Proton Mail is famous for its privacy and security. The cool trick they do is that not even Proton can decode your email. That’s because it never exists on their systems as plain text — it’s always…
The cool trick they do is that not even Proton can decode your email. That’s because it never exists on their systems as plain text — it’s always encrypted! The most Proton can do if a government comes calling is give them the metadata — who you emailed and when — but not the text itself.
This is not actually true when using Proton’s web mail interface, because the encryption and decryption is performed by javascript which is sent from Proton’s server to the (signed-in, easy to identify) user every time they load the page. So, when the government comes calling, they can simply ask Proton to send certain users some slightly different javascript once which exfiltrates the targeted users’ keys to them. sadtrombone.mp3
that’s utterly trivial for a sufficiently paranoid user’s browser to detect, and damning for proton if it is (not to mention, pushing hostile JavaScript doesn’t work for users on the imap bridge or using mobile apps they update via methods that can’t easily be tracked like Obtainium on Android)
the mechanisms proton uses to exfiltrate encrypted data and get their users arrested are far more subtle and deniable than that basic shit. specifically, they’ve been silently overcomplying with law enforcement data requests for years, which has led to documented arrests of activists, and all of their LLM features represent a significant data leak, as all of them are implemented in a way that sends cleartext to proton’s servers while maintaining the illusion that the feature is more secure than it is.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were doing more evil shit than the above, but I would be very surprised if any of it were in the form of JavaScript that the user could, you know, deobfuscate and read
This is not actually true when using Proton’s web mail interface, because the encryption and decryption is performed by javascript which is sent from Proton’s server to the (signed-in, easy to identify) user every time they load the page. So, when the government comes calling, they can simply ask Proton to send certain users some slightly different javascript once which exfiltrates the targeted users’ keys to them. sadtrombone.mp3
that’s utterly trivial for a sufficiently paranoid user’s browser to detect, and damning for proton if it is (not to mention, pushing hostile JavaScript doesn’t work for users on the imap bridge or using mobile apps they update via methods that can’t easily be tracked like Obtainium on Android)
the mechanisms proton uses to exfiltrate encrypted data and get their users arrested are far more subtle and deniable than that basic shit. specifically, they’ve been silently overcomplying with law enforcement data requests for years, which has led to documented arrests of activists, and all of their LLM features represent a significant data leak, as all of them are implemented in a way that sends cleartext to proton’s servers while maintaining the illusion that the feature is more secure than it is.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were doing more evil shit than the above, but I would be very surprised if any of it were in the form of JavaScript that the user could, you know, deobfuscate and read