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.

  • LWD@lemm.ee
    1514·
    1 year ago

    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.

    “Disinformation” = one video the entire cryptocurrency evangelist community can’t disprove, because the guy who made it did his research.

    Voting on the blockchain is yet another joke, demonstrated by some of the truest true believers attempting to function in such a manner.

    • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
      136·
      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?

      • LWD@lemm.ee
        84·
        1 year ago

        It’s good to know that you can’t argue against Dan Olson’s videos. Other cryptocurrency shills have tried much harder than you, and come up short.

        And since you hate the videos but can’t criticize them…

        I guess your second choice is projection. Cryptocurrency is the plaything of the venture capitalist, and for some reason you want to lick their boots.

        • demesisx@infosec.pubEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          Peter Thiel is a neolib? I’m pretty sure he’s more alt-right but really what’s the difference. You seem to be conflating the whole crypto space with Peter Thiel even though he’s kind of focused on shitty projects like Eth and Solana. Oh well.

    • 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.)

    • andruid@lemmy.ml
      11·
      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.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
        12·
        1 year ago

        Mastodon and Lemmy are very different from web3 stuff, because they don’t run on anything remotely close to it. Both are decentralized (at least, if you ignore all the Amazon nodes that web3 applications tend to run on), but

        1. they take two radically different forms of decentralization (selective federation versus what was ostensibly supposed to be a peer-to-peer list of data entries)
        2. They have two different sorts of goals. The servers in a network like Lemmy aren’t necessarily at each other’s throats in a constant fight over who is telling the truth about the messages being transported across it. Money isn’t on the line, and going to a users home server is usually more than good enough to make sure the data has sufficient integrity.
        • 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.