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Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

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Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#41

Post by dredmorbius »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #34
schoen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone made a fake key for each of the participants in a particular keysigning party in October 2013 (including me) and uploaded the fake keys to keyservers. Because the creation date of the fake key for me is newer than the creation date of my real key, apparently Enigmail is suggesting it to people and they're choosing to use it, despite the lack of signatures. More than a dozen different people have now sent me e…

This sounds like an implementation as opposed to design flaw. Enigmail should be throwing up red flags all over the place when duplicates exist. That being said, this is perilously close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen

His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/

That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party.

If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you can revoke a key you have generated. But that's only a small part of the battle.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#42

Post by schoen »

dredmorbius wrote: post #41
TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an implementation as opposed to design flaw. Enigmail should be throwing up red flags all over the place when duplicates exist. That being said, this is perilously close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party. If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you ca…

I'm sorry my homepage is out of date; thanks for the reminder. It seems like it's been a decade or so since I updated it.

I normally check signatures when downloading a new key, particularly as a way of distinguishing between multiple keys available on a keyserver. But I don't have a way to force other people who are writing to me to do that, and apparently at least the Enigmail users often don't.

Edit: Erinn is a more cautious PGP user than I am (with an extraordinarily important key!), but I expect she also has no way of forcing people to check that they have the right key when e-mailing her.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#43

Post by diafygi »

malgorithms wrote: post #35
diafygi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question. Do you plan on gossiping with or mirroring the SKS pools? I would love to be able to just search keybase for a public key rather than both: https://diafygi.github.io/publickeyjs/

Cool site! Max Krohn ( https://keybase.io/max ) and I are meeting with some people working on various PGP projects in Germany in April, and one of the things on our personal agenda is the ideal future of key distribution. We don't really want to be a sole place to look up these keybase-style social media proofs. We also don't think they belong inside the keys themselves. One complication: looking up a key by email an…

Makes sense. If possible, I'd like to request at least gossiping with servers in the SKS pool. Right now, when someone signs my key and sends it to the pool via gpg --send-key, it doesn't get updated in keybase :(

Second, for public keys that are signed by other fingerprints in keybase, it would be nice to have those listed in my trackers list.

Finally, for people who upload a public key to keybase, it would be great if that would gossip to the pool so I could get it via gpg --recv-key.

Thanks for the great work so far!

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#44

Post by bokonist »

mdaniel wrote: post #23
bokonist wrote: post #6

Two things that would make this have more hope of becoming a standard: 1) open source the key server with the REST-API 2) allow domain owners to define their own key server via a DNS TXT entry

1. What's wrong with the existing key server protocol? 2. Why TXT and not SRV?

1. From reading their post, it seems like they made their own REST API for the key server. So it would be nice if they open sourced the service behind it, to alleviate fears of lock in.

2. You're right, it probably should be SRV.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#45

Post by stinkytaco »

mey wrote: post #12

https://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

This is fascinating concept, especially since I've always felt that my PGP key was sitting out there mostly useless since no one I know personally signs their emails or even knows someone who signs emails. However, wouldn't the weak part here be if my twitter (or other public) account was compromised somehow? Or if someone just impersonated me and sent a "unique tweet" pretending to be me?

How does HN feel about that identity aspect? Is it supposed to replaced key signing or just augment it?

I'm frankly not sure I fully get my head around the concept, even after reading this page:

https://keybase.io/docs/tracking

But it's Friday afternoon, so that could be it...

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#46

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

dredmorbius wrote: post #41
TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an implementation as opposed to design flaw. Enigmail should be throwing up red flags all over the place when duplicates exist. That being said, this is perilously close to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party. If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you ca…

No, I mean that my argument there was perilously close to said fallacy.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

schoen wrote: post #42
dredmorbius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party. If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you ca…

I'm sorry my homepage is out of date; thanks for the reminder. It seems like it's been a decade or so since I updated it. I normally check signatures when downloading a new key, particularly as a way of distinguishing between multiple keys available on a keyserver. But I don't have a way to force other people who are writing to me to do that, and apparently at least the Enigmail users often don't. Edit: Erinn is a mo…

I check up on you from time to time. Virtunova's been offline for ages as well.

I'm kicking around ways of making email more reliable, one option that occurs to me is key negotiation at transmit time, or as part of the delivery process. That is: a user's home mailserver would be key-aware. Though that too is subject to skulduggery.

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    Hash: SHA1
    
    - -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
    Version: GnuPG v1
    
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    - -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
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    Version: GnuPG v1
    
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    -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#48

Post by dublinben »

schoen wrote: post #42
dredmorbius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be really, really cautious about throwing "No True Scotsman" at Seth David Schoen and Erinn Clark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Schoen His hopelessly out-of-date homepage: http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ That said, yes, PGP has a notable failing in that there's no reliable method for repudiating a key, particularly one generated by a hostile party. If you've hung on to your key revocation certificate you ca…

I'm sorry my homepage is out of date; thanks for the reminder. It seems like it's been a decade or so since I updated it. I normally check signatures when downloading a new key, particularly as a way of distinguishing between multiple keys available on a keyserver. But I don't have a way to force other people who are writing to me to do that, and apparently at least the Enigmail users often don't. Edit: Erinn is a mo…

Including your key signature everywhere you post your email address (homepage, business card, email signature, etc.) is a good practice. It's not perfect, but it's better than teaching users to go straight to a keyserver.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#49

Post by malgorithms »

stinkytaco wrote: post #45
mey wrote: post #12

https://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

This is fascinating concept, especially since I've always felt that my PGP key was sitting out there mostly useless since no one I know personally signs their emails or even knows someone who signs emails. However, wouldn't the weak part here be if my twitter (or other public) account was compromised somehow? Or if someone just impersonated me and sent a "unique tweet" pretending to be me? How does HN feel about that…

This is a good question: generally if all you know about someone is their twitter name, and that's it, then a compromise of their twitter account could lead to a compromise of their key announcement.

Even this case is mitigated because of the timestamping: a compromise would have to be a public compromise on an ongoing basis, and everyone in the world would have to see the same compromise, including the alleged twitter holder. Tracker statements add to the timestamping: when someone runs the Keybase client and tracks them, they sign a statement saying on date X twitter user Y had that public key and they checked it.

The second advantage is that a person is typically a sum of many identities. Consider a known developer who signs code using their Keybase announced key. (Let's say Jeremy Ashkenas does (does he?) - anyway, he's on Keybase as https://keybase.io/jashkenas). His public key is announced on his Github and Twitter accounts, both of which are known. He signs those statements with the matching private key. If you ask Keybase for his key, you get 3 things: Keybase telling you what it is, Twitter agreeing with you, Github agreeing with you, and bitcoin telling you everyone in the world has gotten the same answer for those 3 accounts for the last few months. And CLI tracker statements timestamping, too.

Re: Making PGP Key Management Invisible So Johnny Can Encrypt

#50

Post by williamcotton »

malgorithms wrote: post #27
mey wrote: post #12

https://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

Two things we're particularly proud of at Keybase are (1) that there's no server trust of these proofs, and (2) we pin the entire state of the directory to the bitcoin blockchain, to prevent forking. [1] In other words, if you ask for Twitter user X's public key, your client can check that proof on twitter itself (rather than trusting that a key server did it for you, like it would with email proofs), and it can trus…

Can you give us the txId of a bitcoin transaction used to represent the entire state?
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