Proton announces Proton Pass, a password manager

April 20, 2023 ndowd

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, is announcing a brand new product today. And it’s a password manager called Proton Pass.

Like other Proton products, the company is insisting on 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 information as the user key is required to decrypt data and cryptographic operations occur 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 (such as saved URLs, which many other password managers don’t encrypt) can be used to create a highly detailed profile on you. For example, if an attacker can see that you have passwords saved for an account with Grindr, gop.com, or even a manga fan site, they’ll know a lot about you as a person, even if they can’t actually access your accounts,” Proton’s founder and CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post.

A beta version of Proton Pass is available to loyal Proton customers, such as users who have a lifetime plan. Customers with a Visionary plan will be able to access the product shortly. 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 a few team members of the Proton team.

Like with Proton VPN and the company’s other products, the company plans to use a freemium business model when it rolls out Proton Pass to everyone. Some features will be available for free, while you will have to pay for a subscription to access advanced features. Proton offers an all-in-one subscription, Proton Unlimited, with all the paid features in Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Drive and Proton Calendar. Advanced Proton Pass features will also be included in this premium subscription tier.

Proton Pass is currently available as a 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 authenticator (like Bitwarden, 1Password or iCloud Passwords).

In other news, Proton has recently reached an important 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 that there are likely more free users than paid users. But it also means that Proton has no issue attracting new users to its products.