Yet he prefers aes-256 over twofish-256 or camellia-256.
Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
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Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#92Or: - he really doesn't use his PGP key all that often, had the same one for 16 years on god knows how many computers, and decided that if he's going to generate a new one, he might as well send a message with it.
Normally i'd let it go, but i actually would like some clarity on your intent here. Are you implying that Schneier doesn't use encrypted communications on a regular basis, that PGP is impractical, or both? (and to be clear, my intent is not to bait, i'm actually curious)
The post to which you were replying was amusing at the cost of a lack of rigor.
Bruce generally does not sign/encrypt his email because he views email as a low-security communications mechanism anyway.[1]
He generally advises a rational risk assessment when determining how much security to apply to a process. He often uses the example of locking doors on your house, etc.
In re PGP, he's been critical of a number of shortcomings in PGP and GnuPG since the beginning, but by the same token, one of his first hires at Counterpane was Jon Callas.
[1] http://www.esecurityplanet.com/trends/security-tips-from-bru...
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, it is unusual to see people even sign emails in the (academic) cryptography community, let alone encrypt messages (at least in my experience). It is surprisingly rare to see academic crypto researchers actually use the systems they design, even for basic things like signing and encryption.
Strategically, you are probably better off not signing a message unless you want the message to be verifiable.
There's also the paranoia of non-repudiability with signed messages. In general, there is minimal benefit just signing a document. I don't care if someone I work with is spoofed because it will become obvious very quickly.
It's only in a very few cases where there's an advantage in signing a document, and it's usually more in the verifiability of content (so that you can verify that nothing is lost/changed in transit) than in the verification of identity.
Given the lack of adoption of PGP/GnuPG in email clients vs. S/MIME, if I'm signing my emails without encrypting them, chances are the recipient would still be able to read my emails and, knowing my writing style and given the context, be able to suss out that I was in fact the author.
I use the word "paranoia" intentionally because there's a lack of meaningful legal precedent establishing that a gpg-signed message is enough to establish authorship. In a civil case, sure, it looks bad, but you could easily say,"oops, I stored my public key on [vps or cloud service], which was a well-known victim of a hack."
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm a professional security researcher, and I end up using ZIP+AES more often than I do PGP.
How do you securely share the AES key?
AES is really great compared to RSA, so I put my AES key on my website instead of my RSA public key. It's made it very easy for people to contact me securely.
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#95So I have a GPG key. I used it a couple of times. Currently, it's most useful to me to sign my own Debian package repository. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get into the whole Web of Trust thing. Nobody I know has their own GPG/PGP key that they use and have signed by others and tools like BigLumber and other places where I looked for key signing parties have not turned up any results. I not spending all…
Not to be snarky, but have you tried using google?
I get a couple requests a year when someone comes through town. It could do with more participation, though. :-)
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume it's a well thought through and properly risk-assesed security/convenience tradeoff. Handling encrypted files is much less frequent than handling encrypted email - and putting an airgap between the internet and your email is likely to cause more grief than the security improvement it creates. I've got the seeds of an idea which has been kicking round my head for a few weeks now - a rasbperrypi (or similar) w…
That definitely fits with the 'hacker ethos' and all, but why not just use a smartcard with a Class III reader (i.e. dedicated pinpad and display on the reader itself). Support is already integrated with GnuPG, they are specifically designed to prevent key material leaking, and they have some other nice properties (like self-destruction after three incorrect admin PIN attempts). Smartcards are cheap, anyway: http://s…
Mostly because I've got a pair of RspberryPis – and I'm doing this mostly out of curiosity and learning (and a little bit of "sticking it to 'the man'"…).
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#97An interesting thing to note about 4096bit RSA openPGP keys, that's what Snowden was using. His PGP Key was a 4096bit RSA signing key with a 4096bit RSA encryption subkey.
I suspect that it's because 4096 is the largest permitted RSA key on most software right now. There is no 11 on that dial.
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd imagine the process works something like this: * Generate the new key * Sign the new key with the old key * Generate the revocation cert for the old key * Push the revocation publicly with a reason of "Superseded by (fingerprint of new key)" or similar * Push the new key * Try to get your new key signed by everyone that signed your old key for authenticity's sake I'm not too sure how the community of GPG users ou…
One issue I have noticed is that people do not frequently update their keys from the key servers. Key revocation is not all that useful if you are not periodically checking for published revocations...
And 90% of the time, people want to revoke their old keys because they had a pressing one-time need to have a PGP key (vendor exchange, whatever) and lost the private key without generating and saving a revocation certificate.
This is a place where solid infrastructure support at the OS-level would really help. Instead, it's nerds and the paranoid who bother, and they'll steal the software or insist on open source anyway. :-)
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years ago, a classmate of mine built a rig out of a receipt printer and one of those old handheld scanners to provide an "air gap", though it never really worked (sort of an art project at the time). Might be time to revive the idea...
How about 2 serial ports, connecting only TxD, RxD and GND? 3-wire RS-232 basically has no attack surface, there's no protocol to speak of. [edit: shabble already suggested this]
Something very similar to this has been used in the military to "bridge" network barriers at differing security levels. The US Navy uses "SDR" (Secure Data Replication) to transfer content under control.
You could get all stuxnet and exploit the various applications (such as the components that inspect zipped content), but the transport itself is a simple file copy over a bitstream. You could do the same thing with kermit and uuencode a bit more easily.
Re: Bruce Schneier has changed his PGP key to 4096 bits
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"2. Al Qaeda uses 2048bit RSA for internal communications 3. Most corps, diplomats, criminals, and normal people use 2048bit RSA either directly (SSH keys, Website Certs, VPNs) or indirectly (CA's still use 2048bit RSA certs valid until 2020)" I don't see how this is evidence that NSA has the ability to compromise 2048 bit keys, at will. Only that they very likely desire that ability. Math doesn't respond to desire.…
> normal people use 2048bit RSA either directly (SSH keys, Website Certs, VPNs) Any reason for that? [Almost] all of my SSH and TLS (be it HTTPS or OpenVPN) keys are 4096 bits long. I wasn't woried about TLAs with supercomputers snooping on my wires, just heard that 4096 bit RSA keys are considered more secure than 2048 while not sacrificing performance much, so I just didn't have the reason to specify lower size.
When a lot of these tools were first implemented, to get enough entropy, you would have to type and move your mouse for a long time to generate a 1024-bit key. I remember really, really hating that process.
Now, you kids these days with your entropy pools and PRNGs in your CPUs because you had an empty spot on the tape-out...get off my lawn!