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.

  • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
    84·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      55·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Atemu@lemmy.ml
          10·
          1 year ago

          Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time.

          That’s nice but has nothing to do with voter fraud prevention.

          I will not reply to the stupid ad hominem. You have made it exceptionally clear that you have no idea what my political views are.

          • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            If you dislike corruption and capitalists, then why do you like cryptocurrency?

            Because properly-implemented cryptocurrencies make corruption impossible. Even the shitty, scammy FTX project had a decentralized ledger, allowing the FTC to quickly and easily forensically untangle SBF’s tangled web of lies and fraud. Even Do Kwan’s TerraLuna hack would have been possible to detect had the project been open source (like any viable crypto project) but regardless of that, it will still now be quite trivial for the regulators prosecuting him and his co-conspirators with fraud.

            More learning for those listening in that haven’t already made up their mind like you have: https://youtu.be/J5xegDJphvc?si=x3tJw9s1c1WL_WNy

              • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
                8·
                1 year ago

                It’s interesting that you can identify cherry-picking on my part but fail to identify it on your own. I merely mentioned situations where fraud (which I didn’t fall for because I follow certain principles about transparency and auditability of the crypto technologies that I prefer) was easily detected because the nature of the technology puts all transactions on an immutable ledger.

                What valid criticisms of THE TECH have you offered so far? You’ve simply pointed to situations where stupid people failed to protect themselves from clear frauds then went and used that brush to paint the entire crypto space. You’re not really the intellectual heavyweight you seem to think you are.

                  • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
                    6·
                    1 year ago

                    Here’s some easy ways to spot fraud in a crypto project:

                    • not open source
                    • not decentralized
                    • anonymous team (not always a sign of sketchiness)
                    • the crypto is locked in someone else’s wallet (not your keys, not your crypto)
                    • promises of ROI that are too good to be true (like TerraLunas 20% guaranteed return or the unsustainably high return promised by FTX)
                    • not formally verified
                    • an actual use-case rather than leveraging buzz-words to sell a utility token (looking at you IOTA and AGIX)
                    • initial token allocation is all insiders (Ergo had one of the fairest launches in the whole space, for example so I’d be shocked to see that one be a pump and dump)

                    I didn’t predict the failure of FTX or TerraLuna but they also didn’t smell right to me because they ticked MANY of the warning boxes above. I’m fairly centered around Cardano ecosystem projects but even in that ecosystem there’s bound to be some fraud. I protect myself by sticking to my gut feeling and using that small checklist. I have yet to be defrauded and I’ve been investing the space since 2017. It’s not hard and I am not Nostradamus but thanks for the compliment.

                  • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
                    6·
                    1 year ago

                    This video only mentions ERC-20 tokens as NFT’s. Are you so ignorant that you don’t realize that Ethereum is not the only crypto currency project? Do you realize that many projects have entirely different tech stacks? Actually, if you wanted to, you could go through my history and find me criticizing Ethereum’s badly flawed accounts model at least 20 times.

                    I’m not wasting any more time trying to have an intellectually honest debate with a person that blindly writes off an entire class of technologies yet doesn’t even understand beginner level things about it.

          • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
            8·
            1 year ago

            “You drink water and breathe air. Peter Thiel drinks water and breathes air too. Therefore you are just like Peter Thiel!”

            You’re a troll. I literally hate Peter Thiel. He is invested in so many technologies that it’s VERY likely that we’re invested in the same tech somewhere. Pretty sure he doesn’t give a shit about Cardano which is the project I develop applications for.

            Spreading your investments out is kind of how investing works when someone is a billionaire, dipshit.

            Anyway, that’s enough feeding the trolls for today. Have a good night, intellectually dishonest hiveminder.

      • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
        13·
        1 year ago

        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?

      • andruid@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

          • andruid@lemmy.ml
            1·
            1 year ago

            It’s the coordinated decentralization that really defines web from web2 and 1. Cooperative vs competitive coordination is just a sub strategy within that, but I don’t think either strategy is always best for all problems.

      • ssokolow@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.)

    • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      What does Monero do? Why don’t they emulate whatever it is that Monero achieves its reputation and functionality with?

      • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          How does it address the issues with like money laundering, KYC, etc? Wouldn’t you, in practice, basically need a lawyer to help make sure you “use” it correctly and legally?

          • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
            13·
            1 year ago

            I could be wrong (since article is paywalled) but as a DApp dev, Proton probably has a wallet with enough Monero to run this smart contract without anyone needing to add any money at all. So you wouldn’t be getting a Monero wallet in it. It would simply mint an NFT that you could then refer back to for verification that this is the same address that I say it is. It would simply leverage the monero chain every time an account was created and mint that as a unique ID (NFT!).

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            1 year ago

            Wouldn’t you, in practice, basically need a lawyer to help make sure you “use” it correctly and legally?

            Using private cryptocurrency is not illegal, at least in the United States, nor should it be. This is like worrying if it is legal to pay for things with cash.