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Modern Alternatives to PGP

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Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#191

Post by xorcist »

tptacek wrote: post #160
tyingq wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so "gpg -c" is better than other commonly installed command line tools for encrypting a file with password?

PGP, which is something you have to explicitly install, is a badly flawed way to encrypt files; it has a poor password KDF and you should look at how it authenticates data. Install something better.

No, it's not "badly flawed". Your files won't be compromised.

GnuPG could do with better defaults, but that is true for every system good enough to have aged. A more modern KDF would also be welcome but it won't impact end user security. Just to put things in perspective.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#192

Post by DanBC »

xorcist wrote: post #191
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PGP, which is something you have to explicitly install, is a badly flawed way to encrypt files; it has a poor password KDF and you should look at how it authenticates data. Install something better.

No, it's not "badly flawed". Your files won't be compromised. GnuPG could do with better defaults, but that is true for every system good enough to have aged. A more modern KDF would also be welcome but it won't impact end user security. Just to put things in perspective.

> Your files won't be compromised.

...if you use it correctly. It appears that many people can't do this.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#194

Post by [deleted] »

Krasnol wrote: post #77
lucb1e wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dutch probably do to a similar extent. We were quite involved in the war, unfortunately, and burning records to avoid involving jews/romas/homos/etc. But yeah it's the only thing I can think of as well. I still can't pinpoint what argument it is that they are implicitly taught that we aren't.

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...).

[deleted]

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#195

Post by sowbug »

lower wrote: post #89
sowbug wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others if you don't personally have that memory but would like to understand it.

While this is a good movie, one should be aware that it does not reflect the reality in Eastern Germany all that well. It's not a documentary. In preparation for the film, the director asked Christoph Hein, an Eastern German writer, to describe the typical life of a writer in Eastern Germany (which is what the film is about). At the premiere, Hein's name was included in the opening credits, but he asked to have it re…

A friend recommended it to understand why people in certain areas of the world feel more strongly about mass surveillance. For that purpose it's a good movie -- not because of its historical accuracy, but because of its plausibility. The motivations of the characters were straightforward, and the technology unremarkable. No psychos or unobtanium needed.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#196

Post by giomasce »

pera wrote: post #10

As far as I can tell none of these "alternatives" implement what is at least for me the most interesting feature of PGP: web of trust and key servers. It would be really nice to see a modern take on this. > No one was sending you encrypted emails anyway I actually use PGP for e-mailing quite often, for instance: how am I supposed to report security issues without gpg? (please don't suggest Whatsapp...)

Very true! I am completely ok with saying that GPG is not modern cryptography, but it gives me an important asset that I do not want to lose: I have a nice key with many signatures, that means that it is relatively easy for people to check whether my signatures are mine and whether they can send me an encrypted something.

As far as I know, OpenPGP's web of trust is not cryptographically broken: it is a bunch of public key signatures over other keys, and modern signing algorithms and hasing functions are supported and used. So I think that any tool that want to present itself as "GPG done better" should at least enable me to leverage the web of trust that is already in place. Otherwise, it might be a very nice tool, but for me is a very nice tool for doing something else.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#197

Post by fefe23 »

blattimwind wrote: post #76
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…

I have PGP keys on the keyservers but don't actively look random people up and send encrypted mail on first contact (perhaps something that can be automated). I'm surprised how often the reply I receive when contacting some German (.de) open source person is PGP encrypted.

Please sign your outgoing mails if you have a key.

Of the PGP mails I get, most are just encrypted to me. That is cryptographically not a sound idea, but it also means that I cannot encrypt back, because I don't know which key to encrypt to.

The keyservers do not validate anything. They are just a storage medium. In fact, for my personal e-mail address, a prankster has uploaded a rogue key. There is no process by which I can ask for its removal. People who just take the key from the keyserver have a 50% chance to send me data I cannot decrypt.

This is not a PGP weakness. It has been quipped that cryptography is a method to reduce a generic problem to a key exchange problem. There is some truth to that.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#198

Post by acqq »

AgentME wrote: post #130
tptacek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of your list, the alternatives that George provided check off: - offline encryption - digital signatures - batch processing - no server - offline infrastructure - "hidden recipient" (which, ironically, is a command line flag to mitigate a flaw in PGP, and not in fact a feature of PGP) - multiplatform - easy to integrate - copying and pasting ciphertext - open source and well-tested - not bound to phones - not being a…

My frustration is that a lot of the solutions provided are raw libraries rather than end-user tools. For offline encryption, how do I encrypt a file with a password (or a keyfile)? The solutions provided are a few Go libraries, saltpack (which I think is only a spec? I couldn't find an executable), and then the Keybase service. None of these work as a simple no-strings-attached end-user replacement for `gpg -c`. This…

> That tool seems like it might be a good replacement for `gpg -c`

The tool still can't be compiled under MinGW-w64:

./libcperciva/util/getopt.h:35:2: error: unknown type name 'sigjmp_buf'; did you mean 'jmp_buf'?

That is, there's no executable that can run natively on Windows. To compare, Git compiles and runs natively.

(I've once tried to remove the dependencies in the code, step by step, but after each step something more would be visible, so I gave up. I also don't know if it would run under Cygwin.)

Of course I don't expect the compatibility from the author, I just state that I'm not aware that the Windows version even exists, and that it limits the possibilities of the use of the tool.

> My frustration is that a lot of the solutions provided are raw libraries rather than end-user tools.

I fully agree with you. There's effectively no replacement for gpg -c as far as I see.

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox

"It is the caller's responsibility to ensure the uniqueness of nonces" "Thus large amounts of data should be chunked so that each message is small. (Each message still needs a unique nonce.) If in doubt, 16KB is a reasonable chunk size."

It's far from being anything that can be immediately and safely used even if one were willing to use Go to compile it.

Which is sad, as gpg -c is such a basic functionality, and gpg is definitely too big and potentially problematic tool for that purpose (for years defaults of gpg -c were almost insecure, and even now it's hard, or maybe impossible, to achieve the quality that some much smaller tool could, if it existed).

My own wish: a tool that fits into single binary so that it can be easily inspected, ideally the binary itself is also as small as possible and doesn't depend on unnecessary shared libraries, uses only one algorithm of everything, but according to the best knowledge we have today. If the algorithms have to be changed to the level of incompatibility, a new tool is released (e.g tool has compatible versions 1.x until the produced files can be opened with the new version, as soon as the format changes the versions go 2.x etc, but every format version is a self contained tool which can be completely easily inspected because it supports only one format and one algorithm per purpose). And it's truly multiplatform. gpg is just too big now, but I don't know what can replace it at this moment.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#199

Post by Zeratoss »

everybodyknows wrote: post #153
lower wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a good movie, one should be aware that it does not reflect the reality in Eastern Germany all that well. It's not a documentary. In preparation for the film, the director asked Christoph Hein, an Eastern German writer, to describe the typical life of a writer in Eastern Germany (which is what the film is about). At the premiere, Hein's name was included in the opening credits, but he asked to have it re…

>he couldn't see his story in the film ... Published comments, just last month. In German -- would any bilinguals care to summarize? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/donnersmarck-hein-das-leb...

He describes the movie as an overly dramatic dark fairy tale and says he doesn't recognize himself in the main character. As far as specific criticism goes, he says the way the main character has to write in secrecy and is suppressed by the Stasi is inaccurate. He says his room was bugged in the 60s but the 80s in the DDR were supposedly much more liberal than what the film shows.

Re: Modern Alternatives to PGP

#200

Post by [deleted] »

bmn__ wrote: post #178
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PGP, which is something you have to explicitly install, is a badly flawed way to encrypt files; it has a poor password KDF and you should look at how it authenticates data. Install something better.

Well, what is better? You're the expert, why aren't you telling us outright?

[deleted]
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