Tutanota makes encryption easy VS Synapse

Hi HN, we are the developers from Tuta (formerly Tutanota), the German end-to-end encrypted email provider, and we recently released the world's first post-quantum encryption for email.

We have included a full technical write-up of the cryptography involved in these changes and we have released it for open public review.

This document specifies TutaCrypt, a protocol designed for hybrid email encryption in Tuta Mail. The protocol combines a classical Elliptic-Curve-Diffie-Hellman key exchange with a post-quantum KEM. The goal is to replace the usage of RSA in Tuta Mail.

In the remainder of this document we describe some preliminaries such as the cryptographic primitives used. We define the core algorithms of the protocol and describe the flow of messages between the communicating parties. Finally, we discuss the security properties and some limitations of the protocol in its current form.

We are eager for your constructive feedback. All cryptography related source code is available for review and experimenting here: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/blob/master/src/api/worker...

If you have any questions or comments related to post-quantum cryptography please let us know in the comments!

Tutanota - Free secure email account service provider with built-in end-to-end encryption, no ads, no tracking. Free 1GB storage. Which is also partially open source, so you can self-host.

You are probably using a window manager and Electron is not able to detect the secret service backend you have installed. We recently switched to Electron’s built in api for storing credentials, which is the reason for this issue. https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/issues/6265

Tuta Mail (version 3.119.3): Encrypted email & calendar service - easy to use, secure by design.

A look at tuta.com and tutanota.com demonstrates that Tuta is using an Amazon Start of Authority (SOA) DNS record and 4 corresponding Amazon Name Server (NS) DNS records.

rich coming from tuta who still lack a onion based login. this ticket from 2018 was locked as off-topic. https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/issues/528

as lenin said, the best way to control the opposition is to lead it. for me, unless the company has been raided by the government they simply cannot be trusted.

apple proudly advertises privacy billboards while sharing everything they are asked under shadow laws. absolute hypocrisy and double standards. but then they wouldnt be where they are without government money and favours.

Have a non business paid account. Can you change your current tutanota.com email to the tuta.com email?

I have an at tutanota.com account. All of a sudden, this evening, it disconnected and I haven't been able to re-access my account. It actually seems like the whole platform is down, but maybe that's just the context from my devices.

I have a fairly recent free account that I believe was on the domain tutanota.com which I can no longer log into.

What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.

Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages. (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).

If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

some context re the Matrix isses, long history apparently: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481#issuecomm...

Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.

This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481

> That doesn't make this situation any less bad to the rest of the community.

How is the community suffering here? Let's say Element adds a bunch of baller stuff to their versions over the next few months and then closes the source. Can't the community just fork the last AGPL version? You might say, "well then no one can take the AGPL fork and make their own closed-source business", but do you want them to? Even if you do, they still can with the existing Apache-licensed version, just like Element is doing right now.

You're arguing that Element will lose a lot of contributions, but TFA points out that despite being super open, the vast majority of contributions are still made by Element employees (which seems to be true [0]). It's not the case that Element is looking to monetize the (small) contributions of others, it is the case that others are looking to monetize the (huge) contributions of Element.

And besides, aren't the MSCs the core of Matrix? It's already super possible to build your own compliant client and server.

The situation is that Element needs money to keep developing the ecosystem. It would be cool if there were a big network of donors and contributions, but there isn't. You're essentially saying, "that's fine, go out of business then, and the community will keep developing the ecosystem", but that's not happening now, and it can still happen anyway with the Apache-licensed versions, which again people can still contribute to.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/graphs/contributors