This is non-news, like all tech companies, they are bound by law to do this. It happens more than 6000 times per year for Proton. However, this user just had bad opsec. Proton emails are all encrypted and cannot be read unless law enforcement gets your password, which Proton does not have access to. Even if Proton hands over all data.
Proton doesn’t get a free ride here.
They are bound Swiss law and should not be retaining any identifying information.
If they are going to give up everything they have on you when the feds come knocking, they shouldn’t keep anything or they shouldn’t market themselves as private and secure .
But if you use their service for free, you do not have to provide any identifying info. As far as I am aware there is no check what you enter is legit and there is no requirement to supply a backup address. So the whole solution for a user to stay anonymous as much as they can with Protonmail is simply to not enter any identifying info.
Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.
The user specifically requested that Proton retain this PII for account recovery.
Speaking of which, how do they implement recovery emails? Do they save your private keys only if account recovery is enabled?
Recovery email only restores access to the account, so you can get future emails. But all data is lost, emails sent in the past (saved emails) are not recovered.
No, Proton does get a free ride here. The information they provided was the recovery email address, which they were required to do by law.
The only data they don’t encrypt (can see) is that which they absolutely need to store unencrypted. If they encrypt your recovery email address, then… they can’t send you any recovery emails to it since they can’t see it.
This is 100% the fault of the user.
All any service can do is give you the best tools available to maintain your privacy, but they can’t stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.
Firefox is also great for privacy, but if I use it to fill out some info on some phishing sites then that’s not a them problem.
Don’t forget that most of your email arrives at their servers unencrypted, supposedly they immediately encrypt it, but you have to take their word on that. And there’s always the possibility that they are forced or just decide to make a copy of emails as they’re encrypting for your inbox.
How do you imagine a recovery email to work, if the provider doesn’t store it, and you lost access to your email by definition in the moment you need it? Recovery email is not needed, you can totally use your account without and proton doesn’t ask for it. It’s a feature where you obviously are disclosing that piece of information and link two accounts. It’s either that or not using that feature.
It would be cool if they stored a hash of the recovery email, then you type it out during the recovery process and they can send if the hash matches what they got.
They are bound by Swiss Law, so they have to comply with lawful orders. They are very up front about this even within their marketing that pertains to protection from other government authorities. They are also very good at explaining exactly what is protected and what inherently isn’t. A recovery email isn’t. In order for a recovery email to work by its very nature, Proton has to have a record of it. But at the same time they don’t require you to set one. Proton hasn’t done anything that they’ve promised not to. There comes a point where you need to put a little effort into understanding the product you’re using.
Don’t tell me, tell the guy they gave up . ?
They market to activists and people concerned with the business of protest, not Swiss law experts - and are very much are not up front about what could happen if they are contact by LE. Of course They don’t hide it, but you won’t find it on the front page, where they trumpet about Swiss privacy… You and I know the detail, many users may not.
At the end of the day, they attract a lot of activists and protesters to their service, with the offer of “safe and secure email. “ .
They hold a database of all them, in a jurisdiction that requires them to comply with legal requests for information.
They service some 6000 such requests from their database of every year, or around 30 per day.
You can decide for yourself who this efficient and eminently accessible single source of protesters information helps the most.
Proton’s mails are encrypted… between proton accounts. Send an email to a hotmail account and bye-bye encryption. Proton does rely on PGP so you can use that if the recipient supports it.
https://proton.me/support/password-protected-emails
A Password-protected Email is an email that requires a password to open it. It’s a way you can send a secure, end-to-end encrypted email to anyone who isn’t on Proton Mail.
They mean encrypted at rest. As in, Proton cannot hand over a copy of all your emails to a law enforcement agency, they don’t have access.
This means law enforcement would have to capture an unencrypted email in transit, or obtains your emails from either recipient individually.
They provided the backup e-mail address
Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.
Just in case anyone thinks they decrypted mails and handed them over, nope. I hadn’t thought about that “settings” are not encrypted. Guess if you want to stay anonymous you shouldn’t add your private mail address in there as a backup.
Yeah. Even if they couldn’t hand over recovery emails, having a personal email as a backup to a “private and sensitive” email account is bad practice.
But what do you do if that field is needed? A throwaway address won’t work as it’s easy to recreate. Buy your own domain and run a server?
I don’t believe you need that field with Proton, correct me if I’m wrong. If you do need that field with an email provider, and you need complete opsec, use a different provider.
I put the Simplelogin email alias as my backup mail. Which forwards mail to my proton, so I guess it isn’t really a backup. Even more so if you realize I need to sign into simplelogin with my protonmail account and protonmail owns Simplelogin.
No, domain names are tied to a person and, even if that person register the domain with fake person details, there will be a digital payment associated with the purchase.
Doesn’t look like Proton did anything wrong, they can’t fight these requests and he was caught by identifying information he linked to his account.
They could disclose the fact that they might need to give that info to authorities and warn users of that.
They never mention it here for example https://proton.me/blog/protonmail-threat-model
https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement
Here the mention clearly the data mentioned in the privacy policy which in turns clearly states that you MAY provide a recovery account which will be associated with your account. I also think that anybody that should be concerned for this should understand that law enforcement can get ALL the data the company has on you.
They do mention it on that page:
However, if presented with a valid order from a Swiss court involving a case of criminal activity that is against Swiss law, Proton Mail can be compelled to share account metadata (but not message contents or attachments) with law enforcement.
The only ever claim to encrypt message contents and attachments. And explicitly call out account meta data here as something they can hand over if requested by law enforcement. They also mention they are not good vs targeted and governmental level attacks:
There are, however, some risks for users facing a strong adversary, such as a government focusing all its resources on a very specific target.
And explicitly mention they might be compelled to log and give up information like ip adresses:
if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.
I don’t know much about the case beyond some very lazy peripheral searching, but it strikes me that Proton’s compliance isn’t an issue, but the requests themselves are totally unjustifiable and based on malicious prosecutions to nab some separatists on ridiculous terrorism charges for their nonviolent action and protests.
This individual is suspected of being a member of the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s police force) and of using their internal knowledge to assist the Democratic Tsunami movement.
The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism laws, despite the primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving protests and roadblocks, which raises questions about the proportionality and justification of such measures.
Probably the request to Proton arrived from a Swiss judge, who received a request from Spanish judge, and he evaluated the request and decided that it has merit.
Proton a few years ago disclosed the IP address of the user of a certain mailbox upon request by LEA. That was enough to get the person found and arrested (I don’t remember what the case was about). They HAVE to comply with these requests, but they DON’T need to log/retain those info ETA: and I was wrong, thanks @Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works to set me straight. But I think the point still stands. I don’t want to be ALWAYS be tied to a VPN, there are some scenarios where I can’t use a VPN.
That was the moment I decided to selfhost my email server.
In that particular case they did need to log the ip because they were compelled to do so by a Swiss court.
That was an opsec failure on the user, if they used a VPN or Tor they would not have been caught.
A VPN would’ve only shifted the “blame” unless it was a decent one like IVPN.
Tor would’ve been much better, especially considering Proton has an .onion address.
Yes, by VPN I meant something decent. Not whatever spyware is top on the Play Store for circumventing geoblocks.
They were already using Proton Mail, they just were probably thinking that was enough. It would have been if the French had not been able to convince a Swiss court that their request was valid.
So couldn’t a court compel the VPN to log all IPs and then use some FISA level shit to prevent the VPN from alerting users?
There’s been a handful of VPN cases taken to court where they have proved, at that moment in time, that they had no logs to hand over. But why not take it that last step and compel the change then?
That’s a good question. I know good vpns like mullvad do not and can not log ips/traffic without changes to their backend, I wonder if they could claim “it’s impossible” or something (clearly bogus, but the argument could be “with our current infrastructure, I.e. We can’t afford to redo our systems to comply”)
Posteo doesn’t have to retain IPs and doesn’t, it also doesn’t retain payment info (though if you transfer by wire there’s still a window where a payment can be traced AFAIU).
They will also absolutely forward any and all traffic for a particular account to law enforcement when given a court order. What’s it with criminals thinking that they can outsource opsec to legitimate businesses. Defending against a state-level actor actively hunting you down, watching closely and pouncing on any and every mistake, is a vastly different beast than making sure google doesn’t know about the butt plug you just bought.
Agree with you, that’s why I buy my butt plugs (and similar toys) with my gmail account! 😁
That was the moment I decided to selfhost my email server.
So now the hosting you use will share the same(or likely much more) data if some government requests it.
