Comment by uallo
5 hours ago
> If you need true end-to-end encryption where the provider can't see plaintext, you lose search, real-time collaboration, most of the AI features everyone's been bolting on lately, etc.
Proton has all of these features, despite being end-to-end encrypted. Search works well with their Mail and Calendar solutions, real-time collaboration is a core offering of their Document editor. It surely is harder to implement, but not impossible for many use cases.
And proton is a Swiss company operating under the Swiss Jurisdiction too.
The funny thing is that Proton is considering moving our of Switzerland, because of the new proposed surveillance laws...
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/ai-governance/proton-does-not-t...
The funnier thing is that they opted for Germany which as I understand have similar laws.
How do they do that? Either they 1) transfer your entire data to your system before searching, 2) use shoddy cryptography, or 3) you have to expose your private key to them. I doubt it's 1).
Apparently, it's (1): https://proton.me/support/search
There are obvious UX/performance issues, but it's an honest approach.
Based on link below:
> Click Enable to confirm. Your messages will then be downloaded from Proton Mail’s servers, decrypted, and indexed locally in an encrypted state.
They just download your emails into your browser and make them locally searchable.
I battled the same issue, in the end I have unencrypted data for fulltext search. But none of these are sensitive. I was thinking that maybe with AES, which is just a XOR, you could do search if you have the key as you just need to know how to XOR the search query and which phrases you can include. So instead of "hello" the XOR would yield "arpe5," and you just look for that in the db. But this could only work with exact matches or prefixes, it would not allow elastic search or anything complex like that.