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.
deleted
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. 😅
deleted
Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight
No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.
In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.
Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.
have you seen any of the research that the US government did on it? Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time. I don’t want to write an essay right now but are you truly up to date on this?
Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.
I COMPLETELY DISAGREE. It should be exactly as hard as it is to freeze the cash of bad actors. That’s the point of it. I, of course, happen to be a libertarian socialist/anarcho syndicalist. You happen to be a capitalist. You seem to want be in the camp of “you will own nothing and you will like it” but I just so happen to not trust governments and their decisions. I believe in socialism but have seen it co-opted and destroyed by corruption. Anyway, I don’t think that those same clearly corrupted governments should have the unilateral right to prevent me from attemtpting to claw enough back from their corruption and greed to feed my family.
deleted
deleted
deleted
deleted
It sounds overcomplicated, is there really a need for the blockchain aspect? Could the same security be provided by a simpler method (like how keybase has their identity proofs?) but better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it ig
Right here:
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.
The benefit of doing this with a blockchain instead of a privately held and maintained database is that the latter can be compromised, and you just have to trust “whoever” is maintaining that private database. Blockchain means that the ledger is distributed to many nodes, and any post-entry modification to that chain would be instantly recognized, and marked invalid by the other nodes operating the chain. Besides that, when you’re looking up a public key for a recipient on such a blockchain, you would be looking it up at a number of nodes large enough that in order for a malicious entry to come through, they would all have to be modified in the same way, at the same time, and you would have to be asking before the change got flagged. Poisoning blockchain data like this is simply not possible; that’s what makes this an especially secure option.
deleted
PGP solved this a long time ago, but it is difficult to make it user friendly enough for non-technical people to understand and adopt it.
How many people have verified how many people’s identity with PGP signatures? Also I’m willing to bet a horribly shocking amount of people would just accept a new key from someone (not necessarily sign it) and trust them regardless.
deleted
What is wrong with doing something like pgp key servers?
deleted
