According to Ortis, briefed him about a “storefront” that was being created to attract criminal targets to an online encryption service. A storefront, said Ortis, is a fake business or entity, either online or bricks-and-mortar, set up by police or intelligence agencies.

The plan was to have criminals use the storefront — an online end-to-end encryption service called Tutanota — to allow authorities to collect intelligence about them.

“So if targets begin to use that service, the agency that’s collecting that information would be able to feed it back, that information, into the Five Eyes system, and then back into the RCMP,” Ortis said.

  •  ReversalHatchery   ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) English
    1•8 months ago

    on the proton encryption, i did know about this but does that apply to proton-to-proton, proton-to-NonProton, or both? if you have details on this let me know.

    As I know it applies to both. Formerly they were asking (among other things) about the titles of your latest emails for account recovery. (after I have put all the links here I realized that these don’t give a details on whether this also applies to inter-proton messages…)

    A few sources:

    https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

    Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/b1ect2/a_question_about_encryption_metadata_subject/eiphhs7/?context=3

    https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/196265/why-is-some-meta-data-not-encrypted-in-proton-mail

    either way the fact that they dont makes me feel that proton is a similar honeypot to signal and telegram, where they make a compromise with the five eyes, to give them metadata even if actual contents are safe. metadata can be much more powerful than contents often times

    Yeah, might as well be. But if it is, I’m afraid we won’t get to know for a few decades, if ever. And I think it’s still better than the alternatives… the alternative email providers, that is.
    If it comforts you, in their reddit comment I linked they mention (in 2019…) that there’s a proposal they support for openpgp to be able to have an encrypted subject line.

    •  privacybro   ( @privacybro@lemmy.ninja ) English
      1•8 months ago

      Really appreciate your thoughts and time, thanks.

      I found out also that Tutanota is essentially the same, except that they do E2EE subject lines between tutanota users, but I am guessing that is because they don’t use PGP unlike Proton. In which case, Proton is in the right in this case because they are increasing E2EE interoperability beyond just their own users. So, my comment about honeypotting was really uncalled for I think, and I apologize for that.

      The OpenPGP proposal is interesting, but I couldn’t find anything on it. All I found was this below, which explains that email headers can’t be/aren’t encrypted, and subject is one of those, so that’s why. I have no clue what Proton was talking about, or where they got that info

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/cku293/cant_find_the_openpgp_subject_line_encryption/