Necessity is the mother of invention, the old adage has proved its worth again when a group of Harvard and MIT students came together to create an NSA-proof email service.
ProtonMail, the new email platform launched at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) by five security experts ‘who were drawn together by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet,’ is probably safer and secure than Lavabit, Snowden’s defunct email service.
The service has many benefits over conventional email service providers. As the founders explain:
They are incorporated in Switzerland, which is well known for offering the strongest privacy protection to both individuals as well as countries.
The site uses end-to-end encryption and intense user authentication measures, implying that the data transmitted through their services is inaccessible to the ProtonMail team itself, let alone other people.
“ProtonMail’s segregated authentication and decryption system means logging into a ProtonMail account that requires two passwords. The first password is used to authenticate the user and retrieve the correct account. The second password is a decryption password which is never sent to us. It is used to decrypt the user’s data in the browser so we never have access to the decrypted data, or the decryption password,” reads the website.
It is free forever and does not allow tracking or logging of personally identifiable information.
“We do not save any metadata such as the IPs used to connect to accounts, or the times certain accounts are accessed,” the website says.
Even data with non-ProtonMail users is secure and emails are provided with an optional expiration time so that there are no trails of sent messages.
They use only trusted secure implementations AES, RSA, along with OpenPGP with open source cryptographic libraries.
Besides, the service providers have invested heavily in hardware security, with fully encrypted hard disks and multiple password layers, thus preserving data security even in an event of hardware size.
Additionally, they conduct routine server side integrity checks and uses Swiss SSL secured connections.
With a few weeks in private beta, ProtonMail launched its beta phase recently and is easy to use ‘comprehensive security for everyone,’ according to the website claims.
Worth giving a try!!!!