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.
