I like Google's End-to-End design better. It seems to add a few extra security checks.
Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
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Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#12https://keybase.io/ with it's social media identity proofs have been interesting way to allow finding contacts in my social network's pgp keys.
Edit: I also have invites available if you are interested in checking it out. Contact me via my HN profile
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#13In my experience, key distribution is the easiest thing about PGP / GPG. EnigMail and most other clients can already query key servers easily. Enigmail routinely asks me to "download missing keys", and if my recipient's key is on a keyserver, it downloads them. In fact, the PGP global directory ( https://keyserver.pgp.com/vkd/GetWelcomeScreen.event ) already seems to have all the features that are missing from the wh…
key distribution is the easiest thing about PGP
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#14https://keybase.io/ with it's social media identity proofs have been interesting way to allow finding contacts in my social network's pgp keys. Edit: I also have invites available if you are interested in checking it out. Contact me via my HN profile
Tim Bray's been interested in it, which is where I first heard about it.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#15It also needs to be baked into contact management apps so that exchanging your credentials becomes no different than sending your contact card via Bluetooth, NFC etc. I suspect that this would require something a bit more robust than vCard to package everything up in a nice bundle.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#16So... the answer is to decrease security by just dismissing whole attack classes?
I think the idea is to create an abstraction layer and make it easy for the whole pgp on "end-user".
Btw, very interesting idea on solving the greater problem around UX and PGP.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#17I think the 99% of the time it's not an issue argument is invalid. Encryption isn't really necessary for 99% of people at any given time anyways . It's just that you don't know when you're in the 99 and when you're in the 1 percent, and a mistake in that 1 percent of the time is crucial, that's why we try to do it 100% of the time.
Well, and there's the availability concern -- if it's a critical or time-sensitive message, sending it to the right address with the wrong encryption key is the same as the message getting dropped in transit, which is hazardous.
Heck, even with a verified key, I've seen it at least once where a critical e-mail came in to a shared key but nobody was around who could decrypt it. When PGP is used only in special circumstances, the e-mail verification almost needs to be refreshed periodically to make sure the owner continues to have control of the account and the key.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#18This is no longer necessary with MiniLock. See http://minilock.io/ and this article: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/minilock-simple-encryption/
miniLock doesn't solve public key distribution problem.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#19It also needs to be baked into contact management apps so that exchanging your credentials becomes no different than sending your contact card via Bluetooth, NFC etc. I suspect that this would require something a bit more robust than vCard to package everything up in a nice bundle.
vCard already supports this with a field specifically for public keys. It can have either a link to the key, or the key itself.
Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt
#20I think the 99% of the time it's not an issue argument is invalid. Encryption isn't really necessary for 99% of people at any given time anyways . It's just that you don't know when you're in the 99 and when you're in the 1 percent, and a mistake in that 1 percent of the time is crucial, that's why we try to do it 100% of the time.
As with everything in crypto: it depends on your threat model.
If you are sending very sensitive secret messages, it is indeed crucial that you take the precaution to verify the keys very thoroughly.
If however, you merely want to avoid being caught in the NSA dragnet, trust on first contact does the trick.