1y ago

Proton Mail CEO Calls New Address Verification Feature 'Blockchain in a Very Pure Form'

tech.slashdot.org /story/23/11/16/141213/proton-mail-ceo-calls-new-address-verification-feature-blockchain-in-a-very-pure-form

Proton Mail, the leading privacy-focused email service, is making its first foray into blockchain technology with Key Transparency, which will allow users to verify email addresses. From a report: In an interview with Fortune, CEO and founder Andy Yen made clear that although the new feature uses blockchain, the key technology behind crypto, Key Transparency isn't "some sketchy cryptocurrency" linked to an "exit scam." A student of cryptography, Yen added that the new feature is "blockchain in a very pure form," and it allows the platform to solve the thorny issue of ensuring that every email address actually belongs to the person who's claiming it.

Proton Mail uses end-to-end encryption, a secure form of communication that ensures only the intended recipient can read the information. Senders encrypt an email using their intended recipient's public key -- a long string of letters and numbers -- which the recipient can then decrypt with their own private key. The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. "Maybe it's the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I'm somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key," he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack," like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.

Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can't be altered. Yen realized that putting users' public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them -- and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. "In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging," Yen said.

Curious if anyone here would use a feature like this? It sounds neat but I don't think I'm going to be needing a feature like this on a day-to-day basis, though I could see use cases for folks handling sensitive information.

150 comments

I’d absolutely use this. I’m glad to see people using this incredibly powerful concept to solve problems that would literally be impossible to solve without it. It is especially encouraging that they used Monero since it has an extra layer of untraceability built-in. Blockchain is experiencing kind of a backlash in public perception, but like tech closely related to it like NFT’s, it is a VERY viable idea that just so happens to be tainted by greed and disinformation.
Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight...but would also probably:
A. enable the creation of a CBDC (which would also allow the state to REVOKE ownership of your own money)
B. force a state to pick a technology/crypto of choice (and tip the scales toward that crypto)
both of which I somehow am vehemently against yet moderate a (ghosty) community on blockchain voting. 😅
!blockchainvoting@infosec.pub
- Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight
  No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.
  In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
  A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.
  Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
  
  I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
  have you seen any of the research that the US government did on it? Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time. I don't want to write an essay right now but are you truly up to date on this?
  Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
  I COMPLETELY DISAGREE. It should be exactly as hard as it is to freeze the cash of bad actors. That's the point of it. I, of course, happen to be a libertarian socialist/anarcho syndicalist. You happen to be a capitalist. You seem to want be in the camp of "you will own nothing and you will like it" but I just so happen to not trust governments and their decisions. I believe in socialism but have seen it co-opted and destroyed by corruption. Anyway, I don't think that those same clearly corrupted governments should have the unilateral right to prevent me from attemtpting to claw enough back from their corruption and greed to feed my family.
- What does Monero do? Why don't they emulate whatever it is that Monero achieves its reputation and functionality with?
  
  What does Monera do?
  it is a crypto currency that:
  Monero uses three different privacy technologies: ring signatures, ring confidential transactions (RingCT), and stealth addresses. These hide the sender, amount, and receiver in the transaction, respectively. All transactions on the network are private by mandate; there is no way to accidentally send a transparent transaction. This feature is exclusive to Monero. You do not need to trust anyone else with your privacy.
  IMO, as a software engineer, leveraging the network effect of Monero was a wise choice. In decentralized systems, the network effect (the amount of unique, separate nodes on a network) is directly correlated to the security of that network. If I were to transact with you in a public place (like a mall food court), you could correlate the presence of other parties in the food court as unique nodes in a network. The more eyes you have witnessing you transaction, the more intrinsic security that transaction has.
  Another concept that actually comes into play in cryptocurrency-based systems is that the intrinsic value of that token directly relates to the security of the data in its network. That could be another reason that they chose Monero. Since it already has stable value, it offers a pre-existing and stable security solution.
- Yeah my most downvoted comments mention Blockchain 🤣 Capitalism turns everything to shit 💩
- deleted
  
  Thanks for lazily puking a couple of reductive, bankster-funded, cherry-picked, neolib rage-bait videos at me. Did you want to discuss this issue or do you want to lazily let the videos do it for you while forcing me to write essays that will be brigaded by the hivemind?
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  one video the entire cryptocurrency evangelist community can't disprove
  Voting on the blockchain
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  Moxie Marlinspike's My first impressions of web3 is also a very relevant thing to share.
  As a sampler of the points made, web3 is already re-centralizing around gatekeepers because the average person doesn't want to run their own server (or, in the blockchain case, host their own full copy of the blockchain) and, if the supermajority of users can't see you because the gatekeepers block you, then it doesn't really matter that you're technically still up.
  The takeaway on that particular point is that pushing for more and easier data portability is probably the best route in the face of how real-world users behave. (eg. anything stored in a git repository, including GitHub project wiki contents, is a great example of that. You've got your data locally with a simple git clone and you can upload it to a competing service with a simple git push.)
  
  I like Dan Olson's video but I don't think it's truly unassailable. There is some real use cases for block chains in low trust networks. One of those being global monetary policy. Another critic is that web3 applications (like Mastadon and Lemmy ..) I think is moving forward even more so as the age of easy money comes to a full close.

What is wrong with doing something like pgp key servers?
- Key servers can be dishonest, so you need to have another way of verifying that the key you receive is correct.
- Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can't be altered. Yen realized that putting users' public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them -- and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. "In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging," Yen said.
  
  How do you ensure the accuracy of the data going into the block chain in the first place?
- deleted

This is basically like Domain Keys-Identified Mail (DKIM) but for a specific email address, without needing to own a domain to set it up. I'm gonna call it "P(ersonal)KIM" for short.
If this is implemented correctly it'll be a few clicks to set up and then just work in the background to make it harder to impersonate you via email, even if you have a free email address.

It sounds overcomplicated, is there really a need for the blockchain aspect? Could the same security be provided by a simpler method (like how keybase has their identity proofs?) but better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it ig
- PGP solved this a long time ago, but it is difficult to make it user friendly enough for non-technical people to understand and adopt it.
  
  How many people have verified how many people's identity with PGP signatures? Also I'm willing to bet a horribly shocking amount of people would just accept a new key from someone (not necessarily sign it) and trust them regardless.
- Right here:
  Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can’t be altered. Yen realized that putting users’ public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them – and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. “In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging,” Yen said.
  The benefit of doing this with a blockchain instead of a privately held and maintained database is that the latter can be compromised, and you just have to trust "whoever" is maintaining that private database. Blockchain means that the ledger is distributed to many nodes, and any post-entry modification to that chain would be instantly recognized, and marked invalid by the other nodes operating the chain. Besides that, when you're looking up a public key for a recipient on such a blockchain, you would be looking it up at a number of nodes large enough that in order for a malicious entry to come through, they would all have to be modified in the same way, at the same time, and you would have to be asking before the change got flagged. Poisoning blockchain data like this is simply not possible; that's what makes this an especially secure option.
  
  But it’s not public. It’s a private blockchain. The immutable ledger aspect only matters if everyone can see the ledger. Otherwise we take at face value all of the things you said. Assume they run one node and that one node is compromised by a malicious actor. The system fails. Extend it to a limited number of nodes all controlled by SREs and assume an SRE is compromised (this kind of spearphishing is very common). The system fails again.
  Sure, you can creatively figure out a way to manage the risks I’ve mentioned and others I haven’t thought of. The core issue, that it’s not public, still remains. If I’m supposed to trust Proton telling me the person I’m emailing is not the NSA pretending to be that person (as the Proton CEO suggested), I need to trust their verification system.
  
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I would strongly assume Protonmail will be doing this automatically soon, there's no manual day-to-day verification necessary.
Writing to the Blockchain is difficult and takes processing power, reading from it is absolutely trivial though.

I’ll use it once they’ve sorted out CalDAV and CardDAV… it’s only been an open issue for eight fucking years.
- Care to elaborate?
  
  There’s no way to sync contacts and calendars between an iPhone (and other mail clients) and protonmail. The app does one way sync from the phone to protonmail, but not the other way round.
  8 years ago a feature request was made to add support for CardDAV and CalDAV, but even with the release of bridge it’s not there.
  So iOS users have to resort to using other calendar services, or 3rd party bridges to enable it.

deleted
- This is false. Protonmail has supported Web Key Discovery for external domains since 2019: https://proton.me/blog/security-updates-2019
  
  Unfortunately pretty much no one uses openPGP.
  
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Look, another solution without problem.
- Key verification has been a real problem for decades, and AFAIK nobody's made a solution that is simple and effective.
  
  nobody’s made a solution that is simple and effective
  This one isn't that either by the looks of it but it's certainly a problem where something like blockchain could provide a solution.

What should I use for my throw away emails now?

So PM claims it has on the order of 10^8 users. Let's assume each user has one email address with one public ed25519 key, both of which are likely false.
Each key is 32Byte; 32B * 10^8 = 3.2GB.
Could someone do the math how much fiat it'd take to store such an enormous amount of data on the Ethereum or monero blockchains?

So, every identity verification of your email address will be forever in the public domain? That's counter to privacy. Your email address will be married to a block and chain? There is no thorny issue. That's a solution to a problem that hardly anyone has. Ridiculous nonsense.
If you are one of those people that thought CERN was looking out for your privacy, here is the rude awakening.
- It is not counter privacy. It is (potentially) counter anonymity.

The best thing is reading all of this with https://github.com/samhocevar/no-fucking-thanks
- You should first try reading it at all.
  
  I dont want to, I just said it looks interesting if you use that addon.
- This announcement doesn't have anything to do with cryptocurrencies or nfts. I'm not sure if I like the idea yet either, but please don't conflate it with all that other scammy nonsense.
- While it is funny (honestly replacing any tech term with circlejerk in a tech article makes it sound so funny to me, I have the mind of a child), it's not very relevent here.

Who cares about their honeypot
- We now have an unalterable record of exactly who you are for your anonymous email address. For your privacy.

Don't use proton...
You can't just give all of your data to one company and expect it to be private
- Is your suggestion to self host your email or not use email? I'm not sure why you couldn't find a company that you do trust, and proton seems to be one of the most likely candidates.
  
  @volleyballcrocodile @possiblylinux127 What about Disroot ?
  
  deleted

fuck this and blockchain in general so very, very much. time to look for another email provider.
- Do you have valid arguments against this proposal or is it just an emotional reaction caused by a single word?
- Sounds like you're letting emotions cloud your judgement there mate
- FYI. Blockchain is only so very power waster because for cryptocurrency uses the users churn out new rounds continuously as if there is no tomorrow.
  Here, your public key relatively rarely changes. If you had your protonmail account for years, it probably hasn't changed ever yet.
  Maybe I'm wrong in this, but this seems to be similar to what Keybase was doing, and that was a cool idea!

150 comments