Proton Mail CEO Calls New Address Verification Feature 'Blockchain in a Very Pure Form'
Proton Mail CEO Calls New Address Verification Feature 'Blockchain in a Very Pure Form'
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.
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. 😅
This is basically like Domain Keys-Identified Mail (DKIM) but for a specific email address, without needing to own a domain to set it up. I'm gonna call it "P(ersonal)KIM" for short.
If this is implemented correctly it'll be a few clicks to set up and then just work in the background to make it harder to impersonate you via email, even if you have a free email address.
I would strongly assume Protonmail will be doing this automatically soon, there's no manual day-to-day verification necessary.
Writing to the Blockchain is difficult and takes processing power, reading from it is absolutely trivial though.
So, every identity verification of your email address will be forever in the public domain? That's counter to privacy. Your email address will be married to a block and chain? There is no thorny issue. That's a solution to a problem that hardly anyone has. Ridiculous nonsense.
If you are one of those people that thought CERN was looking out for your privacy, here is the rude awakening.
What should I use for my throw away emails now?
So PM claims it has on the order of 10^8 users. Let's assume each user has one email address with one public ed25519 key, both of which are likely false.
Each key is 32Byte;
32B * 10^8 = 3.2GB.Could someone do the math how much fiat it'd take to store such an enormous amount of data on the Ethereum or monero blockchains?
The best thing is reading all of this with https://github.com/samhocevar/no-fucking-thanks