ProtonMail Takes Privacy to a New Level
Students from Harvard and MIT have partnered up to create ProtonMail, a new email server that promises to protect the user’s privacy. Gmail and the NSA are infamous for shuffling through people’s emails and monitoring activity, and as a response these students have created a highly encrypted method for sending emails.
According to Jason Stockman, the founder and developer of ProtonMail, the students started developing the idea in 2013. At the time, some students were located in Switzerland working at a nuclear research facility. “It was the Snowden leaks that got us started,”Stockman told The Huffington Post.
While navigation through emails is easy for the user, the end-to-end encryption and user authentication protocols make it impossible for anyone (even the creators) to view emails. According to Ben Johnson, the chief evangelist at server and endpoint security vendor Bit9, “Because the encryption is point-to-point, the middleman — the ProtonMail service — never receives the decrypted data. The way these messages could be compromised are really limited to two things: weaknesses in encryption implementation, and endpoint compromise.”
Many users have already flocked to ProtonMail for its privacy features, but will it also attract the wrong kind of user? With such high privacy qualities, the potential for malicious usage is almost undeniable.
“One of the challenges with systems like this, in addition to folks who just want more privacy and peace of mind, is that this is the kind of service that criminals will flock to,” Johnson told The Huffington Post.
However, Johnson added that in our society, there’s either “a world where you’ve got private communications or not.”
ProtonMail is free, and those interested can sign up here.
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