Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source
Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250802-protons-lumo-ai-chatbot-not-end-to-end-not-open-source - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDPZbUPUFyk&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
Following proton's recent development has been like seeing a friend become way too interested in gas station drugs
I used protonmail in its early days but stopped after they started putting resources to pursuing cryptocurrency when their mail service was still not totally complete and while they also had ambitious plans for a whole office ecosystem as an alternative to Google docs etc. Seeing the zeal for this cryptocurrency angle at the time evaporated any trust I had in their product decision-making.
That and I remember a lot of their marketing being around the fact that they had ex-CERN employees but IIRC they weren't working on anything cryptography or security related at CERN so it sounded like they were just assuming scientists are smart so people will just assume their product is safer, which was a bit sus.
This chatbot thing is totally in line with that so I guess they haven't really changed.
Unrelated to protonmail, but related to getting the wrong guy for the job. The telegram CEO said that the cryptography of telegram was coded by his brother. (The CEO is also famously not a persona non grata in Russia which likely means the FSB has access to telegram (And if they have access, more people can have it))
Fuck
Introduce money into a system guarantees that system will degrade.
The cool trick they do is that not even Proton can decode your email. That’s because it never exists on their systems as plain text — it’s always encrypted! The most Proton can do if a government comes calling is give them the metadata — who you emailed and when — but not the text itself.
This is not actually true when using Proton's web mail interface, because the encryption and decryption is performed by javascript which is sent from Proton's server to the (signed-in, easy to identify) user every time they load the page. So, when the government comes calling, they can simply ask Proton to send certain users some slightly different javascript once which exfiltrates the targeted users' keys to them. sadtrombone.mp3
that’s utterly trivial for a sufficiently paranoid user’s browser to detect, and damning for proton if it is (not to mention, pushing hostile JavaScript doesn’t work for users on the imap bridge or using mobile apps they update via methods that can’t easily be tracked like Obtainium on Android)
the mechanisms proton uses to exfiltrate encrypted data and get their users arrested are far more subtle and deniable than that basic shit. specifically, they’ve been silently overcomplying with law enforcement data requests for years, which has led to documented arrests of activists, and all of their LLM features represent a significant data leak, as all of them are implemented in a way that sends cleartext to proton’s servers while maintaining the illusion that the feature is more secure than it is.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were doing more evil shit than the above, but I would be very surprised if any of it were in the form of JavaScript that the user could, you know, deobfuscate and read
that’s utterly trivial for a sufficiently paranoid user’s browser to detect
How many of their users do you think are sufficiently paranoid?
And if it is utterly trivial, I am curious how you think a sufficiently paranoid user actually would go about detecting such an attack, much less detecting it prior to running the malicious javascript and having their keys exfiltrated. For detecting it after the code has already run, ok, I know how to use mitm proxy to record the javascript being sent to my browser. (Which is the first step of detecting an attack... the next steps involve analyzing the legitimate changes to the code and discerning them from malicious changes.)
I could also imagine a variety of ways (using mitm proxy, or a browser extension) to try to avoid running new javascript before seeing it and having a chance to analyze it - but all of the ways I can imagine would require a substantial amount of work, including writing new software.
Do you know of any existing browser extension or other software which sufficiently paranoid protonmail users can/should/do use to detect and/or actually prevent the type of targeted attack I'm describing?
doesn’t work for users on the imap bridge
Yes that is why i said "when using Proton's web mail interface" - which I expect 100% of users of other interfaces also sometimes log in to.
How hard is it to actually have a company that provides a useful product and doesn't veer off into insanity at the first possible occasion. Why does it always end up like this.