Protonmail is certainly one of the more secure mail solutions since it's e2e encrypted not just at rest. On the other hand it doesn't support U2F yet which doesn't bring it to the top in terms of security.
Regarding privacy I would say it's one of the best available solutions since everything is encrypted they can and do not read your email content.
It's still a webapp, fully served from network, without any code signing (not even SRI to match hashes against), except for the TLS layer. AFAIK they don't even have a standalone variant except for the unofficial desktop Electron app, and a beta IMAP bridge for paying customers.
Basically, they still ultimately rely on trust, just like others. While they're drastically different from e.g. Gmail, trust requirement is still there.
If one's well-being really depends on security, it's best to err on side of caution. Meaning, something like MailPile on the client side, very cautious non-automated key exchange, and, optionally, self-hosted email with at-rest encryption (e.g. Postfix+Dovecot+GnuPG pipe) is probably much better option than anything Protonmail can offer in their current state. Or avoiding email (as it's not yet there and probably never will be) and using something like Wire or BitMessage or whatever (I'm not a security expert) has both client-side static and auditable source code and limits metadata leakage.
Bridge is out of beta: https://protonmail.com/bridge/ and yes for paying customers. Given they don't sell your data it's natural that advanced features have a price.
Yes there is of course trust involved as with anything. Still, for the majority of the folks it's better to trust someone else with their mail over running their own servers with gaping security holes. Avoiding email is not really possible yet and in the very near future...
Why does it need to support u2f? Would be nice if it did but from a security point of view,it does support two factor authentication(TOTP).
If you're concerned about the authenticator app being compromised then a dedicated phone or hardware token device can be configured.
As I said,u2f has better security but at least financially speaking,time based OTP has a lower barrier of entry while being superior in it's security to most non-u2f alternates (phone call,sms,etc...).
I don't think lack of u2f alone disqualifies it from being considered as having top tier authentication.
U2F is the only generally available two-factor method that is phishing-resistant. Phishing accounts for a large percentage of targeted attacks, something that is highly relevant in a threat model for journalists.
> Use encrypted services (ProtonMail for email, Signal for chat, etc.)
Also have a look at Briar [0] as they offer P2P communication, and the ability to route everything via Tor. As an alternative to Mail also BitMessage comes into mind, which avoids Metadata about who you contacted.
Oh also have a look at drdaeman's comment in here, ProtonMail is far from the solution for secure email.
It is fucking straight up evil to disguise your marketing blog posts as "security guides" for at risk people. It is really sad that stuff like this is making it to the HN front page.
The advice given here is largely NOT good.
There are only a few extremely limited scenarios where you might want to choose Protonmail over Gmail. Do not use Protonmail.
And for gods sake, whatever you do don't follow the advice from this "guide" and use their "Secure VPN" service.
>ProtonVPN comes with Tor support built-in. Through our selected Tor servers, you can route all your traffic through the Tor anonymity network and also access dark web sites. This provides a convenient way to access Onion sites with just a single click.
These guys are trying to convince people to access .onion sites through their VPN using Tor nodes ran by them...
>Again, do you have anything substantial? Known vulnerabilities? Negative experience?
Since when is "public VPN services are bad" a claim which needs substantiating?
As tptacek put it: VPN services. For when you want coffee-shop wireless network security, but in the comfort of your own home or hotel room.
But these guys go further than most providers. These guys try to bait you into ditching Tor and relying on their Tor-as-a-service instead, which is nothing but malicious.
>It may be insufficient, I agree, but what's particularly wrong with it?
They tell you to use a VPN to avoid "government surveillance agencies.
They try to get you to use their Tor-as-a-service, which is insane and completely defeats the purpose of using Tor.
They recommend that you use their products instead of objectively better products by competitors, they don't even bother to mention the competing products.
They suggest that using Protonmail to talk to non-protonmail users over email is at least somewhat secure, it is not.
All the advice that doesn't amount to "use our product" is extremely limited. Key advice such as Don't use an Android phone is nowhere to be found.
>It's OK to sell things and write marketing blog posts. I'm pretty sure your company does it as well.
The critical difference is that my marketing blog posts do not pretend to be security guides for people who could literally get killed for following bad advice.
We should absolutely be condemning Protonmail for putting this out. They can't claim to be a great provider for at-risk users while simultaneously putting them in further danger by giving them bad security advice.
>Since when is "public VPN services are bad" a claim which needs substantiating?
You assume there are good VPN services. What are they? Private ones, self-maintained, run by a friend? For journalists, who are mostly not seasoned sysadmins and crypto experts, self-run VPN is worse.
>But these guys go further than most providers. These guys try to bait you into ditching Tor and relying on their Tor-as-a-service instead, which is nothing but malicious.
No, they don't. The say: "for ultimate anonymity you can also run Tor locally on your machine".
>They tell you to use a VPN to avoid "government surveillance agencies.
It's all about your threat model. For many journalists, their adversaries are not US TLAs, but less competent nation states TLAs. Using a service outside of their jurisdiction may be acceptable.
>They try to get you to use their Tor-as-a-service, which is insane and completely defeats the purpose of using Tor.
It's not more insane then trusting your email provider. But yes, you have to trust Proton, this should have been stressed more.
And let me remind again, this is a guide for journalists, not for crypto-nerds. "Tor... can be tricky to set up, and can sometimes attract attention to yourself", which is true.
>They recommend that you use their products instead of objectively better products by competitors, they don't even bother to mention the competing products.
This is not a product comparison.
>They suggest that using Protonmail to talk to non-protonmail users over email is at least somewhat secure, it is not.
It is, for some scenarios. When both parties use providers who protect mail in transit and one of them also protects mail at rest, an attacker's options are very limited.
>All the advice that doesn't amount to "use our product" is extremely limited. Key advice such as Don't use an Android phone is nowhere to be found.
>You assume there are good VPN services. What are they? Private ones, self-maintained, run by a friend? For journalists, who are mostly not seasoned sysadmins and crypto experts, self-run VPN is worse.
I do not assume that there are good public VPN services.
Presumably a journalist would be using one provided by their employer or none at all.
>No, they don't. The say: "for ultimate anonymity you can also run Tor locally on your machine".
Yes, they do mention the possibility of running Tor locally. So what? They're still trying to push people to use their Tor gateway which is simply indefensible.
>It's all about your threat model. For many journalists, their adversaries are not US TLAs, but less competent nation states TLAs. Using a service outside of their jurisdiction may be acceptable.
Remember your username, don't think too little of "less competent nation states TLAs". :)
Choosing to follow Protonmails advice involves taking stupid risks, you should not be taking stupid risks if you are worried about any TLAs.
>It's not more insane then trusting your email provider. But yes, you have to trust Proton, this should have been stressed more.
With email you hardly get a choice. There's no legitimate reason to ever have someone else run your Tor client for you.
And we can already establish that Protonmail cannot be trusted. A trustworthy organization would never have released this "SECURITY GUIDE", nor would they ever try to get you to use their Tor client to access hidden services.
>And let me remind again, this is a guide for journalists, not for crypto-nerds. "Tor... can be tricky to set up, and can sometimes attract attention to yourself", which is true.
The first part is not true, Tor browser and Tor messenger are both very easy to use. The second part is true, but Tor isn't going to draw significantly more attention than Protonvpn.
>This is not a product comparison.
No, this claims to be a SECURITY GUIDE but is actually an ADVERTISEMENT.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never recommend Protonmail over Gmail.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never recommend ProtonVPN.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never ever suggest taking advantage of ProtonVPNs "Tor VPN support".
>This doesn't make them "bad", but insufficient.
I strongly disagree with you. Posting this was absolutely unethical on protonmails part.
This contains good advices but also very doubtful ones. such as "use Whatsap", like something proprietary that is not decentralized? And use Apple devices/Chromebooks (where everything you do works/syncs in the cloud) as your primary device, you must be kidding... The only good security device would be "don't even own a smartphone" if you care about security at all.
> Chrome as your browser.
What a bad advice, since the code added by Google on top of Chromium can't be audited at all.
>This contains good advices but also very doubtful ones. such as "use Whatsap", like something proprietary that is not decentralized?
How is this "doubtful" advice? Whatsapp and Signal are literally the state of the art of encrypted messaging apps. There simply are no better options. What would you recommend instead?
>And use Apple devices/Chromebooks (where everything you do works/syncs in the cloud) as your primary device, you must be kidding..
So what would you tell people to use instead? This is advice for "journalists" not "unemployed people".
Google and Apple only have the best security teams in the world, why do you believe their services to be insecure?
>The only good security device would be "don't even own a smartphone" if you care about security at all.
What if you are a person who is actually trying to do something with their life?
>What a bad advice, since the code added by Google on top of Chromium can't be audited at all.
Why is that? Have you audited Chromium? Since when can't binary blobs be audited? What is the realistic worst case scenario here?
> Google and Apple only have the best security teams in the world, why do you believe their services to be insecure?
As US-based companies, they are answerable to the US government. That makes them inherently insecure because your data and privacy is one shitty court order away from being released, at best.
> How is this "doubtful" advice? Whatsapp and Signal are literally the state of the art of encrypted messaging apps. There simply are no better options. What would you recommend instead?
Custom XMPP server running as a Tor hidden service with OMEMO enabled (https://conversations.im/omemo/). Signal and Whatsapp require a phone number which may or may not be good based on one's threat model.
Oh sorry, I figured out that if a media company is serious they'd run the server for their journalists. https://conversations.im/ also uses E2E encrypted chats and I don't need to setup any "random VoIP numbers".
For the record you don't need to use Tor in conversations, it depends on your threat model but using Tor protects against middle man figuring out which services do you use. If you use third party server even when the message is encrypted you are leaking metadata (where do you log in from, who do you contact).
The fundamental problem here seems to be that Conversations doesn't run on iOS, so it's hardly a realistic option even if there was some reason to choose it over Signal.
For me not relying on a centralized solution ran by a company funded largely by the US government is good enough reason. Especially that as I've demonstrated you can have the same level of security or even more (XMPP doesn't require phone numbers and can run over Tor) not losing any modern features.
32 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.5 ms ] threadBasically, they still ultimately rely on trust, just like others. While they're drastically different from e.g. Gmail, trust requirement is still there.
If one's well-being really depends on security, it's best to err on side of caution. Meaning, something like MailPile on the client side, very cautious non-automated key exchange, and, optionally, self-hosted email with at-rest encryption (e.g. Postfix+Dovecot+GnuPG pipe) is probably much better option than anything Protonmail can offer in their current state. Or avoiding email (as it's not yet there and probably never will be) and using something like Wire or BitMessage or whatever (I'm not a security expert) has both client-side static and auditable source code and limits metadata leakage.
Yes there is of course trust involved as with anything. Still, for the majority of the folks it's better to trust someone else with their mail over running their own servers with gaping security holes. Avoiding email is not really possible yet and in the very near future...
It's an email service. IMAP is a standard, not some feature they are charitably implementing.
Well the end it's only email. You decide whom to trust with.
Personally, I feel better with Protonmail. It's not better nor cheaper than gsuite it just has a totally different proposition as a product.
If you're concerned about the authenticator app being compromised then a dedicated phone or hardware token device can be configured.
As I said,u2f has better security but at least financially speaking,time based OTP has a lower barrier of entry while being superior in it's security to most non-u2f alternates (phone call,sms,etc...).
I don't think lack of u2f alone disqualifies it from being considered as having top tier authentication.
https://mobile.twitter.com/YuanfenYang/status/96200225940708...
Also have a look at Briar [0] as they offer P2P communication, and the ability to route everything via Tor. As an alternative to Mail also BitMessage comes into mind, which avoids Metadata about who you contacted.
Oh also have a look at drdaeman's comment in here, ProtonMail is far from the solution for secure email.
[0]: https://briarproject.org
The advice given here is largely NOT good.
There are only a few extremely limited scenarios where you might want to choose Protonmail over Gmail. Do not use Protonmail.
And for gods sake, whatever you do don't follow the advice from this "guide" and use their "Secure VPN" service.
Here's a much better guide, which wasn't written with the sole intention of selling you things https://techsolidarity.org/resources/basic_security.htm
EDIT: This is just way too good to not include in here https://protonvpn.com/secure-vpn
>ProtonVPN comes with Tor support built-in. Through our selected Tor servers, you can route all your traffic through the Tor anonymity network and also access dark web sites. This provides a convenient way to access Onion sites with just a single click.
These guys are trying to convince people to access .onion sites through their VPN using Tor nodes ran by them...
>The advice given here is largely NOT good
It may be insufficient, I agree, but what's particularly wrong with it?
>don't follow the advice from this "guide" and use their "Secure VPN" service
Again, do you have anything substantial? Known vulnerabilities? Negative experience?
It's OK to sell things and write marketing blog posts. I'm pretty sure your company does it as well.
And thanks for the link.
Since when is "public VPN services are bad" a claim which needs substantiating?
As tptacek put it: VPN services. For when you want coffee-shop wireless network security, but in the comfort of your own home or hotel room.
But these guys go further than most providers. These guys try to bait you into ditching Tor and relying on their Tor-as-a-service instead, which is nothing but malicious.
>It may be insufficient, I agree, but what's particularly wrong with it?
They tell you to use a VPN to avoid "government surveillance agencies.
They try to get you to use their Tor-as-a-service, which is insane and completely defeats the purpose of using Tor.
They recommend that you use their products instead of objectively better products by competitors, they don't even bother to mention the competing products.
They suggest that using Protonmail to talk to non-protonmail users over email is at least somewhat secure, it is not.
All the advice that doesn't amount to "use our product" is extremely limited. Key advice such as Don't use an Android phone is nowhere to be found.
>It's OK to sell things and write marketing blog posts. I'm pretty sure your company does it as well.
The critical difference is that my marketing blog posts do not pretend to be security guides for people who could literally get killed for following bad advice.
We should absolutely be condemning Protonmail for putting this out. They can't claim to be a great provider for at-risk users while simultaneously putting them in further danger by giving them bad security advice.
You assume there are good VPN services. What are they? Private ones, self-maintained, run by a friend? For journalists, who are mostly not seasoned sysadmins and crypto experts, self-run VPN is worse.
>But these guys go further than most providers. These guys try to bait you into ditching Tor and relying on their Tor-as-a-service instead, which is nothing but malicious.
No, they don't. The say: "for ultimate anonymity you can also run Tor locally on your machine".
>They tell you to use a VPN to avoid "government surveillance agencies.
It's all about your threat model. For many journalists, their adversaries are not US TLAs, but less competent nation states TLAs. Using a service outside of their jurisdiction may be acceptable.
>They try to get you to use their Tor-as-a-service, which is insane and completely defeats the purpose of using Tor.
It's not more insane then trusting your email provider. But yes, you have to trust Proton, this should have been stressed more.
And let me remind again, this is a guide for journalists, not for crypto-nerds. "Tor... can be tricky to set up, and can sometimes attract attention to yourself", which is true.
>They recommend that you use their products instead of objectively better products by competitors, they don't even bother to mention the competing products.
This is not a product comparison.
>They suggest that using Protonmail to talk to non-protonmail users over email is at least somewhat secure, it is not.
It is, for some scenarios. When both parties use providers who protect mail in transit and one of them also protects mail at rest, an attacker's options are very limited.
>All the advice that doesn't amount to "use our product" is extremely limited. Key advice such as Don't use an Android phone is nowhere to be found.
This doesn't make them "bad", but insufficient.
I do not assume that there are good public VPN services.
Presumably a journalist would be using one provided by their employer or none at all.
>No, they don't. The say: "for ultimate anonymity you can also run Tor locally on your machine".
Yes, they do mention the possibility of running Tor locally. So what? They're still trying to push people to use their Tor gateway which is simply indefensible.
>It's all about your threat model. For many journalists, their adversaries are not US TLAs, but less competent nation states TLAs. Using a service outside of their jurisdiction may be acceptable.
Remember your username, don't think too little of "less competent nation states TLAs". :)
Choosing to follow Protonmails advice involves taking stupid risks, you should not be taking stupid risks if you are worried about any TLAs.
>It's not more insane then trusting your email provider. But yes, you have to trust Proton, this should have been stressed more.
With email you hardly get a choice. There's no legitimate reason to ever have someone else run your Tor client for you.
And we can already establish that Protonmail cannot be trusted. A trustworthy organization would never have released this "SECURITY GUIDE", nor would they ever try to get you to use their Tor client to access hidden services.
>And let me remind again, this is a guide for journalists, not for crypto-nerds. "Tor... can be tricky to set up, and can sometimes attract attention to yourself", which is true.
The first part is not true, Tor browser and Tor messenger are both very easy to use. The second part is true, but Tor isn't going to draw significantly more attention than Protonvpn.
>This is not a product comparison.
No, this claims to be a SECURITY GUIDE but is actually an ADVERTISEMENT.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never recommend Protonmail over Gmail.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never recommend ProtonVPN.
A legitimate SECURITY GUIDE would never ever suggest taking advantage of ProtonVPNs "Tor VPN support".
>This doesn't make them "bad", but insufficient.
I strongly disagree with you. Posting this was absolutely unethical on protonmails part.
It doesn't look like you have very deep knowledge about how journalism works today. I assume you have the '70s model in your head.
This contains good advices but also very doubtful ones. such as "use Whatsap", like something proprietary that is not decentralized? And use Apple devices/Chromebooks (where everything you do works/syncs in the cloud) as your primary device, you must be kidding... The only good security device would be "don't even own a smartphone" if you care about security at all.
> Chrome as your browser.
What a bad advice, since the code added by Google on top of Chromium can't be audited at all.
How is this "doubtful" advice? Whatsapp and Signal are literally the state of the art of encrypted messaging apps. There simply are no better options. What would you recommend instead?
>And use Apple devices/Chromebooks (where everything you do works/syncs in the cloud) as your primary device, you must be kidding..
So what would you tell people to use instead? This is advice for "journalists" not "unemployed people".
Google and Apple only have the best security teams in the world, why do you believe their services to be insecure?
>The only good security device would be "don't even own a smartphone" if you care about security at all.
What if you are a person who is actually trying to do something with their life?
>What a bad advice, since the code added by Google on top of Chromium can't be audited at all.
Why is that? Have you audited Chromium? Since when can't binary blobs be audited? What is the realistic worst case scenario here?
As US-based companies, they are answerable to the US government. That makes them inherently insecure because your data and privacy is one shitty court order away from being released, at best.
Custom XMPP server running as a Tor hidden service with OMEMO enabled (https://conversations.im/omemo/). Signal and Whatsapp require a phone number which may or may not be good based on one's threat model.
>Custom XMPP server running as a Tor hidden service with OMEMO enabled
Is not advice you can give in a "security guide for journalists"
For me not relying on a centralized solution ran by a company funded largely by the US government is good enough reason. Especially that as I've demonstrated you can have the same level of security or even more (XMPP doesn't require phone numbers and can run over Tor) not losing any modern features.
And when they get critical reporting for this, they claim the journalist based his story on 'unsubstantiated rumors': https://twitter.com/xFailure/status/962026777743835139