ProtonMail Could Reroute Connections Through Google To Circumvent Censorship

Proton Technologies, the company behind encrypted email provider ProtonMail, has announced plans to circumvent censorship by routing connections to its servers through third-party infrastructure, which may include Google -- a company that ProtonMail has long been critical of over its privacy practices. From a report: Proton, which was founded out of Switzerland in 2013 by academic researchers working on particle physics projects at CERN, promises ProtonMail users full privacy via client-side encryption, meaning that nobody can intercept and read their emails -- it has frequently positioned itself as the antithesis of Gmail, which serves as a vital cog in Google's advertising wheel. ProtonMail, on the other hand, has emerged as a prominent privacy-focused alternative, used by companies and individuals -- including White House staffers and activists -- wishing to sidestep snoopers.

Thus, ProtonMail has faced its fair share of censorship, with the likes of Turkey, Belarus, and Russia all blocking the service in recent times. This is something that Proton is now pushing harder to counter with its new backup solution. The new tool, which will be deployed over the next few weeks in the ProtonMail desktop and mobile apps, is designed to sidestep any blocks imposed by network administrators, internet service providers (ISPs), or governments.

Nice, but maybe first...

[RandomUsername99]

Maybe first they should have stopped voluntarily giving connection data to governments.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]

Presently happy customer

[weilawei]

Please dont fsck it up, for the love of FSM.

Basic plausibility

[aeropage]

If it's well encrypted on send and retrieval, the intermediate infrastructure shouldn't matter.

Remember domain fronting?

[hax 109]

When Russia tried to censor end-to-end encrypted messengers, one evasive maneuver was "domain fronting". That technique uses the fact that the "server name indication" (SNI), which is part of the transport security layer can be different from the HTTP host header inside the encrypted connection. With big infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Amazon and Google, you can use this to make the outwardly visible names from the DNS resolution and from SNI something innocuous that a censor wouldn't touch to avoid causing too much collateral damage. The encrypted connection is terminated on load balancers which then direct the traffic to the actual host you want, which is given by the host header, safely encypted between the client and the load balancer. When this trick was used to evade Russian censorship of messengers, it didn't take long for the big cloud providers to explicitly forbid domain fronting. What makes ProtonMail think they can use Google to evade censorship now?

Russian block had nothing to do with Censorship

[kot-begemot-uk]

Some moron (according to different sources from Ukraine or Netherlands) was swindled by a Cryptocurrency scam sometimes mid-last year.

He has been sending mass mailings about bombs in schools, hospitals, the Moscow subway, the parliament - you name it. On a bad day up to 2000 sites with bomb threats and in some cases up to 30K bomb threats in a month. He used Proton mail for a period of time as a source.

Proton mail was asked to cooperate, and AFAIK it initially ignored the Russian request. They put a blo

Re:

[kot-begemot-uk]

If you wonder what being swindled by a crypto fraud and Russia has to do - so do most people, but the moron decided that it is all Russia's fault and he will continue (in fact he is continuing this today) the campaign until Russian state reimburses him for the losses. He has probably caused an economical loss which exceeds the requested amount by 2 orders of magnitude, but they are not budging out of principle.

Re:

[comodoro]

Could you please source this? Because Proton claimed it was blocked without any cooperation request.

Swiss encryption company, eh?

[gawdonblue]

Probably owned by the CIA [forbes.com].