this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
287 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
57997 readers
3140 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AFAIK, Proton's standard is PGP, they just manage the keys for you (I'm guessing keys are AES encrypted and decrypted on the client) (source):
Tuta doesn't use PGP, but it uses open encryption standards for it. So it's a wash IMO since both are only used for internal emails (within their respective platforms).
For messages to external email addresses, they use pretty much the same thing: password-protected access through their platform (i.e. you click a link to Proton or Tuta and enter the password to decrypt).
I don't know about other email services, but those two both seem pretty good, regardless of whether PGP or GPG is used internally. I haven't reviewed the source code of either, but both have open clients so maybe I'll get around to it at some point.
I think you are agreeing with me. I like Proton because it uses a standard protocol and it provides a migration path from unencrypted to encrypted.
PGP and GPG are effectively synonyms in this context. (GPG is just an implementation of PGP)
Yes, agreeing in general, just with some clarifications. I think clarifications are important when talking about a product focused on privacy and security.
I was responding to this part:
Proton uses standard PGP AFAIK (and yes, PGP vs GPG is irrelevant), so your subject line and attachment names are not end-to-end encrypted:
Depending on your threat model, this may or may not be an issue.
At least one other provider (Tuta in my example) doesn't use PGP internally because using SMTP internally w/ PGP for the body leaks the subject line and other metadata. Neither have released the source to their backend, and I haven't read the client code, so I don't know if there are any other concerns.
That I think Proton is absolutely fantastic, and I used it for a few years with absolutely no issue. I do think it's important to be accurate, though, since others may not like the tradeoffs. Proton has a bunch of other benefits as well over alternatives, such as:
Yeah, any email provider will use standard SMTP, otherwise it's not email. The differences are whatever happens after it reaches Proton's servers.