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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The encryption being crap really does not depend on the threat model. Sure, in some threat models you may not need e2ee at all but in that case, what’s wrong with WhatsApp?

    The issue with XMPP is that security really was an afterthought. Not only is e2ee an optional extension, but there are actually 2 incompatible extensions, each with multiple versions. Then you have some clients not implementing either, some clients implementing the older, less secure one. Some implement the newer one but older version of the spec with known issues. And of course, the few clients that implement it well become incompatible with other clients that don’t if you enable e2ee, so it is disabled by default.

    That is all before you start looking into security audits or metadata harvesting.






  • Yeah, we should just ditch email for sensitive communications.

    Anyway, my point was that I lost trust in Proton back then over this and went to Tuta that has native clients. It makes no difference to my security since I don’t think I ever sent or received a single mail that was actually e2e encrypted. But Tuta’s more serious approach to e2ee made me slightly more confident in it as a company.

    Now it kinda looks like it was the right choice.


  • doesn’t impact the security sufficiently to make a difference for the average user.

    I think it is borderline. I am not advocating for PGP, I like the Signal model where you trust signal for introductions but have the ability to verify, even in retrospect. Trust but verify. Even a few advanced users verifying Signal keys forces Signal to remain honest or risk getting caught.

    I think the lack of meaningful verification for proton is a significant security weakness, though average user probably has bigger things to worry about.



  • It is nuanced, but having the ability to selectively serve malicious javascript stealing keys to specific people only on one access is considerable issue in practice, compared to distributing binary where you would generally have the same binary for everyone and you are able to archive and analyse it. Especially if you use third party distributions, like github releases or flatpaks.




  • Honestly, if the app was open-source so we can check it does not leak data, I would probably have no issue with it.

    Making it a separate app makes sense if google wants to allow other apps to re-use the code. No reason to have the same functionality bundled into each app separately.

    And the feature, as long as it is configurable, seems useful.

    The auto-install is bad but understandable. As far as I am aware, there is no easy way to mark an app as a dependency of another app so it gets automatically installed only when needed. This should be fixed, but auto-install for all is not terrible temporary solution. This does not apply when the app is closed source and may steal your data.