I don't think that email is going to go away any time soon, so there doesn't appear to be a lot of alternative. I doubt that Moxie is suggesting that users send emails in plain text, so maybe email encryption needs to be reinvented.
GPG and Me
181–190 of 267 posts
Re: GPG and Me
#182For 20 years nobody cared about crypto - how is it surprising that we have what we have?
For the future - progress does not come from just line of development, there needs to be many many experiments before we get good crypto. We need better UIs, and we also need many infrastructure improvements. I have not looked at the protocol itself - but it being flexible and having too many options is not really a problem - it is needed for the other layers built upon it to have space for experimentation. But the PGP related libs are really not good. I had once an idea for a Web of Trust related website - and I found out that there is no way to for example verify a signature without loading a full key-ring, that is loading all unrelated keys into the memory just to build the data structure used by the library. This is just one case - but it supports the thesis that the libs are a fossil from the last century. If we want better end user tools we need to give better libs for programmers to start the experiments.
Re: GPG and Me
#183I don't want GPG to get in the way of better, newer options. But even less do I want to read more about people burned by the incompetent engineering of lesser new alternatives. Can we just declare a flag day and switch to TextSecure?
Yea, remember that even in 2020 you would still be much better off using well designed 1990s crypto than things like Telegram or Cryptocat. And TextSecure is not a true replacement.
Re: GPG and Me
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say "Redphone? Whisper? and various other projects - while very cool - didn't achieve even as much popularity as GnuPG" The Axolotl protocol that was created for Whisper System's TextSecure is now used, by default, by Cyanogenmod (10 million users) and the Android version of WhatsApp (more than 500 million installs from the play store). I'd say Moxie's tech has been pretty widely adopted.
When can I have a compatible FOSS desktop client? I don't do 100% of my communications from my phone, and I never will.
You won’t have that until someone takes the time to produce such a client.
Re: GPG and Me
#185I'm not a programmer so I was hoping somebody could answer this question for me, why did Moxie choose to italicise the word python in this sentence:
"Mailpile had to write 1400 lines of python code just to interface with a native GnuPG installation for basic operations, and it still isn’t rock solid."
Re: GPG and Me
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any specific criticisms of GPG other than "it's old and it's not popular"? What's your ideal vision of what end-to-end encryption for the common (wo)man should look like other than "not GPG"? Two questions whose answers are nonexistent in your article.
Specific criticisms of GPG: > the working hypothesis for privacy enhancing technology was simple: we’d develop really flexible power tools for ourselves, and then teach everyone to be like us... Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish I think it's self…
You list plenty of specific problems with GPG the UI and GPG the "API" (though frankly the fact that mailpile would write 1400 lines of python that wrap GPG rather than taking one of the independent library implementations of RFC4880 and bringing it up to production quality makes them part of the problem). But none of those specific problems are problems with OpenPGP the protocol.
Re: GPG and Me
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any specific criticisms of GPG other than "it's old and it's not popular"? What's your ideal vision of what end-to-end encryption for the common (wo)man should look like other than "not GPG"? Two questions whose answers are nonexistent in your article.
Apparently it's so hard to use properly that even Snowden screwed it up in the course of communicating during his leaks. > The frustrating and ironic thing about GPG is that even experts make mistakes with it. Even, as it turns out, Edward Snowden. > I now had Poitras’ permission to send Snowden her encryption key, but in his first email to me, Snowden had forgotten to attach his key, which meant I could not encrypt…
Any encryption system has to exchange keys, and you can do it easily or securely, pick one. Failing the way you describe makes things cumbersome but does not compromise security.
Re: GPG and Me
#188Creating a GPG alternative is hard. That's pretty much the only reason why it's still around. That, and the ubiquity of e-mail.
Sending encrypted/signed e-mail with GPG isn't hard when you're using things like Enigmail. Maybe the GUI could be a little friendlier, I don't know, but the encryption part isn't hard. Key management, now that's hard. Not just in terms of usage, but in terms of explaining it to new users.
On the one hand, both parties need to somehow exchange keys before they can communicate in a secure fashion. Doing this is hard, and if done wrong can leave you vulnerable to attack. That's why we verify key fingerprints. If there's an easy way to make this painless, I don't know it. Central authorities like what we've got with TLS/HTTPS are obviously a steaming pile of shite. Decentralized (like GPG) are difficult for users. What else is there? I don't know.
Re: GPG and Me
#189Sorry but what is the actual point of this blog post? GPG is just one guy. Who's practically beggared himself writing and maintaining the tool. GPG is actually used by human rights activists, journalists etc. That, right there, is reason enough to celebrate it and NOT "kill it off". I think the massive pile-on this is creating is really dumb, to be honest. So Moxie thinks it could be done better; that's great. He's g…
It's not about GPG sucking; it's about the absence of anything sucking less than GPG.
It's not about activists and journalists being (more or less) able to use GPG; it's about the fact that nobody who doesn't face as deadly a risk as them would bother to use GPG.
I didn't feel any denigration reading him; rather, the statement that:
* We have new crypto needs, in wake of revelations such as Snowden's;
* GPG isn't an adequate answer to those needs, and isn't likely to evolve into one;
* Tech people don't realize that GPG is unlikely to morph into an adequate solution, and therefore don't bother starting an alternative.
Finally, I believe that a successful answer would rely on excellent UX and PR at least as much as sound crypto. I'm not aware that Moxie is an expert in these fields (although he might have more talents than I know), so it's not obvious that he's in a position of showing rather than telling.
Re: GPG and Me
#190There are a couple alternatives to GPG being developed right now. One is reop ( https://github.com/tedu/reop ). The cryptography is done by libsodium and it is well-written. Another is NetPGP ( http://www.netpgp.com/ ). The cryptography is done by the OpenPGP SDK. The NetPGP code is well-written but the OpenPGP SDK code looks like OpenSSL. Both are promising and deserve everyone's support.
> OpenPGP SDK code looks like OpenSSL.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that intelligence services sabotage open source crypto projects by helping turning their codebase into an arcane mess, which scares away the million eyeballs which are supposed to make bugs shallow.
I've worked on OpenSSL quite a long time ago; I thought they kept it so messy in order to sell their expertise through consulting. At that time, only tinfoil hat folks would have believed that spooks would spend millions sabotaging everything and anything crypto-related... Now I believe that infiltrating open-source SSL / TLS / PGP developper communities is at least as strong a priority as infiltrating terrorist communities for them, so I'm utterly convinced they're trying, and I'd rather bet they succeed.