I recieved this update from Disroot’s newsletter recently
.:Other notable changes:.
Phasing out TLS1.1 - Time to phase out TLS1.1 has come long, long time ago. But each time we do it, we get someone complaining that their old device no longer works. This can’t go forever and so 1st of July, we are phasing outy TLS1.1. Please consider upgrading your software (or hardware) if you are affected by this (Android v4.4, windows XP etc).
We have improved the color palette for our custom themes (specially dark) which we will work on to roll out on all services providing more uniform experience on entire platform
Lacre - @pfm has managed to fix the bug which initially prevented us from running Lacre alpha tests on Disroot. It was quite a battle. Dragon has been slayed opening the door to the Disroot test again. Expect
announcement about upcoming test of end-to-end mailbox encryption on disroot soon.
Oh one more about Lacre. @wiktor one of the prominent developers of Sequoia has pushed to Lacre initial support for it. Sequoia is a more secure, robust re-implementation of PGP. We are very happy and
thankful to @wiktor for his work!
there haven’t been any comments on this topic since last June. any update as to did Disroot follow up with these? I don’t understand what any of this means so would be awesome if someone can explain.
Lacre seems to be interesting, but other servers also should install/enable Lacre as well. If Lacre ever becomes popular it is really good thing, so people would have encryption without vendor lock, like pm or tuta. So right now it will be same useless as mentioned services, only amongst Disroot service.
Sure. But as I understood Lacre is about e2ee between various Lacre-enabled servers, thus making e2ee emails vendor-lock free. Using strict PGP itself is OK, but nobody uses it nowadays, Lacre uses PGP encryption to make it simple and viable for present situation? PM encryption is useless if you send emails to non-pm services?
That is implementation, and messages between two Lacre servers are e2e encrypted, not just between users of one service? Also Lacre server itself do not stores private keys, which is also good thing. Anyway, it is still to be enabled some time later.
When you write a message it is unencrypted, data goes ssl-encrypted to SMTP server, which encrypts it than, and than it goes to IMAP server encrypted with no way to decrypt it without private keys and IMAP server have no way to decrypt is as well. Sure servers should enable Lacre ofc.
Anyway, if you use Proton webmail, when your outgoing messages are encrypted? Server does it, right? So client side encrypting is possible only with PGP?
Yes, except for the provider which would have those keys.
No it’s better than that, because these emails are encrypted by the openpgp.js in browser/bridge prior to being uploaded to Proton. With approaches like Lacre they are encrypting on receiving the message. So that does mean there is a window in which they process the unencrypted email.
But they have only public key? Also how they encrypt it with SMTP server without having private key?
Sounds good. Yet technically they can decrypt it back, as they store private keys? That is not something I fear, I use Disroot and they store messages in plain text.
Their server encrypts emails with your public key when they are received. They can only be decrypted with your private key which isn’t stored on their server.
You decrypt the messages in the Webmail or email client using your private key.
No they don’t store your private key like Proton and other providers they only store your public key and use that to encrypt your messages.
If anyone has any questions about Lacre (the name of the encryption software they are working on) they have had a FAQ and documentation about it for a while now.
Yep I mistyped, you encrypt with public key and decrypt with private key. Obviously. I mean calling Lacre not true e2ee could be OK?, but calling PM true e2ee is also not correct?
Edit. Actually I wanted to clarify single and simple thing. If PM user sends mail to other non-PM user this email could be read by recipient provider. Sending mail from Lacre server to another Lacre server could not be read by recipient provider, only your own provider, is it correct? Same is applied to PM, but worse, they could read absolutly any mail they want, as they have private keys. M?
Edit2. Or saying it simple, with Lacre enabled servers we will have e2ee with email similar (+/-) to message apps, like whatsapp, but for emails. That is how I understand it, maybe I do not understand it correct.
Lacre as far as I understand helps to protect your emails at rest, they don’t enable E2EE between mail servers, that’s something you will have to configure and setup yourself.
Directly from Lacre’s FAQ about how it works:
From server perspective, Lacre works as a postfix (SMTP server) filter. All incoming emails are passed to the filter that then checks whether a GPG key is present in the database for a given recipient. If a key is present, the email is being encrypted with the recipient’s public key and transmitted to the IMAP server that then saves it on to the mailbox. If the incoming email is already encrypted or the recipient key is missing, Lacre does nothing and forwards the email to the IMAP server.