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Modern Alternatives to PGP

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Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#91

Post by kazinator »

> The "modern alternative" is to use a much more specific and much less configurable solution to your problem.

The problem is you're replacing one configurable, flexible thing, with N different specific solutions involving multiple obscure little utilities. Oops!

How can this blogger not see that this isn't better.

How about a modern alternative to git? Instead of one hydra with so many heads, why not use scp for transferring repositories (not git push), cp -r for saving snapshots of versions (not git commit), diff -urNp for calculating differences (not git diff), patch -p1 for applying deltas, not git rebase ... You know: specific solutions that do one thing, instead of one big, confusing mess.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#92

Post by jrochkind1 »

A side issue, but:

> It generates those passwords for you, and they're short, one-time-use combinations of three English words

If an attacker knows the tool does this, doesn't this reduce the keyspace to crack to (number of words in an English dictionary)*3? Is that enough? Am I missing something?

A very complete dictionary has around 170K words, let's generously assume the password generator is willing to use all of them, many that will be unfamiliar and cumbersomely large to an actual native English speaker. So 510K in the keyspace, around 19 bits of "key". Maybe that's enough?

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#93

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

zeveb wrote: post #63
resoluteteeth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own a domain and have a webserver running ssl you can distribute your public key in a secure manner. What situations are you encountering in 2019 where you really need a distributed web of trust?

> If you own a domain and have a webserver running ssl you can distribute your public key in a secure manner. That means that I'd be trusting GUANG DONG CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY and every other CA not to issue a fraudulent certificate against my domain. I don't think that's very secure.

Use a domain that requires certificate transparency and you're basically set.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#94

Post by wrs »

jwr wrote: post #80

One starts looking at things differently as years pass. I've been working with computers for >25 years now, and I've learned that long-term thinking is important. Remember '.bz' files that were all the rage? Yeah. Bzip1, not '.bz2'. Good luck trying to read that. For my data, I will stick to things that have been around for a long time and that are likely to stay. Those fancy 'nacl/box' thingies? I'm willing to make…

Those fancy box thingies are very well specified and fit into 100 tweets worth of public domain ANSI C with no dependencies. If you want your format to last 100 years, I’m not sure how to ensure it better than that.

https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#95

Post by AceJohnny2 »

lucb1e wrote: post #47

> No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway Guess what! Since I moved to Germany (from the Netherlands), I noticed that people send a lot of encrypted mail. Not random Germans, sure, but where in the Netherlands the security and broader hacker community was hard to convince, in Germany it's quite widespread. My colleagues (security firm) and friendly security firms (when we collaborate) expect nothing less, and…

Noting that GPG's main maintainer, Werner Koch, is German too.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#96

Post by eropple »

robotrout wrote: post #88
Krasnol wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stasi is not that long ago. People tend to forget what the problem was during WW2. See rise of right wing parties (also in Germany...).

Censorship seems to be coming from the left. I think it makes sense for everybody to maintain as much privacy from .gov as possible.

So...you are aware that "saying that makes you an asshole" and "you can't say that" are different things, yes?

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#97

Post by m45t3r »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #92

A side issue, but: > It generates those passwords for you, and they're short, one-time-use combinations of three English words If an attacker knows the tool does this, doesn't this reduce the keyspace to crack to (number of words in an English dictionary)*3? Is that enough? Am I missing something? A very complete dictionary has around 170K words, let's generously assume the password generator is willing to use all of…

It is not multiplication, it is permutation (170k!).

I don't know how big this number is, however it is pretty big.

This technic even has a name: diceware [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#98

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #2

The context for this is this Go project proposal: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/30141 Filippo proposes to deprecate (but not remove) Blowfish, archaic curves, CAST, MD4, RIPEMD160, TEA, Twofish, XTS, and OpenPGP from the Golang x/ libraries (which are "officially supported" but not part of the standard library. It's really heartening to see a project get serious about shedding legacy crypto.

[deleted]

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#99

Post by taeric »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #44
taeric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is asking past the point. Without a web of trust, how are you securely signing? You can go with somewhat centralized trust, but that only gets you do far. Or, rather, that forces everyone to deal with that centralized source. Much like the web of trust.

If you own a domain and have a webserver running ssl you can distribute your public key in a secure manner. What situations are you encountering in 2019 where you really need a distributed web of trust?

You are just using a different web of trust. Specifically the SSL Certificate Authorities.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#100

Post by eropple »

jwr wrote: post #80

One starts looking at things differently as years pass. I've been working with computers for >25 years now, and I've learned that long-term thinking is important. Remember '.bz' files that were all the rage? Yeah. Bzip1, not '.bz2'. Good luck trying to read that. For my data, I will stick to things that have been around for a long time and that are likely to stay. Those fancy 'nacl/box' thingies? I'm willing to make…

Hm. So you think that libsodium is going to dry up and disappear from the internet in "5 years' time"? Bear in mind that its first GitHub import was in 2013 and that it is used, and supported, by lil' guys like...uh...lemme look at this..."Google".

While it's drying up and disappearing, is it going to take with it things like rbnacl which both use it transitively, package it for their environments, and also have some pretty great documentation on how it works? Is it going to take with it the public definitions of Curve25519 and XSalsa20+Poly1305? Are we going to get all neuralyzed and just...lose it?

Look, I'm no security wonk. I have some interest in it, but that's it. And even I realize that libsodium as a thing you can use if you need to will probably outlive both you and I.

Also, FWIW, it took me literally one Google search to find a bzip decompressor. I did have to read a page first, though.

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