PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
philzimmermann.com
PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
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Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#2It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet [... then...] a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages
Fun fact: "We made many improvements" is doing an interesting lift in this paragraph, since PGP 1.0 shipped with a cipher of Zimmerman's own design, Bass-O-Matic, which lived up to its name in part by being demolished by Eli Biham over a lunch. PGP 2.0 introduced IDEA, and, I believe, the first (for the era) cryptographically credible version of PGP; a more fitting anniversary to celebrate, perhaps.
(We've learned quite about about how to engineer cryptography in the ensuing 29 years, and PGP hasn't kept up --- can't, really; so on the 30th anniversary of Bass-Free PGP, we might fittingly celebrate by finally giving PGP a well-earned retirement.)
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#3such a great tool. It's not a serious security product unless you support PGP.
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#4I wonder how much of the rest of the article will be drowned out by the conclusion:
> It's not only personal freedom at stake. It's national security. The reckless deployment of Huawei 5G infrastructure across Europe has created easy opportunities for Chinese SIGINT. End-to-end encryption products are essential for European national security, to counter a hostile SIGINT environment controlled by China. We must push back hard in policy space to preserve the right to end-to-end encryption.
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#5It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet [... then...] a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages Fun fact: "We made many improvements" is doing an interesting lift in this paragraph, since PGP 1.0 shipped with a cipher of Zimmerman's own design, Bass-O-Matic, which lived up to its n…
More about this story:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/61948/what-was-th...
I just downloaded the source code for PGP 1.0 and found BASSLIB.C. 1988!
It's interesting to note that the Bass-O-Matic design apparently came from a Navy contractor (Charlie Merritt). It seems possible that Merritt and the Navy both thought this design was secure; maybe they didn't have clearances to learn others' opinions about it, and only used it for unclassified communications.
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#6such a great tool. It's not a serious security product unless you support PGP.
I'm a huge fan of Phil and his work, and plan to send him a note of thanks, but I think your second sentiment is out-of-date now. Even if we avoid other controversies like Thomas Ptacek's views about the inappropriateness of the e-mail encryption threat model, PGP doesn't support forward secrecy and so it's at least not suitable for instant messaging or TLS (as well as not being integrated into their protocols!).
A serious security product could support encryption that's more relevant to whatever it is that that product does.
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#7It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet [... then...] a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages Fun fact: "We made many improvements" is doing an interesting lift in this paragraph, since PGP 1.0 shipped with a cipher of Zimmerman's own design, Bass-O-Matic, which lived up to its n…
What do you recommend as a replacement for PGP? (I'm looking for stand-alone software I can use to encrypt files on storage media, not an encrypted e-mail service.)
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#8It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet [... then...] a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages Fun fact: "We made many improvements" is doing an interesting lift in this paragraph, since PGP 1.0 shipped with a cipher of Zimmerman's own design, Bass-O-Matic, which lived up to its n…
What do you recommend as a replacement for PGP? (I'm looking for stand-alone software I can use to encrypt files on storage media, not an encrypted e-mail service.)
The high bit of the right answer to this question is that you don't want to replace PGP; one of the things we've learned in 29 years is that you don't want a single tool to do lots of different cryptographic things, because different applications have different cryptographic needs.
For package signing: use something in the signify/minisign family.
To encrypt a network transport, use WireGuard.
To protect a web transaction on the wire, TLS 1.3.
For transferring files: use Magic Wormhole.
For backups: use something like Tarsnap or restic.
For messaging: use something that does Signal Protocol.
To protect files at rest, use encrypted DMGs (or your OS's equivalent, like encrypted loop mounts).
To encrypt individual files --- a niche ask --- use Filippo's ungooglable "age".
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you recommend as a replacement for PGP? (I'm looking for stand-alone software I can use to encrypt files on storage media, not an encrypted e-mail service.)
The high bit of the right answer to this question is that you don't want to replace PGP; one of the things we've learned in 29 years is that you don't want a single tool to do lots of different cryptographic things, because different applications have different cryptographic needs. For package signing: use something in the signify/minisign family. To encrypt a network transport, use WireGuard. To protect a web transa…
Thanks! Link to "age", for those who are interested:
Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you recommend as a replacement for PGP? (I'm looking for stand-alone software I can use to encrypt files on storage media, not an encrypted e-mail service.)
The high bit of the right answer to this question is that you don't want to replace PGP; one of the things we've learned in 29 years is that you don't want a single tool to do lots of different cryptographic things, because different applications have different cryptographic needs. For package signing: use something in the signify/minisign family. To encrypt a network transport, use WireGuard. To protect a web transa…
It would be nice if there was a reasonable baseline of key format/management that all these new tools shared though. And I don't mean pgp/gpg keyrings, to be clear, which are cumbersome and error prone and over-complicated for a lot of these needs (I'm still annoyed that `pass` is reliant on gpg for forcing me to deal with a keyring).
I see that `age`, which I hadn't actually heard of before, supports ssh keys and identities which always seemed like a fairly natural baseline to me. Would be nice if more of the command line variety did as well (even if only rsa and/or ed25519 keys).