Proton, the Geneva, Switzerland-based company behind the end-to-end encrypted email service Proton Mail, as well as Proton VPN, Proton Drive, and Proton Calendar, today announced a brand new product. And it’s a password manager called Proton Pass.
Like other Proton products, the company is pushing for the privacy and security features of this new password manager. Everything you store in Proton Pass is end-to-end encrypted, including passwords (obviously), email addresses, URLs, and notes.
This way, Proton never has access to your personal data, as the user key is needed to decrypt data and cryptographic operations take place locally on your device. Even if Proton’s servers are breached, your data should still be safe.
“This is important because seemingly innocuous bits of information (like saved URLs, which many other password managers don’t encrypt) can be used to create a very detailed profile of you. For example, if an attacker can see that you have saved passwords for an account with Grindr, gop.com, or even a manga fan site, they know a lot about you as a person, even if they don’t have access to your account. your accounts,” wrote Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen in a blog post.
A beta version of Proton Pass is available to loyal Proton customers, such as users with a lifetime subscription. Customers with a Visionary subscription will soon be able to access the product. The Visionary plan is no longer available to new customers.
Proton Pass is also the result of the acquisition of SimpleLogin, an email alias startup. The SimpleLogin team worked on Proton Pass with some team members from the Proton team.
As with Proton VPN and the company’s other products, the company plans to use a freemium business model when it rolls out Proton Pass for everyone. Some features are available for free, while access to advanced features requires a subscription fee. Proton offers an all-in-one subscription, Proton Unlimited, with all paid features in Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Drive, and Proton Calendar. Advanced Proton Pass features will also be included in this premium subscription level.
Proton Pass is currently available on desktop as a browser extension, iOS or Android app. Browser extensions work in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Customers can also use Proton Pass as their two-factor authentication (such as Bitwarden, 1Password, or iCloud passwords).
In other news, Proton recently hit a major milestone as there are 100 million registered users across all of the company’s products. Of course, Proton has a free tier for all its services, including Proton VPN, which means there are probably more free users than paid users. But it also means that Proton has no problem attracting new users to its products.
Image Credits: Proton