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Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

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Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#61

Post by kevinconaway »

geofft wrote: post #41

Threat model, threat model, threat model. There are some people for whom "The government is literally after me, personally" is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally" (one assumes there's a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model. However…

> see e.g. Stuxnet taking out Iran's nuclear program using a previously unknown method of generating SHA-1 collisions, that looked kind of like how the academic community knew to generate collisions but with a different fingerprint)

To my knowledge, it was Flame that did this not Stuxnet, and it was an attack on MD-5, not SHA-1 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#63

Post by datawarrior »

I gave up on ProtonMail. The lack of a calendar means you often need to go back to using Google Calendar or Outlook.com Calendar, kind of negating the privacy benefits if you're a heavy calendar user.

Secondly, its been years and you still can't store more than a single email address for a contact. This is so incredibly ridiculous that I have an extremely hard time understanding how they get away with charging what they do.

Lastly, the mobile app drives me nuts. I just can't get used to using it. You delete a message and a notification pop down drops from the top covering the next email so that you can't select it until the pop down notification goes away. This is deal breaking for me as if I have to go through 20 emails I have to sit and wait over and over and over again for this notification to go away. Yes, a message was deleted, I'm the one that deleted it, I don't need a notification telling me I did so. Infuriating to use.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#64

Post by ekianjo »

geofft wrote: post #41

Threat model, threat model, threat model. There are some people for whom "The government is literally after me, personally" is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally" (one assumes there's a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model. However…

> "I don't want to lose access to my email" (remember that availability is a part of security!).

Arent there many (difficult to judge how many) cases of people losing access to their Google account, and therefore about everything they had online (photos, email, videos, etc...). That is also scary enough, especially when it happens randomly with no clear reason why and the support of Google seems to be limited to sending info via forms in the hope of a future human interaction.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#65

Post by skybrian »

rurban wrote: post #53
duality wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Google stop scanning Gmail for ads targeting? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

More importantly they give any government agency free access without any warrant to fulltext search any customer. US law interpretation of IMAP. Only with a POP3 service you are safe.

"Without any warrant": what do you mean?

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#67

Post by ploggingdev »

geofft wrote: post #41

Threat model, threat model, threat model. There are some people for whom "The government is literally after me, personally" is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally" (one assumes there's a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model. However…

> "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally"

I thought employees do not have access to user data. Can anyone comment on this?

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#68

Post by thrownsjdke »

flashdance wrote: post #38
onychomys wrote: post #21

It's so cute that they think that the NSA can't read PGP-encrypted messages.

There is no evidence that PGP is compromised. In fact, the snowden leaks revealed that the NSA has "serious problems" following people through TOR, and is unable to decrypt some OTR and PGP encrypted messages. https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...

Right, Snowden weakened US national security. He clued in the public to important secrets related to our intel operations, and ticked off public backlash against our intelligence agencies.

Now, Snowden sits comfortably in a country who is actively hacking us. I’d bet my life that high school students from St. Petersburg have more reverse engineering skills than all US undergrads, at least those who are now interested in supporting US intelligence operations.

Why HN praises Snowden, who committed treason against this country, is beyond me.

It seems that Snowden is part of an effort to divide and wreck the culture of this nation. Russians, on the other hand, are fairly unified in their fight against us. I keep encountering smart folks in this country who could help US national security but won’t on moral principles. Such a mentality was catalyzed by his actions.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#69

Post by datawarrior »

jstanley wrote: post #55
geofft wrote: post #41

Threat model, threat model, threat model. There are some people for whom "The government is literally after me, personally" is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally" (one assumes there's a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model. However…

> "I don't want to lose access to my email" (remember that availability is a part of security!). Really? You've heard just as many stories of unexpected Google account closures as I have. I'm quite confident ProtonMail just don't do that. And if they did, you'd have a much more credible chance of talking to a human and rectifying the situation.

Actually ProtonMail does do this. They can't read your email so they can't know if you're actually abusing it via their terms of service. Thus if you file complaints against users ProtonMail will actually suspend the account without evidence until you clear your name.

It's abused fairly regularly in fact.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#70

Post by feld »

blfr wrote: post #46
someguydave wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair criticism. I don't think the Gmail glossy brochure mentions its threat model either.

They do for their new Advanced Protection Program[1]. The regular Gmail service is not really marketed to the security concious users. It's like comparing Android to Qubes OS. Not really fair. For what they are, Google products are surprisingly secure. [1] https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

Qubes has a nice fat attack surface known as the hypervisor. I'm skeptical when people point to this as the panacea of computing security.
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