• 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 15th, 2023

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  • With Simplelogin integration Proton does PGP encryption because effectively all emails are forwarded by a simplelogin address. I have just tested to be sure, and I can confirm it is the case. I agree though that this only protects “my side”, which is why I said that it doesn’t provide all the PGP features.

    Publishing your PGP public key next to your email doesn’t require “wasting a domain” or anything like that

    It does if I don’t have any key that I use for emails. My key(s) is bound to the Proton account with the other domains I use, so for this domain I would need to either add it (back) to Proton (easier option, but “wastes” a domain) or just generate and manage a key myself, that I can then even add manually to Proton, but I didn’t bother doing this just yet. I am not going to use any other public key I have because I wanted specifically to keep this domain separated from my identity.

    I just thought it was amusing that you didn’t seem to actually follow your own advice.

    FWIW, I do follow the described setup for everything personal, which is what matters to me. As I said, ~1/2 months ago I did have my PGP key because I enrolled the domain into Proton, which if anything is a testament to how annoying it is having to manage keys myself (which I already do for signing commits etc.). Maybe I will spend some time to polish the setup, eventually.



  • Yep, I am aware of the contradiction. I used to, but since then I moved to an alias as it was not worth wasting a domain for a single address. I may spend eventually the time to setup PGP for the alias itself, but I just didn’t. It’s a Proton alias, so I get anyway PGP encryption, though (obviously without all the features, but good enough for the near-zero volume I currently have).


  • Not that I know, which is the reason why I essentially didn’t consider those threats relevant for my personal threat model. However, it’s also possible it happened and it was never discovered. The point is that there are risks associated with having the same provider having access to both the emails (and the operations around them) and the keys/crypto operations.

    The cost of stealthily compromising a secure email company is simply disproportionate compared to the gain from accessing my emails. Likewise, it’s unrealistic to think some sophisticated attacker would target me specifically to the point that they will discover and then compromise the specific tooling I am using to access/encrypt/decrypt emails. Also, a $5 wrench could probably achieve the same goal in a quicker and cheaper way.

    If I were a Snowden-level person, I would probably consider that though, as it’s possible that the US government would try to coerce -say- Proton in serving bad JS code to user X. For most people I argue these are theoretical attacks that do not pose concrete risk.


  • Thanks, I will go and double check, I am sure there are more typos!

    I honestly didn’t think at all about the use of checkmarks/crosses and the fact that it can be misinterpreted, I will add a disclaimer.

    A bigger issue IMO is how you describe email encryption in transit as a matter of fact, but according to Google transparency report[1] there are still domains that do not support in transit encryption, and, what’s worse, when you send an email you can’t tell if it will be encrypted or not.

    you are right. The reason why I took that for granted is because I assumed the scenario in which people use the “mainstream” providers. I was looking at data and I think Outlook and Gmail alone make up more than 50% of the market share. I made an assumption which I considered fair, as 99%+ of the users do not need to worry about this at all. However, this is interesting data and I might add a note about it as well, so thanks!


  • Thanks!

    Can you make the images clickable? They’re impossible to read at that size.

    I will look into it, there might be a zola option for it. If there is, sure!

    This paragraph should probably mention that this won’t work if the provider uses E2EE

    That paragraph is in the context of what I call “transparent encryption”, which means E2EE works until the provider is not compromised and the E2EE is effectively broken by delivering malicious software or disclosing the key. E2EE is as resilient as the security of the provider, which is why picking a trusted one is important. Of course, compromising the provider and breaking the E2EE is quite complex.




  • Django Unchained

    Isn’t it ironic that a movie with so many uses of that word helped you understand that word better?

    To me it seems a very good reason to believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of the syntax of the word, but definitely oppose the use when the semantic is the despicable one.