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The PGP problem (2019)

latacora.com

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Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#11

Post by nine_k »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #8
schoen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a section in this post with proposed replacements: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th... I was also frustrated with this criticism in the past, but there are definitely some concrete alternatives provided for many use cases there. (But not just with one tool.)

I’m still frustrated by the criticism because I internalized it a couple of years ago and tried to move to age+minisig because those are the only 2 scenarios I personally care about. The overall experience was annoying given that the problems with pgp/gpg are esoteric and abstract that unless I’m personally are worried about a targeted attack against me, they are fine-ish. If someone scotch tapes age+minisig and conv…

Has Tarsnap become inadequate, security-wise? The service may be expensive for a standard backup. It had a serious bug in 2011, but hasn't it been adequate since then?

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#12

Post by eddythompson80 »

aniviacat wrote: post #10
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still frustrated by the criticism because I internalized it a couple of years ago and tried to move to age+minisig because those are the only 2 scenarios I personally care about. The overall experience was annoying given that the problems with pgp/gpg are esoteric and abstract that unless I’m personally are worried about a targeted attack against me, they are fine-ish. If someone scotch tapes age+minisig and conv…

> the fact that this post is recommending Tarsnap and magicwormhole shows how badly it has aged in 6 years What's wrong with magic wormhole?

It’s just not the same thing. There is significant overlap, but it’s not enough to be a reasonable suggestion. You can’t suggest a service as a replacement for a local offline tool. It’s like saying “Why do you need VLC when you can just run peertube?”. Also since then, age is the real replacement for pgp in terms of sending encrypted files. Wormhole is a different use case.

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#13

Post by singpolyma3 »

maqp wrote: post #5

The biggest issue with PGP/gpg is the difficulty of getting rid of it. If you work on big distros, or know someone who works on big distros, please (start asking them to) add https://github.com/jedisct1/minisign to pre-installed packages to facilitate transition. It's almost a chicken egg problem but the sad thing is, no project wants to swap the signing tool to a better one until everyone can verify the new signatur…

Note that minisign was also vulnerable in the gpg.fail exposures

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#14

Post by woodruffw »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #13
maqp wrote: post #5

The biggest issue with PGP/gpg is the difficulty of getting rid of it. If you work on big distros, or know someone who works on big distros, please (start asking them to) add https://github.com/jedisct1/minisign to pre-installed packages to facilitate transition. It's almost a chicken egg problem but the sad thing is, no project wants to swap the signing tool to a better one until everyone can verify the new signatur…

Note that minisign was also vulnerable in the gpg.fail exposures

Yes, but not nearly to the same extent. The GPG vulns are staggering in comparison.

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#15

Post by tptacek »

shakna wrote: post #7
shakna wrote: post #2

Probably resurfacing, because we have some new attacks thanks to CCC. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453461

Worth noting: minisign and age were also affected by a couple things here. GnuPG has decided a couple things are out of scope, fixed a couple others. Not all is in distro packages yet. age didn't have the clearest way to report things - discord is apparently the point of contact. Which will probably improve soon. minisign was affected by most everything GnuPG was, but had a faster turnaround to patching.

The minisign bug was much less severe than the (insane) GPG signing bugs, and the age bug wasn't a cryptographic thing at all, just a dumb path sanitization thing. Minisign was not in fact affected by most everything GPG was. The GnuPG team wontfixed one of the most significant bugs!

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#16

Post by tptacek »

bgwalter wrote: post #9

How does this help people who are not following this issue regularly? gpg protected Snowden, and this article promotes tools by one of the cryptographers who promoted non-hybrid encryption: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement So what to do? PGP by the way never claimed to prevent traffic analysis, mixmaster was the layer that somehow got dropped, unlike Tor.

You could also say Cryptocat protected Snowden; he used it to communicate with reporters. So, that's how well that argument holds up.

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#18

Post by [deleted] »

bgwalter wrote: post #9

How does this help people who are not following this issue regularly? gpg protected Snowden, and this article promotes tools by one of the cryptographers who promoted non-hybrid encryption: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement So what to do? PGP by the way never claimed to prevent traffic analysis, mixmaster was the layer that somehow got dropped, unlike Tor.

[deleted]

Re: The PGP problem (2019)

#19

Post by nine_k »

I agree that age + minisign comprise a much neater stack that does basically everything I would need to use PGP for.

Neither of them supports hardware keys though, as much as I could see. OTOH ssh and GnuPG do support hardware keys, like smart cards or Yubikey-like devices. I suppose by the same token (not a pun, sadly) they don't support various software keychains provided by OSes, since they don't support any external PKCS11 providers (the way ssh does).

This may reduce the attack needed to steal a private key to a simple unprivileged infiltration, e.g. via code run during installation of a compromised npm package, or similar.

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