The new ProtonMail has passed its independent security audit
protonmail.com
protonmail.com
Very glad to see the security audit in any case.
In addition to the subpar UI, I was trying to import my (admittedly large) gmail mailbox into Protonmail, and it just did not work. I let it run for days, had to restart it, repeated the process for weeks, and after about 4 weeks I just had to give up…
It’s a shame because I really appreciate the security aspects of it, and the fact that they’re a small company / underdog.
But there’s just too much friction.
But it‘s not only the app that is bad, the web client was quite functional for a while apart from the missing login persistence. Then came the new UI now it just kind of works. Try to move/tag many mails after each other? Now you also have to deal with clicking away success boxes as they start piling up and overlapping the very UI elements you are trying to reach. There are threads but for some reason they are way more cumbersome to use than GMail’s. Everything is gigantic now as well. I haven‘t checked yet but during the beta I could just not find some settings anymore. Hope they got added before launch.
Once companies grow past a handful of employees they usually go from everyone being a generalist who can work on every part of all their product to having specialists who only can deal with some of what the company does.
The various sites that report corporate information put the number of Proton employees in the 160-250 range. They are almost certainly well into the specialist phase. The people working on calendar and VPN and whatever would likely not be able to help with mobile email if they were shifted to that. If mobile email needs more work than those currently working on it can do, Proton needs to bring in more mobile and/or email specialists.
It would only make sense then to stop calendar and VPN work if they do not have sufficient budget to bring in people to help with mobile email and need to lay off people from other projects to free up the money.
Interesting point.
At the same time, I think it won't take long at all for someone who develops a calendar mobile app to switch to working on an email mobile app. -- But maybe you meant the email web client? (Web vs native development?)
I think you're right that a VPN and related Linux kernel and networking is a different type of specialization, yes.
On this subject, I thought the recent upgrade of the email web client was nice. Maybe we can hope for something similar with mobile soon?
(How many emails do you get per day?)
The UI is still clunky, and paging through the inbox is really terrible. Now they will promote their bridge to allow you to use Outlook or whatever, but that's not a solution for some of us.
I assume their need for revenue is what drives the features-before-improvements approach, but I know it is costing them some potential customers.
Nowadays I only use PM for special occasions, such as needing a temporary private email conversation with someone (who also sets up a new temp PM account).
I have found Tutanota to be much better in terms of usability. I can't speak for their security quality compared to PM, but honestly, unless you're only communicating with other local users, your emails are unencrypted at the other end. So the whole encryption topic is moot in many cases.
The whole complaint above is about the web UI and mentions that the bridge isn't an option/solution for everyone.
That and the total lack of useful search sent me back to big G.
Just how bad is the search? Google's Gmail search is hot garbage.
I have 1 starred email with the subject "benefits info" that contains some info I reference semi regularly. I can't search and find it, even if I copy the subject and paste it into search.
My partner has similar issues, the search is mostly useless.
* Clarification: it's not that my search results are polluted other emails, that specific email does not show up at all in the results.
The hacker's solution would be to put sqlite inside a truecrypt volume I suppose.
Edit: mount it over sshfs if you need end-to-end encryption. And pray that truecrypt and sqlite have optimized their read/write operations well enough.
Maybe I'll reevaluate switching again, thanks!
The packages are pretty good value IMO. For something like 100 euros per year you get secure email, two custom domains, and VPN. For someone who just needs exactly that for their personal websites and daily driver usage it’s great.
While this is unrelated to the core security of the application from a technical perspective, to me it seems shockingly sloppy and evidence of a severe lack of security mindset within the development organization.
For comparison, gmail sends a confirmation code to the destination inbox that must be entered into the source email account.
A possible mitigation for this would be to support loading the site as a Secure Bookmark.[0] There might be technical and UX issues with doing this, but it would be interesting to know if it was at least possible to make it available as an option.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lavabit-founder-fought-9-mo...
Use PFS..
From what I understand, some cryptocurrency DApps like Uniswap[0] are using this route.
I'm not sure if you actually need a trustworthy backend, or rather, if the frontend is encrypting its state before sending it to the backend, then the worst a malicious backend can do is delete or replay your data. By including timestamps and replicating your state to multiple independent backends, that risk can be largely mitigated.
Is this just conspiracy theories, or is there something to actually be concerned about?
When I moved an old e-mail domain to ProtonMail, the number of spam e-mails hitting my inbox increased dramatically. So it's not even close to as good as its competitors in this regard.
I moved to Tutanota. I now get even more spam :(. Google, Zoho and Yandex handle spam better (IMHO).
Regarding ProtonMail, they will tell you something like this:
Moving the messages to spam will automatically add the address to your blacklist.
All blocklists are useless in some contexts. There's not even a silver-ish bullet against spam. Sender blacklist however is one of the most effective ones, but at some point yeah you might have to create filters to match certain subjects and stuff.
I guess ProtonMail could hire someone to just improve spam filtering, that'd be the only thing that'd rise the filtering quality really.
(I do realize I can create an explicit filter rule to avoid this, but at this point I just want to see how it plays out.)
More interestingly, DKIM is "neutral" too. The message body doesn't seem to be modified by the forwarding mail server as far as I can tell... guess this might be canonical's fault after all? It's been going on for months, how am I the only one that's noticed it?
ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com;
dkim=neutral (body hash did not verify) header.i=@canonical.com header.s=20210705 header.b=im31FPsM;
spf=neutral (google.com: XXX is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ubuntu-security-announce-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com) smtp.mailfrom=ubuntu-security-announce-bounces@lists.ubuntu.com;
dmarc=fail (p=NONE sp=NONE dis=NONE) header.from=canonical.com
Right now it seems that it's `lists.ubuntu.com` and `canonical.com` in both cases, Canonical could fix SPF and/or DKIM, for the very least for their own e-mails forwarded by their own relay.
In the end the issue might be that some big vendor is sending similar letters that are *not* spam, so some simple bayesian or even a NN can't mark it confidently as spam.
There aren't enough words to describe how difficult the problem of spam really is.
While errors always happen and it is a good thing they found them during beta, I would definitely not say "the final report was overwhelmingly positive, and the audit uncovered no major issues or security vulnerabilities" (blog post).
Quite the opposite: XSS is the major attack vector of a web app for encrypted mail as it most probably enables access to plaintexts.
Am I misunderstanding the report here?
disclaimer: i work for a competitor and we discovered less severe attack vectors in the past but even then sent out notices to all users informing them about the timeframe of the vulnerability and such.
> Prior to their release, the source code of both the new ProtonMail and Proton Calendar underwent an extensive security audit. We are happy to announce the final report was overwhelmingly positive, and the audit uncovered no major issues or security vulnerabilities.
This report was done before the release of the new software, and important issues fixed. What they said was accurate given there was only one medium severity finding, and no highs or critical. For example, the site now returns a CSP preventing inline JS so this wouldn't work anymore even if they didn't fix the underlying XSS.
The fact that exploiting this required the user to intentionally right click and show the image in a new tab (since it already renders it inline w/o xss) is why it was categorized that way since it's unlikely someone would do this by default.
Most companies never disclose anything like this, so them disclosing there was a vulnerability found in a report they paid for and then published isn't really a strike against them and I'm fine with this language. It's a little marketing speak but I don't agree it's inaccurate for them to say so
Oh, yes, I did, sorry! I thought this was found in production code.
I do support them publishing this and like I said: The code is audited to find exactly these kinds of errors, so I am not at all trying to shame them here. Their process worked, they found and fixed the vulnerabilities.
OTOH, not having a proper CSP preventing inline JS, the innerHTML usages and that XSS together does not go too well with the overall extremely positive sound of the headlines. All those three are in the 101 of secure web app development.
Aaand, with the numbers of users they have, tons of them will right click and open in a new tab every hour. Its also easily exploitable: send an image with very small text. However, being in a different tab i am unsure how much info you would be able to steal, but sessions/tokens would be possible I guess.
Because of the nature of their encryption, you can only search using email subject lines with their web clients. I run the Proton Bridge on my laptop just in case I need to search my email. Since most cellphones now have a lot of storage, I really wish the ProtonMail web client would optionally maintain a search index in local device storage (as an option). This would allow me to search my emails on any device. Or, they could make the Bridge available on iOS and Android - this would allow the use of any email clients on mobile and fix search.
We need more people using end-to-end encrypted communication, for these technologies to be useful. They are not effective if only one side wants to encrypt.
I think we should generally also support privacy products.
Really what would be better called for here is a new protocol that can degrade gracefully, but it seems they've only given us a new app. Still it is nice to have people working on the problem.
Does Autocrypt meet that definition?
Sadly, for the last 3 years, ProtonMail has resisted implementing it (unlike Posteo, for example), using FUD tactics to justify themselves: