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ProtonMail now offers elliptic curve cryptography

201 points by _eigenfoo 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Off topic I had a proton email created when it was announced & didn't use it. I found out that my mailbox decryption for that email id is not working (not sure how, I use password manager) & I haven't set a recovery email to recover my account. I saw a HN comment earlier telling, the user had recovered their Proton mail account by answering few questions to customer service. I attempted the same, the issue is that I used VPN to create the email id & didn't provide any personal details for the account. They asked questions like, -Do you remember the exact time and date when your account was created? -When was the last time you have accessed your account? -What is your display name? -Do you remember to which addresses you have sent your last messages? -Do you remember the email subjects of the last sent messages? I tried to answer the account creation date by using the date of password creation in my password manager (the login password was working); but the support didn't seem to buy it. They were insistent on, -Can you please tell us if you remember from which addresses have you received your last few messages? -Could you tell us if you have used the ProtonMail account to sign up for some other web services? I told them, I don't remember receiving email from anyone else & I didn't sign up for any service -There is a service that the xxxxx@protonmail.com address has been used to sign up for. Can you please tell us what that service is? I told them again that I didn't sign up for any service using that email id. - Can you tell us the full address below? no-xxxxx@drxxxxx.com Even though I could obviously guess the username of that email id. I told them that I didn't sign up with such service, that it must be a spam mail sent by some service. They said, - If you have not signed up for this service, the account probably belongs to someone else. Then I typed 'no-xxxxx@drxxxxx.com' on Google Search, the instant results gave 'no-reply@dropbox.com' as the first result. I sent them, Hey sorry, I remembered the service. I did signed up for Dropbox & used the account for a while. The email id you asked was, no-reply@dropbox.com They reset the account & I got access to it. Edit: Had to fix the xxxxx.
- tristor 7y ago
  There’s two separate passwords. If you reset your encryption password it’s supposed to make all prior received mail unreadable. Was this the case for you?
  - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
    Correct, existing emails become inaccessible when the mailbox is reset. Can be recovered though, if there's a backup & the original decryption password is found again.
    - dontbenebby 7y ago
      But is your threat model someone reading your old email? For most people the big risk is that their email can be leveraged to gain access to banks, social media etc through password resets.
      - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
        I agree, access to other accounts is of greater threat. When I created this account, I wanted to build upon the premise of privacy of proton mail & so I created using VPN, with no personal link whatsoever (hence no recovery email). Unfortunately when my decryption password failed, I had no means of recovery until I attempted to talk through support successfully.
        dontbenebby 7y ago
        Hm. I once had an issue with a decryption password failing despite using a manager (not on Protonmail) It ended up being that a trailing newline got added. It's a long shot but worth looking into...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mercora 7y ago
wil421 7y ago
Anyone using ProtonMail regularly? I created an account but haven’t used it much. How are your experiences? Any iOS users who can comment on their experience with proton mail and the default mail client? I don’t went to switch to something that won’t be around in a decade or so.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I love Protonmail! I use it both on desktop and Android. It's interface is very basic, but that's the way I like it. I pay for it as well as ProtonVPN so they will hopefully stay in business.
- robotmay 7y ago
  Yep I swapped to it last year and I've had no problems. Works very well for me.
- diehunde 7y ago
  Works pretty well on iOS and desktop using the bridge. Has been my main account for about a year now.
- vr46 7y ago
  I have used it for my main email account for some years now. The web client is fine, the iOS client is fine, and the ProtonMail Bridge allows me to bring it into my Mail.app. The encryption is great and the anti-spam works well enough. No complaints.
- jamil7 7y ago
  Been using it as my main account for over a year, have an old gmail account which I'm giving a bit longer grace period until old clients and contacts stop emailing. Using it on iOS, it's works great but don't expect many features. Same can be said of the webapp. I use a custom domain so I'm not worried about it shutting down, I'll migrate to something else. One issue I've had is emails from new contacts sometimes showing up in junk.
  - arosier 7y ago
throwaway_x13zd 7y ago
While I appreciate advances in cryptography, I would rather protonmail work on things like getting their bridge returning properly formatted IMAP responses[1] so we can use whatever clients we want with it. The mobile experience is fine, but desktop is brutal unless you happen to prefer one of the few clients they support. [1] https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/429 https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/429
keiferski 7y ago
This gets asked often, but as someone wanting to get away from Gmail, any thoughts on Fastmail vs. ProtonMail?
- drexlspivey 7y ago
  I've used both for some time and decided to move to Fastmail and so far I am very satisfied. Fastmail does one thing and does it well, email. There is no PGP support. Protonmail does PGP in the browser via a library that they serve you themselves which I find less than ideal. If you want to do it outside the browser you need to have a subscription and download a bridge software that needs to be running on your machine. With Fastmail if I need PGP in my email I do it via the GPGTools plugin for the Mail app which uses the system gpg installation.
- reacharavindh 7y ago
  I use both. FastMail: + simple, lean, paid email. + fast web interface ++ working full text search( not just subject line) + No ads. + iOS App. Fast and simple. + Integrated calendar - No encryption. - group calendar has been a pain or non intuitive. Protonmail: + Encrypted + Lean, safe web interface + IOS App that works. + or - Free as in cost. - - - No Full text search. - can't really configure your chosen email client to it... - last time I tried, dragged and dropped images disappeared. May have improved UI now. I only use protonmail for automated alerts and system originated communication.
  - maggit 7y ago
    About this point: "- can't really configure your chosen email client to it..." Do you have any experience with using the IMAP Bridge? It is a daemon you run locally that translates between Protonmail's internal protocol and IMAP, to let you use your email client of choice. I'm using it and it seems to be working OK in my experience, but I don't use my Protonmail account heavily.
    - badpun 7y ago
      My experience with the bridge (on an account with maybe 10k emails) was that it was unfortunately unusable.
elliotec 7y ago
To answer everyone here, I've been using ProtonMail for 6 months now (and protonvpn) and I love it. The iOS app is great, the web view could be improved but isn't bad.
lvh 7y ago
X25519 is great, but it doesn’t make Protonmail (really, OpenPGPjs) a net safe communications mechanism. It inherits all of the flaws inherent in OpenPGP, including optional authenticators (which lead to EFAIL), kitchen sink bulk protocols complete with negotiation (did you know your public keys specify what algorithms you like?), lack of forward secrecy, repudiability, et cetera. We should stop using RSA. But RSA isn’t what was keeping OpenPGP from being a great secure communications channel. That’s aside from the question if it’s meaningful to say you control your keys if you use OpenPGPjs served up every time by a third party. (I say that being extremely on the PGP apologia side of the scale compared to some of my peers!)
- Forbo 7y ago
  Shouldn't it be possible to have the library built in to the browser? I can't seem to find any information on attempts to make that happen, either directly by browser developers or as an add-on.
  - lvh 7y ago
    Sure: that’s WebCrypto. The main problem it solves is that you don’t really want your AES implementation to be in JS which is only a small part of the problem. You still have the problem that the site would be telling you to do with all of that good crypto, and you still need to do key management. You could do all of this well if WebCrypto was good and you had a WebExtension, or an Electron app, or some other way where you weren’t just going to do whatever the website tells you to do. (That is not a blanket security recommendation in favor of Electron. XSS does not normally get me RCE.)
    - Boulth 7y ago
      Interestingly there is such an extension: https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages tl;dr version is one pins all resources on the page with Subresource Integrity hashes and signs the page. The extension verifies the signature matches before rendering anything.
__ralston3 7y ago
As a PM customer of almost a year, I'd definitely say they should focus more efforts on the UI/UX as opposed to advancing the crypto for now. What's the point of having the world's most cryptologically advanced, unusable inbox. Specifically conversation threading/nesting. I don't expect everyone to be as streamlined as say a Gmail, but basic "1 conversation - 1 email" in the inbox would be nice for starters.
- calvinmorrison 7y ago
  I really really really like thier conversation threading. Because I get so many recurring transactional emails (eg bank statements, auto pay, etc) it makes it very easy for me to view ALL of these in one thread, and not take up a lot of space in my inbox. Honestly I wish other providers would give me this sort of 'transactional email' conversation tie up because it's convienent. I can see in the last 12 months for example, I have always paid my gas bill on time, at a glance too!
- phito 7y ago
  conversation threading works well for me as long as the subject don't change But I agree with you that the UI lacks several things, like searching in the body of the messages...
philshem 7y ago
Unsolicited opinion on ProtonMail: I'm a big fan. It's not as flashy as gmail, but so far my mails haven't been marked as spam, which was happening with zoho. Unfortunately, zoho doesn't provide free email forwarding, so the migration to PM is taking longer than hoped for. I'll probably soon subscribe to PM for two reasons: to use the @pm.me domain for outgoing (currently only incoming), and for custom domain support. Also subscribing gets IMAP support (I think).
- wtmt 7y ago
  Note that IMAP support is only through a bridge software that you have to install and configure.
KirinDave 7y ago
This announcement is an example of why I am not using ProtonMail anymore. There are a lot of things they do that sound very good on marketing materials, but upon examination are security theater. For example, they claim, "We have chosen a particular elliptic curve system known as X25519, which is fast, secure, and particularly resistant to timing attacks. It’s simple to implement". However, previously they've said that they use Indutny's library [0]. This library is somewhat infamous because its leadership deciding to discard any pretense of defending against timing attacks on the grounds that would make the library "too slow." [1] There are other options. They could have used something with good timing attack resistance from WebCrypto. Those options exist. Folks with more skill than I have recommended P-256 as an option. [0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-3-release/ https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-3-release/ [1]: https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/128#issuecomment-302593662 https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/128#issuecomment-...
- anfedorov 7y ago
  Worth noting, in similar vein — https://protonvpn.com/support/macos-ikev2-vpn-setup/ https://protonvpn.com/support/macos-ikev2-vpn-setup/
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    I don't know OSX very well these days. Is that... is that actually installing a new global SSL trust root? Doesn't that mean ProtonMail now can seamlessly MitM all SSL connections on that machine? Please tell me I'm reading that wrong, because I don't recall doing this for ProtonVPN on linux.
    - deagle50 7y ago
      In the instructions they ask the user to "always trust" the cert for all use cases, including SSL. If you do that, any app that uses OS certs can be MITMed. It should be enough to trust the cert for IPSec only.
      - 7y ago
motohagiography 7y ago
I like protonmail and will likely move my domains to it. I don't use it for regular social, dating, or sales emails because it is a privacy brand that creates cognitive friction with people who don't get privacy and security. If I wanted to grow protonmail, I would emphasize users moving domains to it because while the brand has exceptional trustworthiness, anything security and privacy themed runs into the "tacti-cool," problem, where even if it's the best available and used by real operators, it triggers peoples sense of illegitimacy, and depends with users who identify with a "rebel," e.g. "losing" team who are not attractive to other users. IMO, the same problem killed Silent Circle, and the rest of the cryptophone market. When you look at who overcame the tacti-cool problem in security and privacy, the way a brand like arcteryx did it in clothing, Apple's iPhone has done it in hardware, WhatsApp did it for messengers, and protonmail is just on the cusp of it. There is an opportunity to build a new privacy brand that would be as big as a FAANG, and if I were running it, I'd fold protonmail into it.
brendyn 7y ago
I was silly enough to sign up without looking in to it because it was recommended on HN. Then I realised they need this bridge software to connect. I asked about it stating I'd like to build it my self and confirm it is libre software. They just sent back a generic link to a .deb beta file. I had a look and its got this eula.txt with the standard you-have-no-rights. Messaged them again asking what they intended to do license-wise and they ignored me. Someone else has written their own bridge and put it on github but it's a bit of a joke to have to do that. Not sure what to move to now, mailbox.org was another I saw recommended. My email history: - gmail.com > US spying, escape. - lavabit.com > Shutdown due to US government legal attack. - Ran my own server > Too much bother, gave up. - openmailbox.org > Died for months, ran away with my money. - protonmail.com > Sketchy, cancelling it now. - Free mailbox.org with custom domain.
- vinay427 7y ago
  You could try Tutanota. Their Android app is even available on F-Droid and doesn't use Google Play Services.
  - dchest 7y ago
    Seems like another crypto startup that doesn't understand crypto: https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58 https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58
- really3452 7y ago
  Seconded. Anyone know of a good email workflow? Rolling your own server no longer seems practical. From what I have read most email providers now simply blacklist the email address of an email from sent from a non-major email service.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Use your isp for emailing out and receive email on your own server.
- justusthane 7y ago
ahelwer 7y ago
Love ProtonMail. Over the past few years I've slowly switched more and more of my usage onto it as my confidence in the service grows. Gmail now occupies a similar niche as Facebook in my life, where I keep a vestigial & largely empty account for those few organizations which still insist on proprietary apps (Google groups/docs, Facebook groups/chats) for organization.
doomrobo 7y ago
Slightly OT, but I didn't see an important question being asked: What is the motivating threat model of ProtonMail? If I just want to access my email securely, that's done by HTTPS. If I want an end-to-end encrypted solution, ProtonMail can provide that, though only for emails between ProtonMail users. For e2e outside of ProtonMail, I can use PGP. From what I understand, ProtonMail makes all the PGP stuff easier by baking it into their UI. Is there anything else it offers other than this convenience? Are they encrypting incoming mail with recipient keys and throwing away the original? If so, who is that protecting, and against whom? Presumably the plaintext was stored by the sender and possibly seen by intermediary servers. Can I get similar security properties by periodically downloading my email and deleting it off the server (assuming the deletion is actually happening)? These are honest questions. I admit I'm skeptical of PM's utility, but I'd this fits someone's usecase and threat model, I can't argue with that.
- scotch_drinker 7y ago
  I'm using ProtonMail because I'm trying to de-Google-Amazon-Facebook my life somewhat as another user mentions. I'm tired of being the product and am willing to pay for certain things.
  - doomrobo 7y ago
    So why ProtonMail over any other email provider, besides GMail? Would you be willing to pay for email?
- arosier 7y ago
  ProtonMail employee here: Are they encrypting incoming mail with recipient keys and throwing away the original? Yes we do. This mainly protects against service level requests for data in the future. Can I get similar security properties by periodically downloading my email and deleting it off the server (assuming the deletion is actually happening)? Yup, assuming you want to deal with that. ProtonMail is designed to give you a privacy focused option for email.
usr1987 7y ago
I tried proton with my own domain... its a hasle, and how about address book sync and calendar?
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
does it matter if its traffic is routed through counties with a history of breaching privacy?
jgowdy 7y ago
I quit ProtonMail / ProtonVPN after trying over and over and over again to import mail through their IMAP bridge. They won't provide an open API for interacting with their mail services so someone can write a better bridge, and their bridge is very slow, disconnects repeatedly, and basically makes any migrations impossible. If you're willing to start over with an empty mailbox, maybe ProtonMail is for you. I eventually gave up trying to move my mail account in (many tries, with Thunderbird in chunks, with Lamiral's awesome imapsync tool, you name it), and let them keep the money I paid for a year of ProtonMail Visionary. I ended up using StartMail from the StartPage people. It's not perfect, but I was actually able to migrate to it and use it effectively.

201 points by _eigenfoo 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Off topic I had a proton email created when it was announced & didn't use it. I found out that my mailbox decryption for that email id is not working (not sure how, I use password manager) & I haven't set a recovery email to recover my account. I saw a HN comment earlier telling, the user had recovered their Proton mail account by answering few questions to customer service. I attempted the same, the issue is that I used VPN to create the email id & didn't provide any personal details for the account. They asked questions like, -Do you remember the exact time and date when your account was created? -When was the last time you have accessed your account? -What is your display name? -Do you remember to which addresses you have sent your last messages? -Do you remember the email subjects of the last sent messages? I tried to answer the account creation date by using the date of password creation in my password manager (the login password was working); but the support didn't seem to buy it. They were insistent on, -Can you please tell us if you remember from which addresses have you received your last few messages? -Could you tell us if you have used the ProtonMail account to sign up for some other web services? I told them, I don't remember receiving email from anyone else & I didn't sign up for any service -There is a service that the xxxxx@protonmail.com address has been used to sign up for. Can you please tell us what that service is? I told them again that I didn't sign up for any service using that email id. - Can you tell us the full address below? no-xxxxx@drxxxxx.com Even though I could obviously guess the username of that email id. I told them that I didn't sign up with such service, that it must be a spam mail sent by some service. They said, - If you have not signed up for this service, the account probably belongs to someone else. Then I typed 'no-xxxxx@drxxxxx.com' on Google Search, the instant results gave 'no-reply@dropbox.com' as the first result. I sent them, Hey sorry, I remembered the service. I did signed up for Dropbox & used the account for a while. The email id you asked was, no-reply@dropbox.com They reset the account & I got access to it. Edit: Had to fix the xxxxx.

tristor 7y ago
There’s two separate passwords. If you reset your encryption password it’s supposed to make all prior received mail unreadable. Was this the case for you?
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  Correct, existing emails become inaccessible when the mailbox is reset. Can be recovered though, if there's a backup & the original decryption password is found again.
  - dontbenebby 7y ago
    But is your threat model someone reading your old email? For most people the big risk is that their email can be leveraged to gain access to banks, social media etc through password resets.
    - Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
      I agree, access to other accounts is of greater threat. When I created this account, I wanted to build upon the premise of privacy of proton mail & so I created using VPN, with no personal link whatsoever (hence no recovery email). Unfortunately when my decryption password failed, I had no means of recovery until I attempted to talk through support successfully.
      - dontbenebby 7y ago
        Hm. I once had an issue with a decryption password failing despite using a manager (not on Protonmail) It ended up being that a trailing newline got added. It's a long shot but worth looking into...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mercora 7y ago

wil421 7y ago

Anyone using ProtonMail regularly? I created an account but haven’t used it much. How are your experiences? Any iOS users who can comment on their experience with proton mail and the default mail client? I don’t went to switch to something that won’t be around in a decade or so.

ravenstine 7y ago
I love Protonmail! I use it both on desktop and Android. It's interface is very basic, but that's the way I like it. I pay for it as well as ProtonVPN so they will hopefully stay in business.
robotmay 7y ago
Yep I swapped to it last year and I've had no problems. Works very well for me.
diehunde 7y ago
Works pretty well on iOS and desktop using the bridge. Has been my main account for about a year now.
vr46 7y ago
I have used it for my main email account for some years now. The web client is fine, the iOS client is fine, and the ProtonMail Bridge allows me to bring it into my Mail.app. The encryption is great and the anti-spam works well enough. No complaints.
jamil7 7y ago
Been using it as my main account for over a year, have an old gmail account which I'm giving a bit longer grace period until old clients and contacts stop emailing. Using it on iOS, it's works great but don't expect many features. Same can be said of the webapp. I use a custom domain so I'm not worried about it shutting down, I'll migrate to something else. One issue I've had is emails from new contacts sometimes showing up in junk.
- arosier 7y ago

throwaway_x13zd 7y ago

While I appreciate advances in cryptography, I would rather protonmail work on things like getting their bridge returning properly formatted IMAP responses[1] so we can use whatever clients we want with it. The mobile experience is fine, but desktop is brutal unless you happen to prefer one of the few clients they support. [1] https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/429 https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/429

keiferski 7y ago

This gets asked often, but as someone wanting to get away from Gmail, any thoughts on Fastmail vs. ProtonMail?

drexlspivey 7y ago
I've used both for some time and decided to move to Fastmail and so far I am very satisfied. Fastmail does one thing and does it well, email. There is no PGP support. Protonmail does PGP in the browser via a library that they serve you themselves which I find less than ideal. If you want to do it outside the browser you need to have a subscription and download a bridge software that needs to be running on your machine. With Fastmail if I need PGP in my email I do it via the GPGTools plugin for the Mail app which uses the system gpg installation.
reacharavindh 7y ago
I use both. FastMail: + simple, lean, paid email. + fast web interface ++ working full text search( not just subject line) + No ads. + iOS App. Fast and simple. + Integrated calendar - No encryption. - group calendar has been a pain or non intuitive. Protonmail: + Encrypted + Lean, safe web interface + IOS App that works. + or - Free as in cost. - - - No Full text search. - can't really configure your chosen email client to it... - last time I tried, dragged and dropped images disappeared. May have improved UI now. I only use protonmail for automated alerts and system originated communication.
- maggit 7y ago
  About this point: "- can't really configure your chosen email client to it..." Do you have any experience with using the IMAP Bridge? It is a daemon you run locally that translates between Protonmail's internal protocol and IMAP, to let you use your email client of choice. I'm using it and it seems to be working OK in my experience, but I don't use my Protonmail account heavily.
  - badpun 7y ago
    My experience with the bridge (on an account with maybe 10k emails) was that it was unfortunately unusable.

elliotec 7y ago

To answer everyone here, I've been using ProtonMail for 6 months now (and protonvpn) and I love it. The iOS app is great, the web view could be improved but isn't bad.

lvh 7y ago

X25519 is great, but it doesn’t make Protonmail (really, OpenPGPjs) a net safe communications mechanism. It inherits all of the flaws inherent in OpenPGP, including optional authenticators (which lead to EFAIL), kitchen sink bulk protocols complete with negotiation (did you know your public keys specify what algorithms you like?), lack of forward secrecy, repudiability, et cetera. We should stop using RSA. But RSA isn’t what was keeping OpenPGP from being a great secure communications channel. That’s aside from the question if it’s meaningful to say you control your keys if you use OpenPGPjs served up every time by a third party. (I say that being extremely on the PGP apologia side of the scale compared to some of my peers!)

Forbo 7y ago
Shouldn't it be possible to have the library built in to the browser? I can't seem to find any information on attempts to make that happen, either directly by browser developers or as an add-on.
- lvh 7y ago
  Sure: that’s WebCrypto. The main problem it solves is that you don’t really want your AES implementation to be in JS which is only a small part of the problem. You still have the problem that the site would be telling you to do with all of that good crypto, and you still need to do key management. You could do all of this well if WebCrypto was good and you had a WebExtension, or an Electron app, or some other way where you weren’t just going to do whatever the website tells you to do. (That is not a blanket security recommendation in favor of Electron. XSS does not normally get me RCE.)
  - Boulth 7y ago
    Interestingly there is such an extension: https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages tl;dr version is one pins all resources on the page with Subresource Integrity hashes and signs the page. The extension verifies the signature matches before rendering anything.

__ralston3 7y ago

As a PM customer of almost a year, I'd definitely say they should focus more efforts on the UI/UX as opposed to advancing the crypto for now. What's the point of having the world's most cryptologically advanced, unusable inbox. Specifically conversation threading/nesting. I don't expect everyone to be as streamlined as say a Gmail, but basic "1 conversation - 1 email" in the inbox would be nice for starters.

calvinmorrison 7y ago
I really really really like thier conversation threading. Because I get so many recurring transactional emails (eg bank statements, auto pay, etc) it makes it very easy for me to view ALL of these in one thread, and not take up a lot of space in my inbox. Honestly I wish other providers would give me this sort of 'transactional email' conversation tie up because it's convienent. I can see in the last 12 months for example, I have always paid my gas bill on time, at a glance too!
phito 7y ago
conversation threading works well for me as long as the subject don't change But I agree with you that the UI lacks several things, like searching in the body of the messages...

philshem 7y ago

Unsolicited opinion on ProtonMail: I'm a big fan. It's not as flashy as gmail, but so far my mails haven't been marked as spam, which was happening with zoho. Unfortunately, zoho doesn't provide free email forwarding, so the migration to PM is taking longer than hoped for. I'll probably soon subscribe to PM for two reasons: to use the @pm.me domain for outgoing (currently only incoming), and for custom domain support. Also subscribing gets IMAP support (I think).

wtmt 7y ago
Note that IMAP support is only through a bridge software that you have to install and configure.

KirinDave 7y ago

This announcement is an example of why I am not using ProtonMail anymore. There are a lot of things they do that sound very good on marketing materials, but upon examination are security theater. For example, they claim, "We have chosen a particular elliptic curve system known as X25519, which is fast, secure, and particularly resistant to timing attacks. It’s simple to implement". However, previously they've said that they use Indutny's library [0]. This library is somewhat infamous because its leadership deciding to discard any pretense of defending against timing attacks on the grounds that would make the library "too slow." [1] There are other options. They could have used something with good timing attack resistance from WebCrypto. Those options exist. Folks with more skill than I have recommended P-256 as an option. [0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-3-release/ https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-3-release/ [1]: https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/128#issuecomment-302593662 https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/128#issuecomment-...

anfedorov 7y ago
Worth noting, in similar vein — https://protonvpn.com/support/macos-ikev2-vpn-setup/ https://protonvpn.com/support/macos-ikev2-vpn-setup/
- KirinDave 7y ago
  I don't know OSX very well these days. Is that... is that actually installing a new global SSL trust root? Doesn't that mean ProtonMail now can seamlessly MitM all SSL connections on that machine? Please tell me I'm reading that wrong, because I don't recall doing this for ProtonVPN on linux.
  - deagle50 7y ago
    In the instructions they ask the user to "always trust" the cert for all use cases, including SSL. If you do that, any app that uses OS certs can be MITMed. It should be enough to trust the cert for IPSec only.
    - 7y ago

motohagiography 7y ago

I like protonmail and will likely move my domains to it. I don't use it for regular social, dating, or sales emails because it is a privacy brand that creates cognitive friction with people who don't get privacy and security. If I wanted to grow protonmail, I would emphasize users moving domains to it because while the brand has exceptional trustworthiness, anything security and privacy themed runs into the "tacti-cool," problem, where even if it's the best available and used by real operators, it triggers peoples sense of illegitimacy, and depends with users who identify with a "rebel," e.g. "losing" team who are not attractive to other users. IMO, the same problem killed Silent Circle, and the rest of the cryptophone market. When you look at who overcame the tacti-cool problem in security and privacy, the way a brand like arcteryx did it in clothing, Apple's iPhone has done it in hardware, WhatsApp did it for messengers, and protonmail is just on the cusp of it. There is an opportunity to build a new privacy brand that would be as big as a FAANG, and if I were running it, I'd fold protonmail into it.

brendyn 7y ago

I was silly enough to sign up without looking in to it because it was recommended on HN. Then I realised they need this bridge software to connect. I asked about it stating I'd like to build it my self and confirm it is libre software. They just sent back a generic link to a .deb beta file. I had a look and its got this eula.txt with the standard you-have-no-rights. Messaged them again asking what they intended to do license-wise and they ignored me. Someone else has written their own bridge and put it on github but it's a bit of a joke to have to do that. Not sure what to move to now, mailbox.org was another I saw recommended. My email history: - gmail.com > US spying, escape. - lavabit.com > Shutdown due to US government legal attack. - Ran my own server > Too much bother, gave up. - openmailbox.org > Died for months, ran away with my money. - protonmail.com > Sketchy, cancelling it now. - Free mailbox.org with custom domain.

vinay427 7y ago
You could try Tutanota. Their Android app is even available on F-Droid and doesn't use Google Play Services.
- dchest 7y ago
  Seems like another crypto startup that doesn't understand crypto: https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58 https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58
really3452 7y ago
Seconded. Anyone know of a good email workflow? Rolling your own server no longer seems practical. From what I have read most email providers now simply blacklist the email address of an email from sent from a non-major email service.
- wolco 7y ago
  Use your isp for emailing out and receive email on your own server.
justusthane 7y ago

ahelwer 7y ago

Love ProtonMail. Over the past few years I've slowly switched more and more of my usage onto it as my confidence in the service grows. Gmail now occupies a similar niche as Facebook in my life, where I keep a vestigial & largely empty account for those few organizations which still insist on proprietary apps (Google groups/docs, Facebook groups/chats) for organization.

doomrobo 7y ago

Slightly OT, but I didn't see an important question being asked: What is the motivating threat model of ProtonMail? If I just want to access my email securely, that's done by HTTPS. If I want an end-to-end encrypted solution, ProtonMail can provide that, though only for emails between ProtonMail users. For e2e outside of ProtonMail, I can use PGP. From what I understand, ProtonMail makes all the PGP stuff easier by baking it into their UI. Is there anything else it offers other than this convenience? Are they encrypting incoming mail with recipient keys and throwing away the original? If so, who is that protecting, and against whom? Presumably the plaintext was stored by the sender and possibly seen by intermediary servers. Can I get similar security properties by periodically downloading my email and deleting it off the server (assuming the deletion is actually happening)? These are honest questions. I admit I'm skeptical of PM's utility, but I'd this fits someone's usecase and threat model, I can't argue with that.

scotch_drinker 7y ago
I'm using ProtonMail because I'm trying to de-Google-Amazon-Facebook my life somewhat as another user mentions. I'm tired of being the product and am willing to pay for certain things.
- doomrobo 7y ago
  So why ProtonMail over any other email provider, besides GMail? Would you be willing to pay for email?
arosier 7y ago
ProtonMail employee here: Are they encrypting incoming mail with recipient keys and throwing away the original? Yes we do. This mainly protects against service level requests for data in the future. Can I get similar security properties by periodically downloading my email and deleting it off the server (assuming the deletion is actually happening)? Yup, assuming you want to deal with that. ProtonMail is designed to give you a privacy focused option for email.

usr1987 7y ago

I tried proton with my own domain... its a hasle, and how about address book sync and calendar?

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

does it matter if its traffic is routed through counties with a history of breaching privacy?

jgowdy 7y ago

I quit ProtonMail / ProtonVPN after trying over and over and over again to import mail through their IMAP bridge. They won't provide an open API for interacting with their mail services so someone can write a better bridge, and their bridge is very slow, disconnects repeatedly, and basically makes any migrations impossible. If you're willing to start over with an empty mailbox, maybe ProtonMail is for you. I eventually gave up trying to move my mail account in (many tries, with Thunderbird in chunks, with Lamiral's awesome imapsync tool, you name it), and let them keep the money I paid for a year of ProtonMail Visionary. I ended up using StartMail from the StartPage people. It's not perfect, but I was actually able to migrate to it and use it effectively.