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
    8·
    8 months 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·
        8 months 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·
        8 months 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.