<story><title>Security experts declare all Proton apps secure after security audit</title><url>https://protonmail.com/blog/security-audit-all-proton-apps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>I agree with you that the title is a bit sensationalist. But if independent security audits with no major issues uncovered cannot make you claim something is secure, when can you claim something as secure? Or are you of the opinion that nothing ever can be claimed to be secure as there can always be holes that could be uncovered in the future?&lt;p&gt;Using openssh as an example, would you say it&amp;#x27;s secure when you&amp;#x27;re using public keys for the authentication? Their track record seems pretty good for the last years, but there might still be uncovered vulnerabilities, could it still claim to be secure?</text></item><item><author>sodality2</author><text>Declaring it secure after an audit is like writing 100% coverage tests and saying it&amp;#x27;s bug-free. You can&amp;#x27;t prove absence, only presence.&lt;p&gt;This title is the definition of sensationalism and only by reading the article do you find the truth: &amp;quot;Their tests uncovered no major issues or security vulnerabilities&amp;quot;. This is a bad look for them and I&amp;#x27;m wary of their company now...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tailspin2019</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s partly the phrase &amp;quot;Security experts declare&amp;quot; which is likely to be what&amp;#x27;s rubbing people up the wrong way.&lt;p&gt;The security auditors themselves would never actually word it like that in their reports, because the statement implies a degree of certainty that cannot really exist.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of what the auditor&amp;#x27;s actually said:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Auditors identified two low-severity vulnerabilities. Additionally, five general recommendations were reported. At the same time, we confirm that no important security issues were identified during the pentest.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a reason that audit reports will never say outright that something is &amp;quot;secure&amp;quot;.  They may say something like &amp;quot;strong and effective security measures are in place&amp;quot;, but that&amp;#x27;s a very different kind of statement.&lt;p&gt;I think the article itself is great but the headline just falls on the wrong side of being a bit hyperbolic and seems to be optimised for marketing impact over accuracy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Security experts declare all Proton apps secure after security audit</title><url>https://protonmail.com/blog/security-audit-all-proton-apps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>capableweb</author><text>I agree with you that the title is a bit sensationalist. But if independent security audits with no major issues uncovered cannot make you claim something is secure, when can you claim something as secure? Or are you of the opinion that nothing ever can be claimed to be secure as there can always be holes that could be uncovered in the future?&lt;p&gt;Using openssh as an example, would you say it&amp;#x27;s secure when you&amp;#x27;re using public keys for the authentication? Their track record seems pretty good for the last years, but there might still be uncovered vulnerabilities, could it still claim to be secure?</text></item><item><author>sodality2</author><text>Declaring it secure after an audit is like writing 100% coverage tests and saying it&amp;#x27;s bug-free. You can&amp;#x27;t prove absence, only presence.&lt;p&gt;This title is the definition of sensationalism and only by reading the article do you find the truth: &amp;quot;Their tests uncovered no major issues or security vulnerabilities&amp;quot;. This is a bad look for them and I&amp;#x27;m wary of their company now...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sodality2</author><text>&amp;gt; But if independent security audits with no major issues uncovered cannot make you claim something is secure, when can you claim something as secure?&lt;p&gt;Nothing at all; it&amp;#x27;s a broken model. The server can &lt;i&gt;at any time&lt;/i&gt; start serving malicious payloads [0]. The server hosts your mail but they also serve the webapp. The clientside decrypts the mail, but the server hosts the client code...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a fundamentally flawed idea, trying to retrofit encryption into email in this way, when the server essentially has to hold all of your mail. In this case, the only thing that would make me feel secure in using it, is a third-party OSS client that downloads the mail without using the webapp, using only client-side code. And even then, of course, the mail can simply just be &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; encrypted when being ingested by Proton. So even then I wouldn&amp;#x27;t really trust it without external encryption like PGP. In which case, why bother?&lt;p&gt;To be clear I do use private email services (protonmail, tutanota) but I am simply not going to fall for the illusion of guaranteed privacy; I just trust that they are what they say they are. They are still a better option IMO than something like Gmail, but I don&amp;#x27;t think they&amp;#x27;re a silver bullet.&lt;p&gt;[0]: If you think this is unlikely, see this: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=25337507&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=25337507&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>