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Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

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Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#111

Post by kuschku »

bruo wrote: post #88
lmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they've made gnome worse, not better.

Worse for some people and better for other. My mother (58) and my grand mother (82) love how easily is to do what they usually do contrasted to the windows 8 experience. I don't know if that is a common case or not, but at least it's not a definitive "worse" or "good". And for me, it's great as I never got a call to ask me where is something anymore.

Well, my little sister (12) and my dad (56) love KDE Plasma, as it’s "simpler than windows".

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#112

Post by rakoo »

mikeytown2 wrote: post #78

If someone could use your public SSH from say Github and send you a private message that would be great. From my understanding that is not possible. You need to generate and exchange PGP keys before, a major UX issue. Allow SSH public keys to be used and we'll be a lot closer to fixing the secure email issue.

Friends (https://moose-team.github.io/friends/) allows you to use your SSH keys but it's not email anymore.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#113

Post by Spooky23 »

late2part wrote: post #75
acqq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice, I heard someone say that the biggest improvement in people’s privacy has been use of Gmail. In practice, until Snowden happened, NSA was able to access all the Google's internal data as Google replicated in plaintext its whole datacenters through the links snooped by the NSA or the GCHQ. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...

Correct. And now they encrypt all the inter-data center traffic. Question: Is that done on an end-to-end basis? Or do they encrypt the links between data centers? I want to encrypt a 10g ethernet and all the solutions look quite expensive. Has anyone done high speed encryption (i.e. 10gbps/1500 byte packets) with strongswan or similar?

Companies like Ciena make line rate encryption cards that protect links. Not cheap, but not outrageously expensive for that level of gear.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#114

Post by Spooky23 »

baudehlo wrote: post #51
Decade wrote: post #46

Backwards compatibility is the killer. The whole design of PGP is to be the envelope to make email private, versus the plaintext postcard that everybody can read. It works with existing servers and existing mail clients. The biggest Snowden revelation is the importance of metadata. Just knowing whom you talk to, when, is frequently enough to compromise the parties involved. You might be doing something legal now, but…

SMTP with TLS doesn't leak any metadata except the connecting IP address. And with DMARC you can mandate it. Calls for whole new protocols for email are usually made by people who don't understand the email ecosystem as it currently stands.

If you actually care about the data, it does nothing. It only guarantees that the front door is encrypted.

With the number of cloud anti spam and archive companies out there, you have no idea what happens between those providers and the mail servers.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#115

Post by Dylan16807 »

late2part wrote: post #75
acqq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice, I heard someone say that the biggest improvement in people’s privacy has been use of Gmail. In practice, until Snowden happened, NSA was able to access all the Google's internal data as Google replicated in plaintext its whole datacenters through the links snooped by the NSA or the GCHQ. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...

Correct. And now they encrypt all the inter-data center traffic. Question: Is that done on an end-to-end basis? Or do they encrypt the links between data centers? I want to encrypt a 10g ethernet and all the solutions look quite expensive. Has anyone done high speed encryption (i.e. 10gbps/1500 byte packets) with strongswan or similar?

With hardware acceleration, my quad core laptop can encrypt faster than 20gbps.

Without it, it can still encrypt at at 4gbps.

I was going to suggest you could place a couple servers at each end, but you only need one low end server.

Anyone offering expensive solutions is doing you a disservice.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#116

Post by Asbostos »

mschuster91 wrote: post #50
moonbug wrote: post #47

PGP's UX is so dismal I could almost believe the whole project operates under an NSA false flag.

The problem is a lack of funds. It was concieved for nerds by nerds and never got enough funding for UX. A common state in the FOSS universe.

That's not funding. That's boredom or perhaps ideology. Most FOSS developers don't bother thinking about UX or even implementing a UI because it's boring. They're interested in the high-tech stuff that their software can do and hope somebody else will put a front end on it. But usually nobody does - at least not an open source front end - because all other FOSS developers are also more interested in the specific technical thing their software does.

I make money developing a front end for a popular but absolutely unusable piece of FOSS software. Other companies do too. It sometimes feels a bit wrong that the open source guys have done the biggest and hardest job for free, while I profit just slapping some windows and dialog boxes over the top of it. But they really don't want to do that part of it and have openly said they think their UI is fine and that people would benefit from learning to use a command driven interface.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#117

Post by Asbostos »

thangalin wrote: post #98

Here is a list of steps to send a signed e-mail: http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/tech/privacy.shtml Once signing is in place, you can send an encrypted e-mail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/digitally-signing-and-e... Here's the response from Robert Hansen on why Enigmail has such a complicated process: > Here's the heart of the problem: "Modifying the wizard to account for average users" works only if you can defin…

When I use my phone to pay for things in a shop, there's surely a lot of complicated security going on, and a bit of ugly technology is even exposed when it displays a QR code for the cashier to scan. But nowhere ever did it ask me any questions that required me to learn any weird technical concepts. I never had to choose a number of bits or know anything about what a "key" is. As soon as a user sees these things, they have to either make a random guess or go off for hours teaching themselves what it means. It's a complete fail.

The words "PGP/MIME" should never appear on a PGP email plugin! When you send a regular file attachment, you don't have to specify the MIME type. It's all silent and hidden.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#118

Post by elipsey »

Sephr wrote: post #107
nocarrier wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to encrypt the transport at the application layer when you're talking about the scale of major internet companies--there are so many links going out of each datacenter that it's not feasible to do IPsec or similar lower level encryption. There aren't many hardware devices sold that can do the encryption at the 10-100+ Gbps speeds that datacenter links use (if any), and it's much easier to amortize the encryp…

> There aren't many hardware devices sold that can do the encryption at the 10-100+ Gbps speeds You are vastly underestimating AES-NI. Most modern Intel CPUs can handle that kind of encryption throughput (when paired with fast enough memory). Even my old Sandy Bridge-E CPU from 2011 gives me ~96 Gbps of AES throughput (with quad channel memory).

Should we trust the implementation of AES-NI in this context?

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/we-cannot-trust-inte...

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#119

Post by XorNot »

Decade wrote: post #46

Backwards compatibility is the killer. The whole design of PGP is to be the envelope to make email private, versus the plaintext postcard that everybody can read. It works with existing servers and existing mail clients. The biggest Snowden revelation is the importance of metadata. Just knowing whom you talk to, when, is frequently enough to compromise the parties involved. You might be doing something legal now, but…

Backwards compatibility has nothing to do with it. No one can read GPG encrypted mail.

It isn't built into their clients, they don't by default get their own keypairs, it is simply straight up impossible to send encrypted email to even friends and family and have them be able to read it.

Everything else is window dressing to this problem.

Re: Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

#120

Post by dlitz »

elipsey wrote: post #118
Sephr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't many hardware devices sold that can do the encryption at the 10-100+ Gbps speeds You are vastly underestimating AES-NI. Most modern Intel CPUs can handle that kind of encryption throughput (when paired with fast enough memory). Even my old Sandy Bridge-E CPU from 2011 gives me ~96 Gbps of AES throughput (with quad channel memory).

Should we trust the implementation of AES-NI in this context? http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/we-cannot-trust-inte...

AES-NI and RDRAND are different beasts. AES-NI is deterministic, and thus much more difficult to practically backdoor.
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