Cern-headquartered ProtonMail has announced that its iOS app has gone open source. The email service company’s web application has been open source since 2015. Earlier this year, the company had an audit conducted by security firm SEC Consult of ProtonMail’s iOS application and the company has now made the app open source after being independently approved.
Apart from the SEC Consult audit, ProtonMail has also undergone third-party audits for its open source cryptographic libraries, OpenPGPjs and GopenPGP. The company has also documented and published its iOS security model. This will help because raw code without documentation can be almost unintelligible sometimes. Hence, a documented security model will help in rigorous assessment and review of the code by the public. ProtonMail has made the iOS trust model available on their Github page.
Innovation in the field of privacy tech
The company says that making the application open source would let people review the code that would in turn increase trust in the security of the platform and to develop a more private Internet. It also says that by making the code freely accessible to the developer community, it would lead to innovation in the field of privacy tech. Developers will be able to implement and build methods from these codes that could be documented and published. It would also lead to building safer and robust iOS apps the company believes.
ProtonMail says that there has been an increase in state-sponsored malware attacking iOS including attacks on ProtonMail users in recent times. This security model will give the users a higher level of security compared to typical apps claims ProtoMail.
