GPG and Me • Hacker News Board

Re: GPG and Me

#211

Post by mrottenkolber » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 12:57 PM UTC

moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

I think you are blaming a slightly arcane program for what is essentially laziness of the population. Every time I read a comment on HN stating how PGP isn't usable I cry a little bit inside. GPG in no harder to use than git or many other tools professionals use.

The difference being, its worse to make a mistake using GPG than it is to make a mistake using most other programs. In the end, you are securing confidential information, which will always be hard, unnerving and require concentration and care. And this is just inherent to the task, which is fighting an undefined, super-powerful, ill-meaning enemy.

Encryption is violence. The objective is to violently keep an enemy away from your jewels. Instead of using an armed guard at your door, you use mathematical forces which are impossible for your enemy to overcome. Imagine your enemy needs the cleartext to save his own life, how does he feel when he is denied access and unable to gain access? It doesn't matter if its a steel door or a block-cipher.

What people are essentially demanding when they want "easy to use crypto" is a self-firing and self-aiming rifle with friendly-fire detection. "Keep all my adversaries away but don't bother me about it."

That's not how conflict works. If you attempt to secure your communications from a state actor, you are engaging in a full-blown combat against one of the most deadly forces there can be. That conflict will always be demanding and unpleasant. GPG being "hard to use" will be the least of your problems.

But no, we want everything for free. Protecting yourself against the overlords should be easy and painless, almost automatic. The defendant shouldn't have to learn how his defense works or how to properly use it.

Seriously?

EDIT: And what I find unnerving about your post is, suddenly the people who put in the effort to use GPG are the bad guys? The 0.1% who actually take privacy seriously enough to go through the the trouble? Don't get me wrong, I almost never use GPG, not because it's hard to use (M-x epa-encrypt-region, anyone?), but because I don't want to experience the emotional distress related to struggling with a super-powered state.

Re: GPG and Me

#212

Post by glogla » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:03 PM UTC

droopyEyelids wrote: post #96

the_af wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Moxie, it intrigues me that the first thing you mention in your post isn't technical or even about UX (which is what most people in this thread are focusing on). Instead, it's that you're starting to dislike reading emails from the kind of person who would "voluntarily use GPG". I know you said there's no unifying theme to these emails, but can you elaborate? Maybe something about security-obssessed lay people us…

It might be people who miss the forest for the trees. Right now Moxie is working on bringing encryption to the masses. That involves a whole-product view, with empathy for the unsophisticated (think about a kid who's only computing device is a phone). I know stereotypes often treat people unfairly, but the kind of person who has the dedication required to use PGP seems, to me, to often coincide with the people who fi…

> Considering Moxie seems to be dedicating a large part of his life's work to helping average people, I believe the attitude I described could play foil to the inspirational messages he also receives. But I don't pretend to know him or anything.

You may say that, but after the "we specifically work to make TextSecure impossible without Google Play because using Android without google is 'going back to the old broken desktop security model'" thing, I'm not convinced.

I'm sure moxie is good with crypto, but sadly, he's on different side of war on general purpose computers than I am. He's on the side of walled gardens and limits what can you do on your own device, and I can't accept that.

EDIT: and of course he would spit on GPG. For moxie, GPG is competition.

Re: GPG and Me

#213

Post by elsjaako » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:09 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #125

MichaelGG wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What your proposing is currently limited to people that are more-or-less OK putting up with PGP. For everyone and their mom to use encryption, features like "I forgot my password and now lost all my email" aren't acceptable. Nor are things like "I've got to make a separate, verified, out-of-band contact to verify that I've got the right key". I'm hoping someone comes up with a breakthrough idea here, something fantas…

I don't see any way to protect users against forgetting their encryption passphrase, or losing their private key, without offloading trust somewhere. Except for backups, anyway. It can be very hard to know whether you have the right public key, especially for people that you know only from online activity. And it's not uncommon to find multiple unrevoked keys, with the same email address. But check out https://keybas…

> I don't see any way to protect users against forgetting their encryption passphrase, or losing their private key, without offloading trust somewhere.

Private keys are obviously an issue, but I don't really get why passwords are considered so important.

I like to use GPG when I can for communicating with people, but most of the things I put on it are less private than what you would get if you got my computer.

I don't think passwords protect you if the attacker can install a keylogger (correct me if I'm wrong), so anyone with hardware access or malware isn't going to be stopped. You are only protecting against people that can read files from your computer but not install hardware/software.

I think for the average user the password provides little extra security while having a high UI cost.

Re: GPG and Me

#214

Post by higherpurpose » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #161

moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

HTTP is '90s tech. TCP/IP is '70s tech. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. 1400 lines of python that tries to pretend that an interactive program is a library is definitely a problem though. How's about this: rather than a protocol-up rewrite, how about just writing a library-up rewrite? Write a ground-up implementation of (maybe a subset of) RFC 4880, with opinionated choices of default ciphers (a bit like…

> HTTP is '90s tech. TCP/IP is '70s tech. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Sure there is. For one, we were talking about encryption protocols. Those are not encrypted. The one that is encrypted, HTTPS, sucks (the whole CA system). So after Snowden's documents came out I would've expected more people to say "it's time to get rid of HTTPS". That hasn't quite happened yet, and I'm disappointed by that. In case w

As for TCP/IP, again, not encrypted, and they need to be. In case we've forgotten, TCP/IP and HTTP is what made it happen for the Internet to become a giant spy machine. That to me means they are broken.

We need to switch to something like CurveCP, MinimaLT, Noise, etc, that is encrypted by default at the Transport or even the IP layer. If we agree "encrypting all the things needs" to happen, then the current state of TCP/IP and HTTP is horrible, and we're not moving fast enough to replace them.

The fact that we don't yet have a good encrypted by default alternative to TCP/IP and HTTP/S is what will also bring us a world of hurt when the "Internet of Things" arrives in a big way, along with self-driving "smart" cars that can be remotely updated (and hacked).

Re: GPG and Me

#215

Post by higherpurpose » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:21 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #155

moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

Blaming "1990s crypto" is, IMHO, missing the point. Until we discover attacks against the ciphers there's no reason to throw them out just due to their age. If you're referring to GPG's shitty interface, then sure. But how much of that is "1990s crypto" and how much is due to the fact that it's one guy working by himself and barely being able to afford it, for years? GPG with Linux-levels of support would be an entir…

Well for one, he's blaming the protocols that are "90's crypto", not the cipher, but second, I think GPG does use some weak crypto as well, at least as options, and they never bothered to remove those.

Re: GPG and Me

#216

Post by felixhammerl » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

I relly disagree that all is lost for PGP. Here's why it's a good idea to not just carelessly toss out the seemingly old and busted: https://blog.whiteout.io/2015/02/25/pgp-theres-life-in-the-o...

Re: GPG and Me

#217

Post by higherpurpose » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

napoleond wrote: post #73

moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

What do you think that looks like, though? Is it TextSecure on the desktop, with file attachments? Is it Pond? Is it just email, but with a different crypto layer? I feel like a lot of the things GPG aims to do are fundamentally hard. It's not the technology that sucks, it's the problem . I completely agree that the answer will come from thinking about user interactions first, but I'm not sure that the solution will…

Peerio might work, but it hasn't been vetted too much yet:

http://peerio.com/

It's made by the CryptoCat author, so make of that what you will.

Re: GPG and Me

#218

Post by edwintorok » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:29 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #55

I 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?

How about Chatsecure with Jabber and OTP? Isn't that a viable alternative too? Doesn't require you to use a phone number, so it works nicely on tablets or desktops (pidgin+otr), etc.

Re: GPG and Me

#219

Post by tinco » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:29 PM UTC

rictic wrote: post #86

tinco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no other model than the web-of-trust. And it didn't fail because it's hard to grap (it's really not), it failed because a) almost no one needs it and b) the tech is hard to use. Imagining a world where the web-of-trust was succesful is not hard. It starts with everyone using Outlook instead of gmail. Then imagine Outlook having PGP support builtin. Then imagine in the contacts list, every contact was marked w…

At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of meaningless and annoying to users, causing them to ignore and misuse it Step 2: mumble mumble... self-healing corruption Step 3: the only reason this hasn't succeeded is that people didn't care enough It's exactly those parts in step 2 where I've historically f…

It's not a pitch for implementing WoT. It's a thought experiment to show that it could be viable. It won't make anyone happier if that's what you want, security never made any UI more pleasant.

The system might send you an e-mail if someone casts doubt over the trustworthiness of a key. If you lose your phone with your keys, they're gone, just like when you lose your keys.

I never said big scary warnings. Just small reminders that what's happening isn't secure, like the green bar in your browser. Most of the time harmless, but informative when you need it.

Re: GPG and Me

#220

Post by XorNot » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 1:30 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #105

rictic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of meaningless and annoying to users, causing them to ignore and misuse it Step 2: mumble mumble... self-healing corruption Step 3: the only reason this hasn't succeeded is that people didn't care enough It's exactly those parts in step 2 where I've historically f…

I think part of the problem that the OP is sort of addressing is that we've spent so much time trying to gloss over the first-line failures of PGP, in terms of even getting a key to begin with let alone giving it to other people, that we don't even know if there are practical solutions to the problems you're listing. Every tool in this space suffers from the choices PGP implementations have made and asking what your…

Frankly, red/yellow/green is an excellent solution. Do I care now? No. Do I care when the secrecy is important? Maybe I'll not send things to non-green users.