I agree with hitekker, I'm feeling pretty nervous about being a FastMail customer right now and will start looking for a more secure alternative now. The main reason I moved to FastMail is because I stopped trusting Google to keep my mail secure.
I've just switched away from Chrome (because I'd like to support Firefox) and am a FastMail customer.
But I've started to think about moving back to Chrome for "high security mail".
My private mail is pretty bland and uninteresting, so I don't care too much about not using GMail there, but for my Apple account, Google account, Microsoft account etc. it might be a good idea to compartmentalize those "high value" things from everyday mail and go to GMail with the Advanced Protection Program (so no access from smartphone or iPad, I guess).
And looking at their web site I've learned that GSuite Business is affordable and allows adding domains hosted elsewhere. Good.
What do people think about this?
But then the next step: what about losing my domain? My registrar is a reputable German domain hoster, but certainly no Google. On the other hand, Google doesn't register domains, but has "domain partners" like "domaindiscount24" (that I've never heard of before), so I guess not much to win there.
They have one of the largest information security teams in the world, that team includes what is probably the best corporate vulnerability research team in the world. They're one of a small number of companies that is actively defining modern TLS and thus modern transport encryption; their operations and security teams are almost certainly the world's most sophisticated users of TLS. They ship the most secure browser in the world (if it's not, it's a dead-even tie with Edge --- but, since Google outclasses every other major vendor in vulnerability research, I doubt it's really a tie) and thus have a far better understanding of browser security and the interaction between serverside applications and clientside JS/HTTP applications than any other company. They spend more per year on external vulnerability assessment than most startups do... for everything. They're a constant state-level adversary target and have, over the last decade, evolved a secops and monitoring team to match those adversaries.
How many engineering employees does Fastmail even have? How much better would each of them have to be than one of the best-paying security teams in the entire industry for them to match up?
I could go on, but to me, you don't really even have to think hard about this.
So it's because Google has deep/best skills in security? It automatically applies and makes all their products more secure than everyone else's, even if their design is weakened as a result of their business model? e.g. Does Google's 1st class security team + unencrypted emails + tracking makes it more secure than a company like Proton Mail that's focused on providing Secure mail?
${All the things I said previously}. And, Google Mail is one of their flagship products.
Most of what is on that ProtonMail page is nonsensical. The claim that is relevant to the discussion here --- that ProtonMail has a "smaller attack surface" and is thus structurally more secure than Google Mail --- assumes significant facts not in evidence.
See downthread for my response to the claim that using a mail services outside the US somehow insulates you from NSA snooping.
They have every incentive to ensure the highest security possible. Their entire business model and most of their revenue is predicated on consumers and businesses moving not just some, but all of their data, straight over to Google's custody and control. Indeed, it damn well had better be secure.
But I think they're compromised by those same business models. Google wants to provide intelligence, and probably more important to them, marketing data. This requires that the consumer is an open book to them, and their business decisions incorporate that. Up until recently, they were actively scanning email for marketing insights. In addition, Google's operating complexity, both business and technical, increases the opportunity for failure. And their other business objectives compromise their security work. That's glaringly apparent for their Android platform. There's more surface. And in a Google world, the email account grants direct access to everything — location data, purchasing history, passwords, documents... everything.
For another dedicated email provider, what they have to protect is also simpler. There are fewer moving parts. There's less to protect, which means that there don't need to be as many engineers. That means a careful and well thought out email provider /can/ be as secure, by carefully limiting their exposure, doing one thing, and doing it well.
There's something to be said for careful application of open standards and open source software, a smaller and more responsive team, and not building a massive single point of failure. I am a current Fastmail customer, and hope to remain, depending on the outcome of this review.
I'm not looking to discredit the claim, I'm genuinely curious to learn about what they've done to earn the Gold Standard from @tptacek
Google were previously reading our emails for Ad purposes and some of their employees are still able to read our Emails, their privacy policy also indictates they will hand over our emails if requested by law enforcement which suggests it's weaker than protonmail.com end-to-end encryption:
> All emails are secured automatically with end-to-end encryption. This means even we cannot decrypt and read your emails. As a result, your encrypted emails cannot be shared with third parties.
If this is the case, how is Google being held as the Gold Standard?
Elsewhere in the thread I mentioned advanced protection[0]. Gmail/Google is also the only company to my knowledge that gives you a warning like this one[1], and it was certainly the first to do so.
A lot of this comes down to your threat model. If you are most worried about
Unless your threat model is "The NSA gives my hosting provider a court order" or "an employee of my hosting provider goes rogue", its pretty clear that GMail is categorically the best option. And in those two cases, its not clear that there are significantly better options.
I get and am not questioning that. It's just that your curiosity doesn't seem to have motivated you to do a first pass of, I don't want to call it 'research', but just basic poking around on the topic. You want links and info from some dude on the internet because what he says contradicts stuff you know from... something a vendor said about their product.
It's a totally sensible question but it's not some particularly arcane mystery to dig into. In tptacek's case, in a jiffy, you can bring up the 60-odd comments of his that mention 'Gmail' and get a reasonable idea of what he thinks of it and why. And if you think he's got it wrong, you can say, hey, tptacek, I think you're full of poop when you said [...]. And then maybe you can hash it out and one or both of you will learn something. But 'Citation, please', especially on trivially searchable topics mostly says 'I'm kind of curious, but I don't really care'. The person you're asking probably isn't going to care either.
I was hoping there was a quick resource of someone having done a deep analysis dive into advanced techniques Gmail does that makes it more secure than everyone else but judging by tptacek's response it sounds like it's because they have the best security team and by extension all products they make are naturally more secure.
If all we have are the same claim being repeated with the only way to learn about what makes Gmail the most secure email provider is having to trawl through 1000's of comments. It means Gmail is always going to perceived as more secure even when they may not be, because relatively no-one is going to trawl through 1000's of comments to make an informed assessment otherwise.
trawl through 1000's of comments. It means Gmail is always going to perceived as more secure even when they may not be, because relatively no-one is going to trawl through 1000's of comments to make an informed assessment otherwise.
60ish is not 1000s. 69ish if you add the 9 about Protonmail. The guy posts on HN so much you can fairly safely go to https://hn.algolia.com and type author:tptacek [topic of interest] and find out what he thinks about it. If there was, inexplicably, a comic universe about HN mutants, he'd be The Citation.
I think you're conflating several different things here. Their vulnerability to hackers is not at all related to the extent to which they are willing to cooperate with the US Government or to exactly how their GMail ads work. You have to define exactly what your threat model is, and no service can really be the best at all of them. It's perfectly consistent with the worst interpretation of your other assertions that Google is still the gold standard for making sure that no hacker can ever compromise your GMail account, reset your passwords to your services, and hold your data and accounts on other services hostage.
