this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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It is nuanced, but having the ability to selectively serve malicious javascript stealing keys to specific people only on one access is considerable issue in practice, compared to distributing binary where you would generally have the same binary for everyone and you are able to archive and analyse it. Especially if you use third party distributions, like github releases or flatpaks.
Well, yes-ish.
An organization with resources to coerce or compromise Proton or similar wouldn't have trouble identifying individual users "well enough" (trivially, IP address). At that point there is absolutely nothing stopping a package distributor to serve different content by IP. Not even signatures help in this context, as the signature still comes from the same party coerced or compromised.
Also most people won't (or are unable to) analyze every code change after every update, which means in practice detection is even more unlikely for OS packages than it is for web pages (much easier to debug code and see network flows). The OS attack surface is also much broader.
In general anyway, this is such a sophisticated attack (especially the targeted nature of it) that it's not relevant for the vast, vast majority of people. If you deal with super sensitive data you can build your proton client directly, or simply use the bridge (which ultimately is exactly like other client-side tooling), so for those very rare corner cases where this threat is relevant, a solution exists. Actually, in those cases you probably don't want to use mail in general. So my question is, who is the threat actor you are concerned about?
All in all I think that labeling "insecure" the setup for this I think is not accurate and can paint a wrong picture to people less technically competent.
Bridge did not exist back then.
As for it being sophisticated attack, I think it is relative.
Regardless, if Proton said it did not matter to most people, I would respectfully disagree and move on. They did not. They claimed it is not at all less secure than a native app, which is BS.
I can see a threat model already from 2014.
Anyway, I think it's a tradeoff that it's hard to assess quantitatively, as risk is always subjective. From where I stand, the average person using native clients and managing their own keys has a much higher chance to be compromised (by far simpler vectors), for example. On the other hand, someone using a clean OS, storing the key on a yubikey and manually vetting the client tool can resist to sophisticated attacks better compared to using web clients.
I just don't see this as hill to die on either way. In fact, I also argue in my blog post that for the most part, this technical difference doesn't impact the security sufficiently to make a difference for the average user.
I guess you disagree and that's fine.