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PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

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Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#11

Post by diafygi »

Fun facts about GPG's public key infrastructure:

1. The protocol used to gossip public keys in the GPG keyserver pool is completely undocumented[1].

2. The protocol for uploading and downloading public keys from the pool only ever made it to draft stage, and is now very outdated[2].

3. Because the keyserver protocols are not establish, there is only one implementation that is written in OCaml (luckily it is still maintained)[3].

Luckily, these issues are fixable. We just need to spend the resources to fix them. What if GPG had the same resources as WhatsApp?

[1]: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/sks-devel/2014-02/msg0...

[2]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp-00

[3]: https://bitbucket.org/skskeyserver/sks-keyserver

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#12

Post by zby »

eukaryotia wrote: post #8
zby wrote: post #7

Addressing the Moxie Marlinspike post - PGP being flexible and comprehensive is not the problem. The implementations/libraries (including GPG) being a fossil from last century are. From my own experience I can say that the libraries are not well designed - they couple things together (like key management and decryption) and make some things hard to do even if they are conceptually simple (like checking a signature wi…

>You need a comprehensive fundations to base on these experiments on. The problem is that people build this huge, powerful libraries, but nobody seems to write the "limiting" libraries that take a subset of the powerful base library and create an easy to use experience from the user. I suppose this largely stems from "implicit knowledge": People who can write cryptography apps likely know enough crypto that they can'…

Libraries are more powerful if they are decoupled. For example I wanted to build a website that would let you check message signature against public keyservers. This sounds trivial - but unfortunately the libraries that I've reviewed don't provide a 'check_sig( message, public_key)' function - but only a 'key_ring.check_sig( message )' function. This complicated the matter a lot - because I would have to download the public key and save it into a temp file and then build a key_ring out of that file (with some other complications that I don't remember right now). Enough to discourage me.

Huge does not mean powerful when it is hard to mix and match (and limit) the functionality.

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#14

Post by prohor »

On thing that always wonders me. Assuming NSA or whatever spying agency is sniffing mail in the Internet, I'm pretty sure that once you use PGP, you are basically a strong suspect for them. Obviously the situation would be different if mail was encrypted by default, but now such people just stand out. Not sure if this is a situation I want to be in...

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#15

Post by felixhammerl »

mootothemax wrote: post #10

Is it possible to have a PGP-powered layer that requires close to no setup from the end user? This seems to be the issue, and until the encryption is, in effect, totally invisible to the average person on the street, I'm not sure we'll see widespread deployment.

your no setup scenario would be when security is handled on the host, which is not really an option for email w/ PGP. if you want gmail to do your de/encryption, you might as well use what you currently have with TLS

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#16

Post by felixhammerl »

prohor wrote: post #14

On thing that always wonders me. Assuming NSA or whatever spying agency is sniffing mail in the Internet, I'm pretty sure that once you use PGP, you are basically a strong suspect for them. Obviously the situation would be different if mail was encrypted by default, but now such people just stand out. Not sure if this is a situation I want to be in...

are you playing devils advocate? this is exactly why it's a good idea to use this stuff even for your normal everyday traffic, so that the ones that really need to use it don't stand out. same goes for pretty much every form of encryption.

your point is well taken, but it's not what we're discussing here. lots of people have written lots of essays about this :)

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#17

Post by peatmoss »

malgorithms wrote: post #9

Since Keybase inevitably comes up in these PGP conversations, 2 things in advance: 1. I've really been very slow in letting people into Keybase. The wait time is still 6 months (last night I was letting in people who asked back in August.) But now that we've added HackerNews key proofs, I'll let people in today who notice this post who have more than 1 karma and write "I'm HN: {theirusername}" in the request form. 2.…

Hmm... I never knew about you guys. I think I may need to do this. I've been meaning to get rolling again with GPG, in part because I want to move to `pass` for password management. Might need to spend some time today getting my ducks in a row.

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#18

Post by felixhammerl »

zby wrote: post #12
eukaryotia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You need a comprehensive fundations to base on these experiments on. The problem is that people build this huge, powerful libraries, but nobody seems to write the "limiting" libraries that take a subset of the powerful base library and create an easy to use experience from the user. I suppose this largely stems from "implicit knowledge": People who can write cryptography apps likely know enough crypto that they can'…

Libraries are more powerful if they are decoupled. For example I wanted to build a website that would let you check message signature against public keyservers. This sounds trivial - but unfortunately the libraries that I've reviewed don't provide a 'check_sig( message, public_key)' function - but only a 'key_ring.check_sig( message )' function. This complicated the matter a lot - because I would have to download the…

we're using and contributing to openpgp.js and so far this has worked pretty good for us, because it provides a sane API, properly documented, coherent code style, CI tested. here's a snippet for decryption and signature checking in Whiteout Mail: https://github.com/whiteout-io/mail-html5/blob/master/src/js...

Re: PGP: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet

#19

Post by malgorithms »

peatmoss wrote: post #17
malgorithms wrote: post #9

Since Keybase inevitably comes up in these PGP conversations, 2 things in advance: 1. I've really been very slow in letting people into Keybase. The wait time is still 6 months (last night I was letting in people who asked back in August.) But now that we've added HackerNews key proofs, I'll let people in today who notice this post who have more than 1 karma and write "I'm HN: {theirusername}" in the request form. 2.…

Hmm... I never knew about you guys. I think I may need to do this. I've been meaning to get rolling again with GPG, in part because I want to move to `pass` for password management. Might need to spend some time today getting my ducks in a row.

Cool, just keep in mind Keybase isn't an email client. So if your goal is encrypted email communications, you'll still need to pick a client for that. Whiteout/Thunderbird w Enigmail/Mail.app w/GPG Tools are all apps to look at for your desktop.

Keybase right now is basically just a directory. It's a different model for making sure you get the right key for the right person. As diafygi pointed out, the traditional PGP keyserver model is busted. There's no canonical ordering of key announcements and revocations, and the gossip protocol is messy. Solving this based on social accounts is our top priority. Every proof or revocation you do on Keybase is put into a chain for you, and in turn that chain is attached to our merkle tree and written to the bitcoin block chain. We want to prove everyone in the world is getting the same answer from Keybase, everything is ordered, and that we're not omitting anything.

What you then do with those keys is up to you.

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