ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
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Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#2So my first reaction there was "there goes another non-five eyes (or nine or fourteen eyes) hosted mail service who've just painted a (or another) great big target on themselves to attract even more NSA scrutiny".
(Second reaction was "Crypto in the browser in Javascript _again?_ Didn't was already point out this is 'doing it wrong'?")
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#3So my first reaction there was "there goes another non-five eyes (or nine or fourteen eyes) hosted mail service who've just painted a (or another) great big target on themselves to attract even more NSA scrutiny". (Second reaction was "Crypto in the browser in Javascript _again?_ Didn't was already point out this is 'doing it wrong'?")
So you'd prefer not to have any crypto at all? Because 99% of people are going to use their browsers anyways.
Btw for example https://blockchain.info/wallet/#/ (in-browser bitcoin wallet) I think has never been hacked - you might say it's a huge outlier but it is possible to do well.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#4So my first reaction there was "there goes another non-five eyes (or nine or fourteen eyes) hosted mail service who've just painted a (or another) great big target on themselves to attract even more NSA scrutiny". (Second reaction was "Crypto in the browser in Javascript _again?_ Didn't was already point out this is 'doing it wrong'?")
So you'd prefer not to have any crypto at all? Because 99% of people are going to use their browsers anyways. Btw for example https://blockchain.info/wallet/#/ (in-browser bitcoin wallet) I think has never been hacked - you might say it's a huge outlier but it is possible to do well.
I'm building a chat platform with js and https crypto. It's better than nothing in my opinion.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you'd prefer not to have any crypto at all? Because 99% of people are going to use their browsers anyways. Btw for example https://blockchain.info/wallet/#/ (in-browser bitcoin wallet) I think has never been hacked - you might say it's a huge outlier but it is possible to do well.
I'm building a chat platform with js and https crypto. It's better than nothing in my opinion.
A false sense of security is worse than nothing at all.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm building a chat platform with js and https crypto. It's better than nothing in my opinion.
A false sense of security is worse than nothing at all.
Is it worse than just Https? I'm not advertising the feature loudly, I just want to keep nosy sysadmins on corporate networks with https inspection out of private conversations. It obviously can be broken by NSA types if they want to actively alter traffic, but passive monitoring should be harder. Also this forces the attackers hand, an attack against this system can be detected if you want to spend the time comparing hashes.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#7Good stuff, paying customer and planning to stay one :) I do wonder though if you are thinking about providing PM as a browser extension based app as well? Would curb some of the issues people always bring up re crypto in browser.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
A false sense of security is worse than nothing at all.
Is it worse than just Https? I'm not advertising the feature loudly, I just want to keep nosy sysadmins on corporate networks with https inspection out of private conversations. It obviously can be broken by NSA types if they want to actively alter traffic, but passive monitoring should be harder. Also this forces the attackers hand, an attack against this system can be detected if you want to spend the time comparin…
> Also this forces the attackers hand, an attack against this system can be detected if you want to spend the time comparing hashes.
You could have an extension which checks the hash of the js/html payload against a publicly known and signed hash prior to running and rejects it otherwise. It's still browser crypto but potentially you do better than 'everything is broken if the ssl session is hijacked'.
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#9So my first reaction there was "there goes another non-five eyes (or nine or fourteen eyes) hosted mail service who've just painted a (or another) great big target on themselves to attract even more NSA scrutiny". (Second reaction was "Crypto in the browser in Javascript _again?_ Didn't was already point out this is 'doing it wrong'?")
So you'd prefer not to have any crypto at all? Because 99% of people are going to use their browsers anyways. Btw for example https://blockchain.info/wallet/#/ (in-browser bitcoin wallet) I think has never been hacked - you might say it's a huge outlier but it is possible to do well.
No no - it's most likely a "good thing"(tm)
It's not like I trust my browser and https any less than I trust my phone's baseband processor and it's NSL-able telco-end backdoorability...
Re: ProtonMail now the maintainer of OpenPGPjs email encryption library
#10So my first reaction there was "there goes another non-five eyes (or nine or fourteen eyes) hosted mail service who've just painted a (or another) great big target on themselves to attract even more NSA scrutiny". (Second reaction was "Crypto in the browser in Javascript _again?_ Didn't was already point out this is 'doing it wrong'?")
So you'd prefer not to have any crypto at all? Because 99% of people are going to use their browsers anyways. Btw for example https://blockchain.info/wallet/#/ (in-browser bitcoin wallet) I think has never been hacked - you might say it's a huge outlier but it is possible to do well.
The issue is like this.
I load https://webmail.example.com.
I see my email.
My ISP doesn't see my email.
The NSA (or anyone else who can MITM https, such as my workplace, college, etc.) can effectively turn it into http, and see the content.
We need to fix that.
So I write an encryption library in JS, loaded from https://webmail.example.com . It loads the email through an AJAX call from https://webmail.example.com, decrypts it, and displays it.
The only issue is that whoever can MITMed the connection can also modify the JS file to send the key to a C&C server.
So:
"Dumb" ISP can't read #1 mail
"MITM" ISP can read #2 mail
So what's the gain?
The only concern is that it's an active attack vs a passive attack, so no plausible deniability.
But in most MITM scenarios, you don't need plausible deniability.
1. Your workplace computer and the connection is owned by them, so they can do what they want with it.
2. Dictatorships give themselves whatever powers they want
3. The NSA has enough side-channel attacks to exploit.
So in which situation will a "JS" encryption help?