German Court Forces Mail Provider Tutanota to Insert a Backdoor

[upnorth]

Content source

https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutanota-zu-Ueberwachungsfunktion-4972460.html

Tutanota only stores its customers' emails in encrypted form and cannot read them itself. Now LKA investigators want to monitor a mailbox.

Tutanota is one of the few email providers that encrypt all incoming emails by default. However, a ruling by the Cologne Regional Court is now forcing the Hanover-based company to incorporate a function with which investigators can monitor individual mailboxes and read emails in plain text.

Translation link below. German to English.

Tutanota Backdoor

 

[MonSpyder9]

Oh no, this should not be happening. Sure, they say it's only for one mailbox, but we all know that's not true.

 

[ForgottenSeer 85179]

For Protonmail this is also already the case

 

[dabluez98]

Crap

 

[jetman]

For Protonmail this is also already the case

Where did you hear that ?

 

[Cafeine]

For Protonmail this is also already the case

Does not seem to be the case, as per : ProtonMail Transparency Report 2020 (Update) - ProtonMail Blog

 

[upnorth]

a court in Germany last month ordered Tutanota to help investigators monitor the contents of a user's encrypted mailbox. The site has until the end of the year to add functionality to perform this surveillance. Such a peephole would destroy the unique selling point of Tutanota: it encrypts all data stored in people's mailboxes in such a way that it can't retrieve the contents beyond some metadata. It also allows people to wrap their outgoing and incoming messages in end-to-end encryption that, again, Tutanota can't break.

in June the Hannover Regional Court had struck down a lower district court's ruling that Tutanota was to be backdoored. While angry police workers reportedly threatened to attack Pfau, sending him menacing emails promising to abduct him from his home and throw him into "provisional detention" unless he obeyed their orders, the regional court dismissed the district court's ruling – leaving police powerless to follow through. Tutanota's successful legal argument at the time was that it did not qualify as a "provider of telecommunications services" within EU law. Pfau explained to The Register how the German police were attempting to counter that: "Although we are no longer a provider of telecommunications services, [they say] we would be involved in providing telecommunications services and must therefore still enable telecommunications and traffic data collection." He added: "From our point of view – and German law experts agree with us – this is absurd."

In September, not long after Pfau's personal battles with police, unidentified persons launched a series of DDoS attacks against Tutanota.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Plus: Yet another UK.gov bod demands end-to-end encryption is broken

www.theregister.com

 

[AG3S]

Well worse things are coming ... which is being approved in EU parliment. Which is creating a general backdoor for all encrypted service inside EU countries. So that it would be easier for them to access information which they need.

This is rediculous. Of course decryption is possible but creating a backdoor is a disaster. If for whatever reason this goes to the hands of hackers... century's disaster will happen :|