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Least you can do is document somewhere that you are doing it, and not silently do it. WhatsApp doesn’t keep it a secret, exactly.

input_sh 3y ago
I've never tried Proton myself, but I don't understand how you can consider it to be a "secret". It's literally the only thing I know about them: they've established themselves as a "more secure" email provider, and they back that up by abstracting some of the pain points of using GPG, which is a completely unusable protocol for normal people. If it was some other email provider that did the same, I'd 100% agree. But with Protonmail, GPG is pretty much the entire reason we're all aware of their existence.
- lxgr 3y ago
  What they do for Proton-to-Proton messages is their business, since they own all the fallout from people losing their keys to that, but to just blindly encrypt to a key somebody might or might not still own the private decryption key for is just reckless. I just tested it myself, and while there is a visual indicator of that automatic key lookup happening, there's zero way to disable it, nor to even verify which key it picked or to display the key hash. It seems like a terrible solution halfway between convenience/opportunistic encryption and actual security, combining the downsides of either (a high risk of sending messages the recipient won't be able to decrypt and a moderate risk of encrypting to a key other than the expected one).
twiss 3y ago
Yeah, we'll work to improve the documentation on this. Though.. note that WhatsApp doesn't have any documentation on their key discovery either, because WhatsApp is not a federated system. Achieving automatic end-to-end encryption in a federated system, when it wasn't there before, isn't so easy. So there's bound to be some growing pains, but we're still trying :)
- MKRhere 3y ago
  Are you with Proton? Maybe the documentation you need is just a lock on the sent email that says "Used key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org", and the recipient could also have a cleartext message saying "Encrypted with key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org"?
deleted 3y ago
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input_sh 3y ago

I've never tried Proton myself, but I don't understand how you can consider it to be a "secret". It's literally the only thing I know about them: they've established themselves as a "more secure" email provider, and they back that up by abstracting some of the pain points of using GPG, which is a completely unusable protocol for normal people. If it was some other email provider that did the same, I'd 100% agree. But with Protonmail, GPG is pretty much the entire reason we're all aware of their existence.

lxgr 3y ago
What they do for Proton-to-Proton messages is their business, since they own all the fallout from people losing their keys to that, but to just blindly encrypt to a key somebody might or might not still own the private decryption key for is just reckless. I just tested it myself, and while there is a visual indicator of that automatic key lookup happening, there's zero way to disable it, nor to even verify which key it picked or to display the key hash. It seems like a terrible solution halfway between convenience/opportunistic encryption and actual security, combining the downsides of either (a high risk of sending messages the recipient won't be able to decrypt and a moderate risk of encrypting to a key other than the expected one).

twiss 3y ago

Yeah, we'll work to improve the documentation on this. Though.. note that WhatsApp doesn't have any documentation on their key discovery either, because WhatsApp is not a federated system. Achieving automatic end-to-end encryption in a federated system, when it wasn't there before, isn't so easy. So there's bound to be some growing pains, but we're still trying :)

MKRhere 3y ago
Are you with Proton? Maybe the documentation you need is just a lock on the sent email that says "Used key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org", and the recipient could also have a cleartext message saying "Encrypted with key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org"?

deleted 3y ago

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