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Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

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Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#211

Post by matheusmoreira »

BoredPositron wrote: post #94
matheusmoreira wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't deny that possibility. Still, it should be an individual's choice to risk it or not.

It is but if I exchange emails with a Protonmail user I am writing with them like there is no encryption present.

That's probably wise. I wish there was a way to add metadata to the subkeys. I want to have one set of subkeys for Proton Mail and another set for absolute privacy. I want to mark them as "leaked" keys somehow. Not quite revoked but close.

I read the OpenPGP standard and it seems to have some kind of "notation" packets. Seems to be somewhat related to metadata but I can't figure out how it works or even what its purpose is and it looks like nothing ever uses that anyway.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#212

Post by Jerrrry »

rmbyrro wrote: post #167
krageon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanctioned by the state, which the right to privacy should protect you from. The fact that your country habitually violates your rights doesn't change anything about the fact that you have a right to them.

In every country's laws, there are limitations to rights and situations where rights can be lawfully broken.

Obligatory George Carlin quote:

"Your rights? Right this way."

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#213

Post by twiss »

Y_Y wrote: post #130
matheusmoreira wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I haven't tried it. Someone actually suggested this to me on the #gnupg IRC but I just kinda forgot about it. The --export-secret-subkeys command does just that: it replaces the master key with some GNU specific stub packet thing. It's conceivable that they could detect this and reject the uploaded key. In order to avoid that, one might edit the secret key packet manually instead. Just zero fill or randomize a…

RFC4880 uses ElGamal for the asymmetric encryption and so it's a discrete log problem. Roughly the private key x should satisfy `a=b^x mod n` where b and n are known, and a is part of the public key. It goes through similarly for elliptic curve-based schemes.

FWIW, OpenPGP doesn't only offer ElGamal, and we never use that algorithm. We use Curve25519 by default since quite a while, before which we used RSA. We've never used ElGamal and also don't allow importing ElGamal keys, since they're insecure and deprecated in the crypto refresh (the upcoming update to the OpenPGP standard): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-openpgp-cry....

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#214

Post by twiss »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #110
Y_Y wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So can you put in a dummy master key after the export and before the upload?

Maybe. I haven't tried it. Someone actually suggested this to me on the #gnupg IRC but I just kinda forgot about it. The --export-secret-subkeys command does just that: it replaces the master key with some GNU specific stub packet thing. It's conceivable that they could detect this and reject the uploaded key. In order to avoid that, one might edit the secret key packet manually instead. Just zero fill or randomize a…

Indeed filling the private key with zeros or random data wouldn't work, but we do support GNU Dummy keys as exported by `gpg --export-secret-subkeys` nowadays.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#215

Post by oooyay »

happymellon wrote: post #99
dathinab wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is also meant to protect you from the state, or more specifically state abuse. It's an essential aspect of privacy. Like privacy is also meant to e.g. not disclose topics you have communicated about so that it can't be abused against you. For example there is a long history of states persecuting people for idk. being gay, believing in a certain religion or being a journalist which was involved in a unpleasant…

> Mainly privacy of communication doesn't always imply anonymity, through sometimes does (and has too!). Anonymity is simply people not knowing who you are, not necessarily what you say. It's not privacy of communication, but privacy of identity. I can post on the internet as Anonymous Coward, and those posts are public even though my identity is private. I can encrypt an email and send it, and it will be picked up b…

Just because you don't use your name doesn't make the service anonymous. Pseudo anonymous is still in the privacy bucket because there's still likely (given websites today) personal information associated with your account. True anonymity could be achieved, but it'd be difficult to maintain.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#217

Post by matheusmoreira »

twiss wrote: post #139
matheusmoreira wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some interesting facts about Proton Mail. It generates OpenPGP keys on their own servers, and if you want to use your own keys their instructions show users how to upload upload their entire OpenPGP secret keychain to Proton Mail. Not just encryption/signing subkeys, the master key also needs to be included. I've emailed them to ask that they fix this. I also created a post on their user voice thing about it. https:/…

Hi! Crypto team lead here. 1. We don't generate OpenPGP keys on the server, we generate them in the client, and then encrypt them with a key derived from your password (which we never send to the server), and store the encrypted key on the server. Then, when you login again, we fetch and decrypt the private key, and use it in the client. The server never has access to your private keys. 2. We do support "GNU Dummy" k…

> We don't generate OpenPGP keys on the server, we generate them in the client, and then encrypt them with a key derived from your password (which we never send to the server), and store the encrypted key on the server.

I see, I stand corrected then. Thanks for clarifying. The Proton Mail interface contains buttons labeled "generate" so I got the impression it was being generated in the server. Is this password-derived key the "account key" which I see in the Proton Mail settings interface?

Please clarify what key derivation function is being used. The OpenPGP S2K which gpg uses is outdated and probably not secure enough. I know that Proton Mail is involved in the OpenPGP standards body in an effort to modernize it and that the new RFC contains support for the memory hard argon2 algorithm. Is that what's being used? If so then I would believe that it's even more secure than the encryption that gpg applies to the exported key output.

Are there instructions for verifying that all this is happening? I think a lot of folks on HN won't be convinced otherwise.

> We do support "GNU Dummy" keys now (which is what `gpg --export-secret-subkeys` creates).

Wow that is GREAT and the exact information I wanted! I only believed otherwise because of the documented instructions, which contain the command I posted above. I double checked with Proton Mail support as well but everything led to believe that this was not supported when in fact it was.

Please add this fact to your documentation and instruct your support staff about this!!

> I would argue that the private key material of the subkeys (used to encrypt and sign your emails) is actually much more important in this case (but of course we don't have access to that either).

I agree. Those are the keys which sign and encrypt the data after all.

It's just that I'm going to create an OpenPGP identity for things like signing code commits on git, signing packages I publish. I'm putting quite a bit of effort into getting it right. I printed out the master key to paper in paperkey and QR code format. I even contributed code to ZBar to add binary decoding support so that the key backup is easy to restore. I'll also be making an effort to join the decentralized web of trust.

So I was really hoping to be able to use Proton Mail with this identity instead of the key pair that's generated for the account. This way the emails I send can be signed by the same identity that I'll publish on the OpenPGP key servers. Looks like it's going to be possible after all.

Thanks for reaching out here on HN. I've been a really happy Proton Mail customer and now I'm even happier.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#218

Post by xinayder »

quitit wrote: post #159

It seems there is some mental conflict going in readers between the reality of what ProtonMail does for its customers and their expectations of what kinds of protections a legitimate business can provide. Both ProtonMail and Apple will challenge subpoenas when they believe they are not valid, however neither company has the final say in the matter and can be compelled to provide access to data that they reasonably ha…

I don't think this is solely the issue that users don't understand that the companies are obliged to provide the data requested by the authorities.

The whole controversy surrounding Proton started when they marketed themselves as "secure and private email", promising they would NEVER give away their users' data, until they did. I had a similar discussion with my friends today about this topic and the issue I have with it is that Proton tries to market itself as an email which will never snitch your data to the authorities. And we've seen countless times (they have provided data to almost 6k requests last year) that this isn't the case.

The problem as I see it is that Proton is not even trying to challenge the requests anymore. It's not like Tuta, who you can read on the news that they keep challenging almost every order they get from the authorities, even if they lose the battle in court: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/german-secure-email-provid...

As I read on a website comparing "private email services", the question here is not whether a service provider will or will not abide by the court requests. It's whether it will do anything to challenge it or just giveaway the data without questions asked.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#219

Post by kube-system »

mmcallister wrote: post #98
kube-system wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could encrypt the source IP on all your outbound TCP packets, but it might not work very well.

a minor point but you can't _encrypt_ source IPs, you can only obfuscate or more accurately, proxy.

I was being sarcastic. The suggestion above that the privacy of an IP address could be "guaranteed by cryptography" is silly. Cryptography is not a hammer that can be used for all problems. At some point you have to transmit your IP over the internet if you want a reply.

Re: Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

#220

Post by xinayder »

Shacklz wrote: post #157

There are some serious anti-proton-vibes in this thread, so just my 2 cents as a paying customer: I'm rather happy with their service. I pay them money, they make sure that Joe in Marketing won't be able to harvest data from my emails. I'm also fairly optimistic that they take security serious enough that the blast radius of some dataleak is hopefully very limited. I have zero delusions however that they can protect…

I'm a free customer and I am always annoyed by ads in my inbox about other services provided by Proton. I signed up for an email box, I don't care about Proton Drive nor ProtonVPN. I chose Proton specifically because it supposedly had less or no ads at all, but it seems like Gmail continues to be the better choice.
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