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Using the blockchain to verify email addresses sounds pretty smart
Blockchain is a logical, easy-to-use solution for verifying the identity of an email address. Which is why I like the idea of using Proton Mail’s Key Transparency email service: it uses the blockchain to hold your public keys, preventing email accounts from being breached.
Proton Mail is based on end-to-end encryption, ensuring that only the intended recipient of an email can read it, which it does by ensuring that the public key really belongs to the intended recipient, which prevents man-in-the-middle attacks, such as the NSA or the Roskomnadzor creating a fake public key linked to it and managing to trick someone into encrypting data with that fake public key.
Putting users’ public keys on a blockchain creates a record that ensures those keys actually belong to them, so you only need to cross-reference them every time other users send emails. Thanks to this, the verification of the public key becomes transparent and cannot be changed.
From there, all you need to do is do a search to ensure that the public key matches the intended recipient, and if it doesn’t, and if there is no match, immediately display a warning to the user. The feature will also be automatically enabled for Proton Mail users.
At the moment, Proton has launched the beta version of Key Transparency on its own private blockchain for the proof of concept, but the idea is that it will be on a public blockchain in order to benefit from a much larger and completely decentralized scale, preventing or hindering the possibility of an attack on a smaller blockchain.
This feature, beyond being a security measure that could be perhaps a little excessive for a normal user, is another step toward all transactions being carried out on the blockchain, Web3: the blockchain as an additional protocol that collects everything we do, a way of building trust in the system itself, so that you don’t have to believe what you see, because everything you do is reflected in a reliable way.
Proton Mail now has more than a hundred million users, most of them attracted by a guarantee of privacy that contrasts with more widespread email services such as Gmail. I’ve been using it for a long time when I want to protect myself from spam, but its features are making it more and more attractive for me to use all the time. If things continue progressing, I may well take that step.
(En español, aquí)
