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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

JS crypto makes sense, but I'm confused as to why a browser extension is necessary—you can safely deliver the JS crypto solution over an https connection, so the critical component is keeping the user's private decryption key distinct from their login/password.

Seems a shame to depend on a browser extension—you lose most of the advantages of webmail when you can't log into it from anywhere.

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The usual argument against JS crypto is that a compromised (either technically or legally) host could send a malicious version of the code to steal your keys/data.

A browser extension could in theory be used to verify the code against a signature or something to that effect, or it could sandbox the crypto routines and keys from the app itself (though that wouldn't prevent the app from stealing the decrypted data)

What needs to happen for this to become generally usable is for the crypto part to be built into the browser - that way you only need to trust your browser and not a somewhat random plugin, nor the .js being served from a particular server.

And it'll "just work", so ordinary people have a chance to use and trust it too.

Sure, eventually, however I'd be just as comfortable using a plugin from, say, the EFF as I would having it built into the browser. It would be a fine stepping-stone (similar to how Google Gears contained many features which influenced HTML5)

And as I mentioned, merely having the crypto parts and key management built into the browser isn't good enough because a malicious site could still trick you into decrypting data which it could then steal, even if the keys themselves are perfectly safe.

As tlrobinson says, the problem is that we dont want you to have to trust us. One of our goals is to minimize the amount of trust you have to place in us. Therefore, we want you to be safe if we are forced to try and steal your keys. See my other comment for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245617

Gotcha, makes sense. Still, I wonder if there might be a clever solution which exploits the same-domain policy to isolate the decryption activity from the rest of the app. That would considerably reduce the attack surface if it handles collecting the key and then you just postMessage strings back and forth.

As you hint at in the other comment, there are various ways that third-parties could vouch for the code running on the decryption domain.

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