ProtonMail makes email service accessible via Tor network
The secure e-mail service ProtonMail has made its service accessible via the Tor network. The Swiss service says it has taken the step to better guarantee the privacy of its users and to prevent censorship.
The company says that with the rapid growth of its users, more and more is at stake when it comes to protecting civil rights. According to the agency, that growth is partly due to the recent presidential elections in America. Therefore, from Thursday it will be possible to use the service via Tor, whereby the ProtonMail site can be reached via the anonymizing network. The Tor browser is required for this. The company has published instructions on how to use its email service through Tor.
The generation of the Tor URL would have taken ‘considerable processing power’ to arrive at a URL that is somewhat memorable. Normally, Tor addresses, such as 5karyquenden4d6k.onion, are difficult to read and remember, raising the possibility of phishing, according to ProtonMail. Therefore, after generating millions of encryption keys, it ended up with the url protonirockerxow.
The site is also provided with a digital certificate from Digicert to build a secure https connection to the Tor site. That company issued the first Tor certificate to Facebook. While the additional encryption is basically not needed for sites on the Tor network, it does add an extra layer of security. ProtonMail wants to host the site outside of its own infrastructure in an undisclosed location.
The advantage of adding Tor support is, among other things, that a third party cannot see which site a user is visiting. This also applies to ProtonMail itself, which cannot see the user’s IP address. Even if an attacker were to intercept internet traffic, the added layers of encryption make reading traffic more difficult. In addition, the accessibility via Tor makes it more difficult to block the service.
The downside is that the service is a lot slower. ProtonMail says it wants to take other measures in the future that improve the security of its service and the privacy of users. One of the latest additions to the service was sending encrypted email and logging in with one password.