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I'm giving up on PGP

blog.filippo.io

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Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#171

Post by brightsize »

orblivion wrote: post #119

How is the author so seriously involved in PGP and only receive two encrypted emails a year? I'm basically just a dude who uses PGP because it's cool and I get tens of them. You just need one friend who also thinks it's cool.

Same question. I have one friend, smart and technical but just middle-of-the-pack when it comes to his non-domain-specific computer skills, and I got him using PGP regularly in our communications. He insisted on using webmail so we went with Mailvelope which mostly worked well up until it seemed to be losing his keypairs. He got pretty frustrated with that so now we're trying the ProtonMail approach and hoping for the best. To your point though, we've exchanged many dozens, perhaps 100 PGP-encrypted emails over the past year and I'm sure he's never heard of a "key-signing party".

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#172

Post by tscs37 »

dom0 wrote: post #32
psiconaut wrote: post #3

I find very interesting the point about the split between what WoT was supposed to be, in theory, and what little it represents, in practice, in terms of practices about key verification. It has been said many times that the lack of adoption of pgp in mail was due to the average user not being able to grasp the concepts behind the proper operation for key management, but the article points to common practices among "…

> I wonder if pgp is fundamentally flawed, or we have a deep conceptual usability issue here. I don't think the "WoT" is conceptually flawed, and frankly, the argument that "people of average intelligence" can't grasp the concept comes from a very high horse and is also untrue. It's simply that any and all software for PGP utterly fails in the UX and functionality department when it comes to key management. Web of Tr…

>A technical criticism of PGP/GPG is of course also possible. The whole thing is a museum of early 1990s crypto, with default ciphers like CAST5 and messages not being authenticated - and even if the message is authenticated most parts of the PGP protocol are not, meaning that you got that big bunch of C code maintained by that one German guy over there that parses unauthenticated bytes that you shipped through half the internet with a big neon-red sticker on it saying "I'M PGP PLEASE TAMPER WITH ME".

Honestly, this made me laugh.

But it also makes me think. GPG and PGP are ancient pieces of somehow working code that probably should not be allowed to operate any significant parts of human communication.

IMO we should aim for a Crypto like Signal presents it; simple yet secure enough for most users.

It might be worthwhile to bring Signal (or atleast the idea) to other protocols like E-Mail.

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#173

Post by bbcbasic »

gvb wrote: post #132
smhost wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard for adoptability isn't the average person at their peak hours of attention and focus. It's the drunk teenager at 2 in the morning fumbling around in the dark.

You might want to reconsider your analogy. When I was a drunk teenager at 2 in the morning fumbling around in the dark, my attention and focus was at 110%!

And you'd need to rely on a web of trust to avoid getting an infection.

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#174

Post by pc86 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105
JulianMorrison wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going with fundamentally flawed. Or perhaps more exactly, a solution for a non-problem. Things PGP can do: - Hide the contents of a message. But not the fact of a message nor who it's to. And it's only as hidden as a key that your recipient has to keep secret indefinitely. - Permanently be incriminating, since the message can be as easily opened a decade from now. - Prove you're you. Which is great for incriminat…

Add one more thing: stop the NSA per the Snowden leaks. Everything else in the leaks failed that test. Using a solution strong against the strongest attacker is worthwhile to people wondering how good various solutions really are. Far as a decade from now, that's probably all you need given the statute of limitations.

Statute of limitations isn't a blank slate that means if you can get away with something for n years you're off scott free.

I'm not googling this type of query at work, but typically as more information about a crime becomes available to law enforcement, the statute of limitations is reset. So if you're buying something illicit and securing communications with PGP, and the SOL is 5 years, if LE doesn't get the contents of that communication for 4 years, they still have 5 years to decide what to do with it.

All SOL means is that LE can't sit on incriminating information about you indefinitely and pursue charges decades in the future for minor crimes.

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#175

Post by mjevans »

lmm wrote: post #153
floatrock wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author did include the standard UX-of-PGP-sucks arguments, but he was also making the point that some of the core models around PGP suck. eg he was saying you can't share a key across multiple devices. Or if you do, you just increase your attack vector and your weakest link becomes the hotel wifi you plug into. eg if your key does get compromised, now you have to rotate all your contacts, which if you distributed…

> eg he was saying you can't share a key across multiple devices. Or if you do, you just increase your attack vector and your weakest link becomes the hotel wifi you plug into. So what are the options here? You can have a GPG key protected by any mechanism you care to think of (passphrase, smartcard, ...). You can share it between devices or not as you see fit, subject to the same tradeoff that is always going to be…

Actually you also have to use it to sign /other people's/ keys.

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#176

Post by Arathorn »

nickik wrote: post #162
Arathorn wrote: post #77

The conclusions here (avoiding long-lived per-identity keys and having the option to easily rotate and re-validate per-device keys) are very much what we've aimed for in the end-to-end crypto for Matrix.org ( https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-en... ). Rather than using a silo like Signal or WhatsApp, it is possible to get the flexibility of an open federated network built on an open standard,…

Matrix really is the hope in this respect. I would absolutely love Matrix in combination with Keybase. This would essentially connect the summation of my online identity with my chat system. It really does seem like a match made in heaven, but I understand how practically difficult this is.

the good news is that keybase now deals in the same EC25519 keys that we do :) the bad news is that they've never responded to any of our requests to hook up. Plus there's a bit of a philosophical mismatch given keybase are effectively centralised, even if they publish the root of their ID tree to a blockchain.

We need to solve decentralised identity somehow for Matrix anyway, so hopefully we'll find a solution soon :)

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#177

Post by camiller »

gkya wrote: post #160

What's this? But seriously what is this? I use GnuPG and am quite fond of it. I've a pubkey.asc up my website, and I use gpg to encrypt some files and my backup tarballs. PGP is not a mail tool, it's for encrypting strings. Yhis guy does not know what it is and cries for having done much ado for nothing. Key signing parties? I certainly have better things to do. Just generate a key and put it on mit key server, call…

He clearly knows what it is. He isn't ranting against PGP he is ranting against the WoT. If you got an encrypted email from Linus Torvalds, how would you verify it was him?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296974

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#178

Post by glxxyz »

With only "2 encrypted emails a year", it's not surprising that the author is giving up. I wonder if he has any real secrets to exchange with anyone else, or if setting up keys and participating in a WoT was really just a hobby.

Re: I'm giving up on PGP

#179

Post by nickik »

Arathorn wrote: post #176
nickik wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix really is the hope in this respect. I would absolutely love Matrix in combination with Keybase. This would essentially connect the summation of my online identity with my chat system. It really does seem like a match made in heaven, but I understand how practically difficult this is.

the good news is that keybase now deals in the same EC25519 keys that we do :) the bad news is that they've never responded to any of our requests to hook up. Plus there's a bit of a philosophical mismatch given keybase are effectively centralised, even if they publish the root of their ID tree to a blockchain. We need to solve decentralised identity somehow for Matrix anyway, so hopefully we'll find a solution soon…

Interesting.

I don't propose that Keybase is adopted on the hole, but somewho we need to able to connect authentication system (centralised or not) with the protocols we use for chat. Maybe these can be made pluggable. Seems like a hard problem, Im thankful that nobody expects me to come up with a solution.

Whats the best information on the current Matrix identity stuff? I did not find really good information how this currently works.

Thanks for your work.

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