Proton Release Notes

• Introduced Proton Protocols,a new VPN architecture designed for improved stability and censorship resistance

• Rebuilt the way the app connects to our servers, making for quicker, more stable connections

• Introduced automatic network conflict detection .The app now detects when other software on your device is interfering with your VPN connection

• Introduced connection feedback. You can now rate your connection quality with a quick thumbs up or thumbs down, helping us improve your future experience

• Fixed an issue where a sudden app or device crash could leave DNS rules active, potentially affecting your browsing after disconnecting from the VPN

• Fixed a reconnection issue for users with IPv6 connectivity

Last year we launched Lumo, a zero-access encrypted AI assistant that never logs your conversations or trains on your data. Since then, more than 10 million people have started using it, and we’ve shipped major updates, including custom conversation styles, dedicated encrypted project spaces, more powerful models, and more.

Today we’re announcing Lumo 2.0, the most significant change since launch. We’ve rebuilt Lumo on a new architecture with capabilities that bring it to the frontier of what AI can do. As always, it runs on Proton’s fully European infrastructure, protected by Swiss privacy laws and zero-access encryption.

Advanced reasoning models

Lumo 2.0 is our biggest leap in capability yet. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (new window), an independent benchmark combining 10 evaluations across agents, coding, scientific reasoning, and general knowledge, Lumo 2.0 Lite scores 127% higher than Lumo 1.4, and Lumo 2.0 Max scores 240% higher.

Lumo 2.0 also introduces fast and reasoning modes to make everyday interactions feel faster while giving more demanding tasks additional depth. Fast prioritizes speed and Thinking is optimized for more complex, multi-step reasoning — a capability that didn’t exist in Lumo 1.4.

Lumo 2.0 responds to everyday queries up to 76% faster than Lumo 1.4. More complex tasks requiring deeper thinking now benefit from a visible thinking state, letting you see how Lumo is working through the problem in real time.

Image recognition and generation

Lumo 2.0 is now multimodal, able to process both text and images. Upload an image to analyze, create visuals from a prompt or a rough sketch, or edit existing images, all in the same conversation.

Lumo’s zero-access encryption applies to image processing too. Images you upload and the images Lumo generates are stored so that no one, not even Proton, can access them.

Image generation

Describe what you want and Lumo creates it. Type a prompt, refine it in the same conversation, and iterate until it looks exactly right. From a logo concept to a travel poster, start with words and end with an image.

Image editing

Upload an image and tell Lumo what to change. Swap backgrounds, adjust colors, remove unwanted objects, or completely re-imagine a scene.

Image analysis

Upload a chart, a document, a screenshot, or a photo and ask Lumo anything about it. Lumo identifies what’s in the image, reads the data, and responds with detail.

Sketch to image

Upload a rough sketch and describe what you want it to become. Tell Lumo the style, the mood, the details, and watch it take shape.

Powerful new web search capabilities

Compared to Lumo 1.4, Lumo 2.0 has far stronger web search. When a question calls for current information, Lumo pulls live results from across the web and cites its sources, so you can verify answers and dig deeper. It stays current on recent news and events, draws on live financial data, and can even pull in weather forecasts. The result is more accurate, more complete answers with fewer hallucinations.

Deeper context with memories

Lumo 2.0 combines user-controlled memory and Projects to move beyond one-off questions toward collaboration that builds over time.

Memory lets Lumo learn your preferences, working style, and ongoing context, so every conversation starts smarter than the last. You decide what it retains, what it forgets, and what it never learns in the first place.

The context window is now twice as large, so Lumo holds longer conversations coherently and reasons across longer documents and bigger datasets. For work that spans multiple sessions, Projects go further: Each is a dedicated encrypted workspace that keeps your chats, files, and instructions together.

Every piece of context is protected by zero-access encryption, the same architecture that secures over 100 million Proton Mail and Proton Drive users.

Custom Lumos

Lumo 2.0 also introduces Custom Lumos, purpose-built assistants tailored to specific tasks. Build a writing assistant that always drafts in your tone, or a research assistant that structures answers the way you need them. You define the instructions once, and the Custom Lumo follows them every time, no re-explaining required.

Private AI for businesses

Most AI tools create a new category of risk for businesses. Employee queries become training data. Confidential documents can be compromised. And your data sits on infrastructure subject to US law — with recent events already showing how fast access can vanish for international users.

Lumo for Business is built for organizations that can’t afford those risks. Every conversation is zero-access encrypted, never logged, and never used to train future models. Administrative tools let you manage your team’s access, and your data stays on independent European infrastructure, meaning access to Lumo cannot be subject to US Executive Orders and user data is not subject to American data collection requests.

Intelligence without surveillance

With Lumo 2.0, you no longer have to choose between advanced AI and privacy.

People now share more with AI systems than they ever shared with any other technology, and the dominant providers are normalizing a future where your personal data is the price of participation. Conversations are getting mined for training. Behavior is being used as a signal for profiling. Ads are arriving inside the most popular assistants. And control over all of it is now concentrated in the hands of a few US tech companies (many with government and defense contracts) with increasing commercial pressure to monetize your attention.

We believe AI should empower people, not extract from them. As it becomes infrastructure for work, creativity, and communication, privacy can no longer be optional. Lumo brings Proton’s privacy standards to AI: zero-access encryption, no logs, no data sharing, and no training on your conversations. And because Lumo is fully open source, anyone can inspect the code, verify the encryption, and confirm it works exactly as we say.

Lumo 2.0 is live now

• Free: Sign up (new window) for private AI with core capabilities.
• Lumo Plus: Unlimited chats, Projects, advanced image generation, and priority access to the fastest models.
• Lumo Professional: Premium features for teams, enabling secure collaboration without data leak risks.

We are shaping a future where AI works for you. Share your thoughts on X (new window) and Reddit (new window).

What is the CLI?

Last week, we finished launching the Proton Drive SDK, a shared engine designed to harmonize Proton Drive across all platforms and to bring you the features you need faster. Today, we’re taking the next step: Proton Drive CLI is here, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The CLI brings the power of our cloud storage and end-to-end encryption to scripts, backups, and deployment pipelines without the hassle of writing code. It’s built on the same Proton Drive SDK that powers our official Proton Drive client applications, and is fully interoperable with them.

For our developer community: While we are developing our fully-featured Linux app, the CLI already allows you to script a lot of Proton Drive’s key features from your favorite scripting environments (or even schedule jobs with cron). The CLI is intended to complement the Proton Drive application. It’s not a full replacement — for example, only the applications include a full synchronization engine that runs in the background — but rather a way to achieve many goals from a lightweight scripting environment.

A command-line interface (CLI) is a program you run from a shell, such as Terminal, PowerShell, or SSH. You pass a command and arguments, it does the job, and exits. Like other Unix command-line tools, you can pipe and script the Proton Drive CLI together with other tools into larger workflows.

The Proton Drive CLI is a single binary you can drop into that world. It supports common Drive operations such as listing folders, uploading and downloading files, trash, sharing, or invitations. Results are displayed in plain, readable text by default — and if you’re building automation on top, you can switch to a machine-friendly format using the --json (or -j) parameter.

How does Proton Drive CLI help?

Until now, using Proton Drive as part of an automated workflow — alongside tools like deployment scripts, backup jobs, cron, or internal runbooks — meant either doing it manually (like opening the app or dragging files) or reverse-engineering Drive’s internals to write custom scripts that were brittle and hard to maintain. The CLI changes that by allowing you to run Proton Drive operations directly from the terminal. It can, for example, upload files after a build finishes, back up a folder on a schedule, invite a reviewer, or check what’s been shared.

This is especially useful when you need a specific action to happen at a specific time, rather than keeping folders continuously in sync, such as publishing files after a release, taking a snapshot of a shared folder before an audit, or revoking access when someone offboards. The CLI runs the operation, tells you if it worked, and exits.

It’s a natural fit for anyone who already works in the terminal and for teams who want their Drive workflows written down as repeatable commands rather than a series of clicks to remember.

Get started with Proton Drive CLI

At launch, the CLI covers the essentials: sign in and out, browse and manage files and folders (including trash), and handle sharing and invitations.

A few typical flows:

proton-drive auth login

# Upload files from local directory to folder in My files
proton-drive filesystem upload ./reports/* /my-files/Reports --conflict-strategy skip

# See who has access, then invite a colleague
proton-drive sharing status /my-files/Reports
proton-drive sharing invite --user [email protected] --role editor --message "Please review reports" /my-files/Reports

# Download to a local backup directory
proton-drive filesystem download /my-files/Reports ./backups

For the full command set and flags, run proton-drive help or proton-drive --help. For example, proton-drive filesystem upload --help.

Find out more about using the Proton Drive CLI.

What comes next

Upcoming additions to the Proton Drive CLI include support for:

• Photos and albums
• Files and folders shared using a secure, public link
• Multi-account support for larger teams and managed service providers

Our long-term goal is to bring everything you can do in the Proton Drive app to the command line.

Download Proton Drive CLI

The fastest way to get started is to download the pre-built binaries for your platform:

Download Proton Drive CLI

On macOS and Linux, you’ll need to make the file executable after downloading (chmod +x proton-drive). Once that’s done, run proton-drive version to confirm the build.

Sign-in happens through your browser — no password on the command line. Your sessions are stored securely by your operating system (Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, or libsecret on Linux).

Build from source

Prefer to build from source? The CLI is implemented in TypeScript, packaged with Bun (new window), and available for download in the Drive SDK repository (new window). After cloning it, you can install the dependencies and build the CLI from the main directory:

cd js/cli
bun install
bun run build
./release/proton-drive auth login
./release/proton-drive filesystem list /my-files

See the CLI README in the repository for more details.

Fair use and rate limits

Proton Drive CLI follows the same fair use policies as all Proton Drive clients. To stay within limits, only upload or download what has actually changed — don’t reupload the same files repeatedly or rewrite entire folders when only a few files are new. Accounts that generate unusually high traffic are temporarily throttled to protect the service for everyone.

Now in your terminal, with the same level of privacy

Proton Drive CLI is available today, and more features will soon follow. Everything you do through the terminal is protected by the same end-to-end encryption as the rest of Proton Drive. Download it, try it, and let us know what you build. And if you’re on Linux: a full-featured desktop client with sync is on its way.

End-to-end encryption is at the core of Proton Drive. It’s what keeps your files private, so only you and the people you choose can access them — not even us. Because every file operation is protected this way in our cloud storage apps, cryptographic performance has a direct impact on how fast uploads and downloads feel.

After our previous SDK performance improvements across uploads and downloads, this latest update builds on that work by making Proton Drive’s core encryption layer even more efficient.

Proton Drive uses the OpenPGP standard to encrypt file contents, and we’ve now adopted a cryptographic advance introduced in an update to the standard. A big part of building the SDK throughout this year has been moving Drive’s file operations onto a shared foundation, making the apps faster and smoother across all platforms. The result is an up to 4x boost in performance for file uploads. It also lays the groundwork for the next generation of Drive features.

Performance impact

Encryption has a major impact on how smooth the app feels during everyday use, so cutting that cost by up to 4x makes file uploads feel much faster, especially on the devices where performance matters most:

• On mobile, our benchmarks show encryption of a 4MB file that used to take 97ms now takes 32ms.
• On more powerful processors, the same operation that used to take 12ms now takes 3ms.

Encrypting an HD movie or 1,000 high-resolution photos used to take your phone about a minute and a half, or a fast desktop around 12 seconds. With this update, the same work finishes in about 30 seconds on mobile and around 3 seconds on a desktop.

How Proton Drive become faster

The structure that Proton Drive uses is a file node, which can have many revisions, each representing a version of the file. The contents are then chunked into blocks. The node contains cryptographic material which is used to encrypt the blocks. This cryptographic material on the file node consists of the node key (a locked PGP secret key) and a content key packet (a PKESK encrypted with the node key).

The PGP messages that Proton Drive uses for file contents consist of two packets:

• A public key encrypted session key (PKESK): This is the node’s content key packet, shared for all blocks.
• A symmetrically encrypted integrity protected data packet (SEIPD): This is the encrypted block contents.

The new encryption scheme

Before this cryptography update, uploaded files used a v3 PKESK and a v1 SEIPD. Now, the encryption algorithm requires a v6 PKESK and a v2 SEIPD. The symmetric encryption used for content is AES-GCM, which makes full use of hardware encryption on most modern devices.

Because the session key is shared between revisions when files are updated, all revisions on a file must match the encryption scheme used by the first one. This means clients must be updated to take the PKESK version into account when making a change to a file and uploading a new revision. Clients built on the Proton Drive SDK will handle this automatically, as the information is carried in the session key. The key is generated here (new window) and used when encrypting the blocks (new window).

To avoid issues with decryption later, revisions submitted with the wrong version will be rejected. This means that clients which don’t support the feature will not be able to update files uploaded after this change comes into effect. Make sure to update your Proton Drive clients to get all the performance benefits.

What’s next

This is an big step in evolving Proton Drive’s shared core model toward more performant, more capable cloud storage protected by end-to-end encryption. The SDK gives every Drive client a shared cryptographic core, making changes of this scope possible — and helping us move faster on what comes next. Stay tuned for more improvements this year.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Proton Drive engineering team

We’ve been focused on making end-to-end encrypted cloud storage faster, smoother, and more consistent everywhere you use it. To get there, we rebuilt Proton Drive around a stronger technical foundation: a single, shared engine that unifies all our cloud storage apps across platforms and powers all uploading, downloading, encryption, and more.

These behind-the-scenes developments have an enormous impact that you can see and feel today. It means better, more consistent performance and vastly improved speeds. And it enables us to power more Drive integrations with every other Proton app: You’ll start seeing deeper integrations with the rest of the Proton ecosystem and support for more clients — and yes, including Linux.

Here’s what’s changed for you:

Quicker uploads and downloads

Moving files in and out of Proton Drive is now much snappier across platforms, with uploads up to 3x faster. This means common actions, like Android photo backup and macOS file sync, complete more quickly, letting you get on with your day. And you can access your files with less waiting, whenever you need, even on the go: Downloads are up to 2x faster.

A faster, smoother app experience

Your files and photos now load faster in Proton Drive. And because photos often hold the memories that matter most, such as family moments, travels, milestones, and everyday life, we’ve made the Photos experience smoother too. Enjoy accelerated timeline scrolling and swifter loading of albums and photos, even in large batches.

A stronger foundation for Drive and beyond

This transformation of Drive was made possible by combining knowledge from our Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and Web teams into a single, better engine: the Drive SDK (software development kit).

An SDK is a package of building blocks of code that developers can use to create applications for different operating systems (like macOS, Linux, or Android). Switching to the Proton Drive SDK was like swapping out a car engine for a jet engine. It gives us the power to create faster Drive apps and makes it much easier to develop new features and integrations for every platform.

With the SDK we were able to improve the cryptographic model that protects your data in Proton Drive, ensuring your new files will be end-to-end encrypted up to 4x faster while slashing battery drain and heat on iOS and Android. We’re always looking to make things better, but one thing hasn’t changed: No one but you and the people you share with can access your data, not even us. See the Proton Drive cryptography update for more details.

The SDK is bringing Proton Drive closer to the rest of your Proton apps and, over time, will make it easier for external tools to use Proton Drive for secure file storage and sharing. For example, Proton Drive integration in Lumo (our privacy-first AI assistant) is powered by the SDK. It lets you use your documents productively in Lumo while keeping them protected by Proton Drive’s end-to-end encryption.

For developers and the wider privacy community, a preview of the SDK is available on GitHub, making it easier to understand and build on the shared engine that powers all Proton Drive.

What’s next

Our work on the SDK continues. As it continues to power new features, Proton Drive will become harmonized across platforms, more deeply integrated across the Proton ecosystem, and easier for the community to build on — all while keeping your files end-to-end encrypted. We’re also now actively building one of the community’s most-requested features: the Proton Drive client for Linux, built from the ground up to leverage the SDK.

Whether you’re new to Proton Drive or have been with us from the beginning, now is a great time to try it, share your feedback on UserVoice, Reddit, or X, and help shape what comes next.

Use Proton Drive now

Not on Drive yet? Create a free Proton Drive account and get 5 GB of free storage.

Many of these improvements were made possible by the Proton community: Your testing, feedback, and support help us build a better private cloud for everyone. Thank you!