That's a problem, because sadly there are no good jurisdictions in today's world, and your jurisdiction doesn't help you if your servers are hacked. 2. It's webmail. That means the security of whatever e2e t…

How (if at all) does this change if you only use their iOS/Android app to access their service?

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#74

Post by duaneb »

moxie wrote: post #24

Some bad signs: 1. Hosted in Switzerland is advertised as a security feature. The point of e2e is that the servers are untrusted. If you need a "good jurisdiction" for your servers, it means they must be trusted. That's a problem, because sadly there are no good jurisdictions in today's world, and your jurisdiction doesn't help you if your servers are hacked. 2. It's webmail. That means the security of whatever e2e t…

So—run your own server with your own root CA?

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#75

Post by duaneb »

tptacek wrote: post #56
modernerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Phil Zimmermann, PGP's creator, says it's too hard to use: “I hardly ever run PGP. When people send me PGP encrypted mail I have to go through a lot of trouble to decrypt it. If it’s coming from a stranger, I’ll say please re-send this in plain text, which probably raises their eyebrows.“ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/08/09/e-mails-bi... I tried the ProtonMail password protection feature today (whi…

"PGP is hard to use" is more memetic than accurate. What makes PGP hard is that it has a million options, and its vocal users (and detractors) seem insistent on availing themselves of as many of them as possible. In reality, 80% of PGP's value (which is more value than you'll get out of any webmail system), you can get with three command lines: gpg -sear recipient@addr document.txt Encrypt and sign a document, ASCII…

If those commands are so simple, why are they not built into chrome? Honest question. It's where I actually write my emails.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#76

Post by zimbatm »

vabmit wrote: post #61
moxie wrote: post #24

Some bad signs: 1. Hosted in Switzerland is advertised as a security feature. The point of e2e is that the servers are untrusted. If you need a "good jurisdiction" for your servers, it means they must be trusted. That's a problem, because sadly there are no good jurisdictions in today's world, and your jurisdiction doesn't help you if your servers are hacked. 2. It's webmail. That means the security of whatever e2e t…

Disclosure Note: I'm with ProtonMail. Please note that I don't officially speak for the company. But, I'm a crypto guy and this is Hackernews so... 1. While historically advertising a hosting location was a bit of a red flag for snake oil, the Snowden disclosures changed things for SaaS providers. Jurisdictional arbitrage is indeed a security feature of the service. I think you're missing the point a bit in that it g…

> 2. This is true. However, it's true about every web service. It is also true about any software that is either distributed over the web/TLS or has security updates distributed over the web/TLS. While some may say that non-web apps have code signing or application signing keys, the fact is that most of either the signing or verification keys for those application code signature schemes are distributed over TLS.

If you install Debian you have to make sure that the ISO was not compromised. You can do that by calling a third-party and compare the published checksums or any out-of-band solution. Once this base of trust is established you are good to go. In fact updates are fetched over plain HTTP because all the updates are signed using GPG.

Now compare with any "web crypto": every time the user loads the page he starts back from zero. An attacker can MITM at any time and inject a trivial `form.onsubmit=sendCredentials` and your user is compromised. There is no way to verify out-of-band that the distributed JavaScript is coming from ProtonMail and even if there was, it would have to be done on every page load.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#77

Post by rndgermandude »

vabmit wrote: post #61
moxie wrote: post #24

Some bad signs: 1. Hosted in Switzerland is advertised as a security feature. The point of e2e is that the servers are untrusted. If you need a "good jurisdiction" for your servers, it means they must be trusted. That's a problem, because sadly there are no good jurisdictions in today's world, and your jurisdiction doesn't help you if your servers are hacked. 2. It's webmail. That means the security of whatever e2e t…

Disclosure Note: I'm with ProtonMail. Please note that I don't officially speak for the company. But, I'm a crypto guy and this is Hackernews so... 1. While historically advertising a hosting location was a bit of a red flag for snake oil, the Snowden disclosures changed things for SaaS providers. Jurisdictional arbitrage is indeed a security feature of the service. I think you're missing the point a bit in that it g…

1. Pwnd the servers. 2. Replace nice in-browser crypto Javascript with a bad version that captures and logs the passphrase and any emails you write. 3. Collect your bounty whenever a user logs in.

In order not to have to wait for users to log in to the now compromised service and capture their keys, don't actually encrypt newly incoming email anymore.

So once I compromise the service I therefore get immediate access to all newly arriving email 100% of the time, and to any already stored user's email if the user ever logs in again, all without breaking/brute-forcing any crypto.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#78

Post by forgotpwtomain »

zimbatm wrote: post #76
vabmit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure Note: I'm with ProtonMail. Please note that I don't officially speak for the company. But, I'm a crypto guy and this is Hackernews so... 1. While historically advertising a hosting location was a bit of a red flag for snake oil, the Snowden disclosures changed things for SaaS providers. Jurisdictional arbitrage is indeed a security feature of the service. I think you're missing the point a bit in that it g…

> 2. This is true. However, it's true about every web service. It is also true about any software that is either distributed over the web/TLS or has security updates distributed over the web/TLS. While some may say that non-web apps have code signing or application signing keys, the fact is that most of either the signing or verification keys for those application code signature schemes are distributed over TLS. If y…

> If you install Debian you have to make sure that the ISO was not compromised. You can do that by calling a third-party and compare the published checksums or any out-of-band solution. Once this base of trust is established you are good to go. In fact updates are fetched over plain HTTP because all the updates are signed using GPG.

It's hard to take this seriously - do you really call a third-party every-time you rebuild a Dockerfile and run update with your package manager? 99.9% of developers deploying to production do not. If anything the best guard we have is for Debian (as in your example) to realize their keys have been compromised (probably by someone else suffering from such an attack) and alert their users, this has an inherent delay.

> Now compare with any "web crypto": every time the user loads the page he starts back from zero. An attacker can MITM at any time and inject a trivial `form.onsubmit=sendCredentials` and your user is compromised. There is no way to verify out-of-band that the distributed JavaScript is coming from ProtonMail and even if there was, it would have to be done on every page load.

As I wrote above, your concept of verification is quite unrealistic - but even with that I would say it's fair to say the danger of a SSL cert for "web crypto" being compromised is definitely greater than for the desktop since even Dockerfiles are rebuilt far-less than web-pages get reloaded, so a much greater number of users would be affected before they became aware.

I tend to think protonmail is a good thing -- it's obviously not the best choice if you need as many security guarantees as possible, but for general population this is a strong improvement over sell-all-your-data to advertisers google mail.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#79

Post by waffl »

Apart from the discussion surrounding the crypto side of all this, one thing that ProtonMail has really succeeded in doing is making encrypted mail finally an accessible thing to a non-technically inclined user.

I've spent well over a year trying to get my team to properly gpg encrypt sensitive files only to constantly find them sending plain unencrypted files over slack, dropbox and even simply gmail.

At least now, finally, they've found ProtonMail easy to use and are choosing to send files this way.

I think the key, unfortunate reality is that until the end user doesn't have to think about encryption, they aren't going to bother using it. Bringing usability to encryption is another huge part of the problem that needs to be considered as it is basically a guarantee that the typical user will take the path of least resistance.

Re: ProtonMail's encrypted email is now available to all

#80

Post by msh »

suprgeek wrote: post #51
nickpsecurity wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider all of them insecure and big time snoops if free and/or webmail. If webmail, best you can do is use a paid service with antisnooping in terms of service and preferrably local laws. Just reduces number that will attack you. Anything further requires using something like PGP/GPG over that so they can't read it. Strong endpoint security, too.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Non-webmail may not be accessible from everywhere, paid-email entails money exchange which maybe traceable. Lavabit seems to have been secure enough for Snowden (for a while). So the question remains: Yes Free and/or Webmail are bad - which one is the LEAST bad from a privacy & security perspective?

I like mailbox.org

They support pgp encryption.

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