this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Proton doesn’t get a free ride here.

They are bound Swiss law and should not be retaining any identifying information.

If they are going to give up everything they have on you when the feds come knocking, they shouldn’t keep anything or they shouldn’t market themselves as private and secure .

[–] [email protected] 65 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.

The user specifically requested that Proton retain this PII for account recovery.

Speaking of which, how do they implement recovery emails? Do they save your private keys only if account recovery is enabled?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago

Recovery email only restores access to the account, so you can get future emails. But all data is lost, emails sent in the past (saved emails) are not recovered.

https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods

[–] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, Proton does get a free ride here. The information they provided was the recovery email address, which they were required to do by law.

The only data they don't encrypt (can see) is that which they absolutely need to store unencrypted. If they encrypt your recovery email address, then... they can't send you any recovery emails to it since they can't see it.

This is 100% the fault of the user.

All any service can do is give you the best tools available to maintain your privacy, but they can't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Firefox is also great for privacy, but if I use it to fill out some info on some phishing sites then that's not a them problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Don’t forget that most of your email arrives at their servers unencrypted, supposedly they immediately encrypt it, but you have to take their word on that. And there’s always the possibility that they are forced or just decide to make a copy of emails as they’re encrypting for your inbox.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They are bound by Swiss Law, so they have to comply with lawful orders. They are very up front about this even within their marketing that pertains to protection from other government authorities. They are also very good at explaining exactly what is protected and what inherently isn’t. A recovery email isn’t. In order for a recovery email to work by its very nature, Proton has to have a record of it. But at the same time they don’t require you to set one. Proton hasn’t done anything that they’ve promised not to. There comes a point where you need to put a little effort into understanding the product you’re using.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago

But if you use their service for free, you do not have to provide any identifying info. As far as I am aware there is no check what you enter is legit and there is no requirement to supply a backup address. So the whole solution for a user to stay anonymous as much as they can with Protonmail is simply to not enter any identifying info.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How do you imagine a recovery email to work, if the provider doesn't store it, and you lost access to your email by definition in the moment you need it? Recovery email is not needed, you can totally use your account without and proton doesn't ask for it. It's a feature where you obviously are disclosing that piece of information and link two accounts. It's either that or not using that feature.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It would be cool if they stored a hash of the recovery email, then you type it out during the recovery process and they can send if the hash matches what they got.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but that's essentially a weaker recovery password (which also is an option in Proton).

Also that poses quite some challenges for email verification (say, you make a typo when you first write your address), let alone the fact that you won't see what emails you have configured essentially, which is also bad UX.

I think it's much simpler to have recovery email as it is and -if one doesn't want to associate proton account with any other account- offer other recovery methods, which are available (phrase and phone number).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I disagree it would be the same as a password. They do use only the hash to validate the entry, that is the same. But then they send recovery to the email instead of proceeding in place. An attacker would have to both know the email and be able to access its inbox. (Or, less likely, generate a hash collision with an address they do control.)

I think they could do verification if they kept the plaintext address just long enough to send something out.

The UX of only being able to show hashes would be pretty unfortunate, sure. Maybe that's a potential compromise if they kept just a first letter, like`x***@example.com`? Same number of stars in the interface regardless of the real length of email, to attempt to leak less info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But the question is "why"? Email addresses are personal but not secrets, there is no reason to add complexity and worsen the UX for such a feature imo. If anybody is not comfortable with this particular piece of data being associated with their account, they can just use a recovery phrase. It is by no means a necessary feature. What would be the advantage of having a recovery email "obscured"? The advantage of the functionality as-is is that it's trivial to see what you have configured, it's trivial to change address etc.

All of this to add an ineffective amount of privacy. If someone is under investigation, having the hash of the recovery email is in many case sufficient. Asking Apple/Gmail/Microsoft if the hash matches any of their customers covers probably 98% of the population. Billions of emails are also available through breaches, so there is very very high chance that if someone used their personal email, it's either with one of the big providers, or it has been leaked before. If it's not, and you used a private provider with no data, then there is no problem even if the address is obtained, as that cannot be further used to de-anonymize you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You're incorrect. If they salt the hash and use bcrypt it is computationally infeasible for Microsoft to match it against a customer. Or at least expensive enough that Microsoft would insist on warrants and subpoenas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Computationally infeasible? It's as expensive if every user made a single login (if they use bcrypt for passwords).

They don't need to do it for every user, they need to do it for one only. Salting is fairly irrelevant in this context. And we are talking about resources for Microsoft, or Google, or Apple. And this is also assuming they can't further segment the customers by other metadata, such as location (in this case for example, Spanish users), which will drastically reduce the number of users to try. If every Spanish person had a user, you need 47kk hashes. Years ago single rigs pumped more than 10k bcrypt/s. That would be 1h of computation give or take? Assuming a fraction of that and not the immense computing power of big tech, it's still something completely achievable for an investigation.