Proton stores your keys

Proton stores an encrypted blob.

All they need now is your decryption password & they can read your messages

“All they need now is your private key”. It’s literally a secret, they use bcrypt and then encrypt it. Also, “they” are not generally in the threat model. “They” can serve you JS that simply exfiltrates your email, because the emails are displayed in their web-app, they have no need to steal your password to decrypt your key and read your email…

It isn’t transparent, because most users aren’t running their own frontend locally and tracking all the source code changes.

Probably we misunderstand what “transparent” means in this context. What I mean is that the average user will not do any PGP operation, in general. Encryption happens transparently for them, which is the whole thing about Proton: make encryption easy and default.

Now you’re merely trusting them to not send you a custom JS payload to have your decryption password sent to the server.

Again, as I said before, they control the JS, they can get the decrypted data without getting the password…? You always trust your client tooling. There is always a point where I trust someone, be it the “enigmail” maintainers, Thunderbird maintainers (it has access to messages post-decryption!), the CLI tool of choice etc.

How many users are actually utilizing their hidden API to ensure that decryption/encryption is only done client-side?

I mean, their clients are open-source and have also been audited?

If they have your private key, how many users do you think are using long enough passwords to make cracking their password more challenging?

I don’t know. But here we are talking about a different risk: someone compromising Proton, getting your encrypted private key, and starting bruteforcing bcrypt-hashed-and-salted passwords. I find that risk acceptable.

This is just entirely inaccurate and you’ve failed to provide any "proof’ for your generalizations here.

See other post.

If you actually understood PGP you’d know you can generate and use local-only keys with IMAPS and have support to use any IMAP client.

Care to share any practical example/link, and how exactly this means not having a fat client that does the encryption/decryption for you?

There is no security benefit in their implementation other than to lock you into a walled garden and give you a false sense of security.

Right, because *DAV protocol are so secure. They all support e2ee, right…? There is a security benefit, and the benefit is trusting the client software more than a server, especially if shared. You can export data and migrate when you want easily, so it’s really a matter of preference.

It’s actually fairly simple: if the server never has access to the keys or the plaintext of messages (or calendar events, etc.), then you need a client tool to handle decryption and encryption operations.

They use PGP, and they have implemented this feature in a way that it’s completely transparent to the user to make it mainstream. So they chose building dedicated tools (bridge, web client), rather than letting users use their own tools, because the PGP tooling sucks hard and it’s extremely inaccessible for the general population.

This means that you need a fat client, whatever you do, or otherwise the server will have access to the data and there is no e2ee. Instead of using enigmail or other PGP plugins/tools, they built the bridge.

I guess Poland? I know from my colleagues that internet infrastructure jumped from old slow stuff to fiber there and it’s fairly cheap.

I struggled with this for a long time, and then I just decided to use synology photos.

It has albums, tagging, geolocation, sharing. It has phone picture backup, it is inherently a backup as it’s on my NAS and I back that data up again.

I want to keep the thing that I really care about the most friction free and also not too dependent on myself so that I can still experiment.

I didn’t try PiGallery2 though, maybe I will have a look!

Super cool project, thanks for sharing! I think I will try to integrate it with my static sites.

Did it sound cold? Because I didn’t mean that, I just meant to actually answer the question from my PoV. Just for the record, I also did not down vote you.

So yeah, use whatever footgun you prefer, I don’t judge :)

Or rustic! It is compatible with restic but has some nice additions, for example the fact that supports a config files. It makes operations a bit easier IMHO (I am currently using both).

Yeah ultimately every container has it’s own veth interface, so you can do shaping using tc on those.

Edit: I had a look at docker-tc. It does what you want, BUT. Unless your use case is complex, I would really think twice about running a tool written in bash which has access to the docker socket (I.e. trivial node escape) and runs with NET_ADMIN capability.

That’s a lot of power to do something you can also do with a few lines of code executed after you start the container. Again, provided that your use case is not complex.

Cgroups have the ability to limit TCP and total network bandwidth. I don’t know from the top of my mind whether this can be configured at runtime (I.e. via docker run), but you can specifcy at runtime the cgroup parent to use. This means you can pre-create the cgroup, set the limits and start the container with that parent cgroup.

You can also run some hook script after launch that adds the PID to a cgroup every time the container is launched, or possibly use tc.

I am not aware of the ability to only limit uplink bandwidth, but I have not researched this.

I think k8s is a different beast, that requires way more domain specific knowledge besides server/Linux basic administration. I do run it, but it’s an evolution of a need, specifically when you want to manage a fleet of machines running containers.

Because the lxc way is inherently different from the docker/podman way. It’s aimed at running full systems, rather than mono process containers. It has it’s use cases, but they are not as common IMHO.

You have a bunch of options:

kubectl run $NAME --image=$IMAGE

this just creates a pod running the specific image. If you kill the pod, or it terminates, it won’t be run again. In general though, you probably want to do some customization before running (maybe you need volumes, secrets, env, ports, labels, securityContext, etc.) and for that you can simply let kubectl generate the boilerplate YAML and then simply make some edit:

kubectl run $NAME --image=$IMAGE --dry-run=client -o yaml > mypod.yaml
# edit mypod.yaml
kubectl create -f mypod.yaml

You can do the same with a deployment or statefulset:

kubectl create deployment $NAME -n $NAMESPACE [...] --dry-run=client -o yaml > deployment.yaml

In case you don’t need anything fancy, the kubectl create subcommand allows you to create simple workload, so probably that’s the answer to your question.

Docker can run rootless too, see https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/

I would say Docker. There is no substantial benefit in running podman, while docker is a widely adopted tool (which means more tooling in the ecosystem, easier to find answers to questions etc.). The difference is not huge tbh, and some time ago the biggest advantage for podman was being able to run rootless, while docker was stuck with a root daemon. This is not the case anymore (docker can run rootless), so I would say unless you have some specific argument to use podman, stick with docker.

They have millions in funding, they will always move at a faster pace. The question is in which direction they will move, I suppose.

I am curious about the details of that conversation, because I remember reading Dev’s comments in some post on Lemmy where they mentioned this option.

One thing I have never understood and keep repeating in this context: Beehaw has >7k$ balance. If they really have a few issues that would solve 90% of the problems, why not putting a 500/1000/2000$ bounty of that feature.

Your just focusing on strict technical definitions and completely ignoring the context of things. I described before how TLS is useful in the context of some SMTP e2e encrypted solution.

Yes, mentioning things that have not to do with e2ee. Anything that is encrypted with TLS is not e2ee in the context of emails. You talked about metadata, but the server has access to those because it terminates the connection, therefore, they are not e2ee. It’s a protection against leakage between you and the server (and between server and other server, and between server and the destination of your email), not between you and the destination, hence, irrelevant in the context of e2ee. Metadata such as destination can obviously never be e2ee, otherwise the server wouldn’t know where to send the email, and since it needs access to it, it’s not e2ee, whether you use TLS or not. TLS in this context doesn’t contribute at all to end to end encryption. Your definition is wrong, e2ee is a technical definition, is not an abstract thing: e2ee means that only the two ends of a conversation have access to the data encrypted. TLS is by definition between you and your mail server, hence it doesn’t provide any benefit in the context of e2ee. It is useful, but for other reasons that have nothing to do with e2ee.

never questioned that. With SMTP you can do true e2ee using PGP and friends

Exactly, and this is what Proton does. You simply don’t accept that Proton decided to write another client that is tightly coupled with their mail service, which is absolutely nothing malicious or vendor-locky, compared to using an already made client. Proton is simply PGP + SMTP.

with CalDAV/WebDAV you’ll need to have some kind of middle man doing the encryption and decryption - it’s a fair trade off for a specific problem.

Yes, and this middle-man is proton client, which sits on the client’s side. I am glad you understood how the only way to have e2ee with *DAV automatically technically impedes you to use “whatever server”. If anybody else but the client does the encryption/decryption, you lost the end-to-end part. I am not saying e2ee in this context is absolutely necessary, you might not care and value more the possibility to plug other *DAV servers, good. Proton is not for you in that case.

but about SMTP where you can have true e2ee

Yes, you can using a PGP client, like OpenPGP of Proton webmail, or Proton bridge. You need stuff on top of SMTP.

Your previous comment of “SMTP requires server to access the data” is simply wrong.

Nope, you are simply misinterpreting it. In SMTP the server requires access to the data because it’s the one delivering it. PGP is built so that the data it’s a ciphertext and not plaintext, so that the server can’t see the actual content of the mail, but it needs to have the data and ship it, in contrast for example to a p2p protocol. PGP is however on top of SMTP and requires a client doing it for you. OpenPGP or Proton do exactly this. There is no way to support SMTP “natively” and offer e2ee. You would like Proton not to do e2ee and leave the responsibility of the client to do the PGP part, with the freedom of picking whatever client you want? Well, that’s exactly the opposite of their business model, since what they aimed is to make PGP de-facto transparent to the users so that it’s available even to people who are not advanced users.

Do you have any proof that they use CalDAV/CardDAV?

https://github.com/search?q=org%3AProtonMail+CalDAV&type=code you can dig yourself into the code if you are curious to understand.

In the same way they don’t do IMAP/SMTP.

I sent you already a GIthub search of their clients for SMTP, look for yourself in the code. Do you think that makes any sense at all for them to reinvent the wheel and come up with ad-hoc protocols when all they need is a client? You can also have a look at the job offers they post: https://boards.eu.greenhouse.io/proton/jobs/4294852101 You can see SMTP mentioned and experience with Postfix in production. It’s very likely that they are running that in the background.

Get over yourself and your purist approaches, when a company provides a service that is standardized in a specific set of protocols and they decide to go ahead and implement their own stuff it is, at least, a subtle, form of vendor lock-in. End of story.

No it’s not. Vendor lock means:

In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

Proton uses open standards, and just builds clients that wrap them. This means, emails are in a format that can easily be imported elsewhere, same for Calendar and Contacts. You are now watering down the definition of vendor lock to try to make your claim less wrong, but it is wrong. I repeat, and you are welcome to prove me wrong:

• There is no substantial cost in any form to migrate from Proton to an equivalent service elsewhere:
  • You can migrate email simply, by changing domain DNS records and exporting/importing the data.
  • You can export your Calendar in a standard format
  • You can export your Contacts in a standard format

This means that I can change vendor easily without significant cost, hence I am not locked-in.

What you actually mean is that while using Proton you can’t interoperate easily with other tools, and this is a by-design compromise to have e2ee done in the way they wanted to make it, which is available to mainstream population. You disagree with their approach? Absolutely legitimate, you prefer to use OpenPGP, handle keys and everything yourself? Then for sure, Proton is not worth for you as you can choose the tools you want if that’s important for you. But there is no vendor-lock, they simply bundled together the email client with the PGP client, so that you don’t have the full flexibility of separating the two.

You disagree with this definition of vendor lock? Awesome, give me your definition and link some source that use that definition. Because if you keep moving the goalpost and redefine what vendor lock means, there is no point to discuss.

So tell me, why is it that Proton simply didn’t go for OpenPGP + SMTP + IMAP and simply build a nice web / desktop client for it and kept it compatible with all the other generic solutions out there? What’s the point?

How is this relevant? I don’t know and I don’t care why they picked this technical solution.

It isn’t and I hope I’m never proven right about Proton for your own sake.

It is, and you have been proven wrong. Either that, or you completely misuse or worse misunderstand what vendor lock is.

Yes you move if you can.

It’s not if. You can.

It has all to do with vendor lock-in and it is already explained.

Yes, you explained interoperability that has nothing to do with vendor lock. They are two. different. things.

If a company uses shady stuff that restricts interoperability by definition it is a form of vendor lock-in as you won’t be able to move to another provider as quickly and fast as you might with others.

False. Again. Interoperability it’s a property that has to do with using the application. Interoperable applications potentially can totally vendor lock. Lemmy interoperates with Mastodon, but vendor locks you because you can not export everything and port all your content away. You definition is wrong. Just admit you misused the term and move on, there is no need to double down.

And it is, because there’s specific metadata that might get leaked on email headers if not minimized by other techniques that will get protected with TLS between servers.

They use TLS. TLS is useful for transport security. Proton uses TLS. TLS doesn’t have anything to do with e2ee in the context of emails because TLS is always terminated by the server. Therefore it is by definition not an e2ee protocol in this context. It is in the context of web, because there the two “ends” are your browser and the web server. It’s not in the context of messaging where the other “end” is another client.

It isn’t perfect

This has nothing to do with perfection, you are simply misunderstanding fundamentally what e2ee is in this context.

it’s better than having email servers delivering PGP mail over plain text connections

And in fact Proton doesn’t do that.

You should be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting that there’s no usefulness whatsoever for this use case.

I am not ashamed because I understand TLS, and I understand that it’s useless in the context of email e2ee. You simply don’t understand the topic but feel brave enough to evangelize on the internet about something you don’t fully understand.

here’s how decent companies deal with that: they encrypt the data in transit (using TLS) and when stored on their servers by using key store and that is itself encrypted with your login password / hash / derivation or some similar technique.

JFC. Proton uses TLS for transit connections. E2EE means that the server does not have access to the data. If the server has the key, in whatever form, and can perform a decryption, it’s not e2ee. The only way to have e2ee for these protocols is that the client(s) and only the clients do the encryption/decryption operations. This is exactly what Proton clients do. They use DAV protocols but they extend them with implementing encryption on the client side. Therefore, naturally, by design, they are not compatible with servers which -instead- expect data unencrypted to serve it, unencrypted (only via TLS, which again, it’s a transport protocol, has nothing to do with application data) to other clients.

Ironically, when saying what “decent companies” do, you have described what Proton does: they use your client key to encrypt data on client side. Then they transfer this data via a secure channel (TLS). The server has no keys and sees only encrypted data, and serves such data to other clients (Proton web, android etc.) that do the decryption/encryption operation back. Underlying it’s still CalDAV/WebDAV.

You clearly have bought into their propaganda but oh well think whatever you want, you’re the one using the service and it’s your data that will be hostage after all.

I don’t need to buy propaganda, I am a security professional and do this stuff for a living. I also understand what vendor lock is because all the companies I ever worked with had forms of vendor lock, and I am aware of Proton features instead.

Maybe you should really stop, reflect and evaluate if you really have the competence to make certain claims on the internet. I understand nobody is there keeping score and there are no consequences, but you are honestly embarassing yourself and spreading false information due to the clear lack of understanding about concepts such as e2ee, transport security, vendor locking, etc.

This is a separate discussion, on which tbh I have not a strong opinion. I can understand the risks of children without proper sexual education consuming porn, but I also understand the pointless nature of trying to block it.