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PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

philzimmermann.com

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Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#11

Post by intc »

greenyoda wrote: post #7
tptacek wrote: post #2

It 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.)

I think PGP is fine for encrypting some files. But you should take into consideration that when you encrypt a file it's very likely that some (or all) of the plain text is left behind on the block device. Using full disk encryption (LUKS for example) will give additional protection (so one can't read plain text fragments from the device when it's not "open").

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#12

Post by techwizrd »

schoen wrote: post #6
waynesonfire wrote: post #3

such 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I'm a huge fan of Phil and his work, and plan to send him a note of thanks, but I think your second sentiment is out-of-date now.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 s…

Not all use cases require perfect forward secrecy, so I think PGP can still be useful for some applications (and I tend to enjoy using PGP). I agree however with your point that serious security products do not need to support PGP specifically.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#13

Post by tptacek »

stormbrew wrote: post #10
tptacek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Why? Why is that good? One of the basic cardinal sins of cryptography is using the same key in more than one context. I don't understand the value of the SSH thing, either.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#14

Post by makach »

greenyoda wrote: post #7
tptacek wrote: post #2

It 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.)

I don’t understand why people want to replace PGP. Of course we can improve the technology but the fact is that security is hard and requires interplay between the humans, processes and technology to work. It’s not enough to rely on just one of those pillars.

There is an illusion in the world of IT that we can solve everything with technology.

Maybe the reason why people don’t want or like PGP is because it needs strong human processes to work properly and keep its integrity, and that breaks the illusion that you can easily solve everything with tech.

Happy birthday PGP!

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#15

Post by tptacek »

makach wrote: post #14
greenyoda wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.)

I don’t understand why people want to replace PGP. Of course we can improve the technology but the fact is that security is hard and requires interplay between the humans, processes and technology to work. It’s not enough to rely on just one of those pillars. There is an illusion in the world of IT that we can solve everything with technology. Maybe the reason why people don’t want or like PGP is because it needs str…

It's funny that you could make literally the same argument about C, especially since so much of the PGP ecosystem relies directly and entirely on software built in C.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#16

Post by neolog »

tptacek wrote: post #13
stormbrew wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Why? Why is that good? One of the basic cardinal sins of cryptography is using the same key in more than one context. I don't understand the value of the SSH thing, either.

What is a "context"? I don't want to manage a ton of key files on my desktop computer.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#17

Post by stormbrew »

tptacek wrote: post #13
stormbrew wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Why? Why is that good? One of the basic cardinal sins of cryptography is using the same key in more than one context. I don't understand the value of the SSH thing, either.

I don't want to use the same key in multiple contexts, but I think some norms around how keys are stored would help build best practices around them.

It would also potentially mean easier to use with hardware tokens, if you could just expect to be able to use something like gpg-agent or ssh-agent or something in between to work with various things.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#18

Post by Avamander »

tptacek wrote: post #13
stormbrew wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Why? Why is that good? One of the basic cardinal sins of cryptography is using the same key in more than one context. I don't understand the value of the SSH thing, either.

Hardware cryptographic storage comes to mind, or simply key management and storage is complex with multiple keys in a lot of different forms.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#19

Post by Avamander »

schoen wrote: post #6
waynesonfire wrote: post #3

such 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 s…

Given that e-mail is not going anywhere in the next few decades, having a way to encrypt it to at least some extent is valuable.

Re: PGP Marks 30th Anniversary

#20

Post by tptacek »

stormbrew wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why is that good? One of the basic cardinal sins of cryptography is using the same key in more than one context. I don't understand the value of the SSH thing, either.

I don't want to use the same key in multiple contexts, but I think some norms around how keys are stored would help build best practices around them. It would also potentially mean easier to use with hardware tokens, if you could just expect to be able to use something like gpg-agent or ssh-agent or something in between to work with various things.

Fair enough, that's a good answer. Thanks!
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