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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

#41

Post by IgorPartola »

It's actually quite simple. PGP/GPG is the equivalent of the S in HTTPS. It's a trust model + ciphersuite + tools and libraries for using it. Would you ask your users to use TLS directly? No, you would not. Would you be surprised if the users hated using TLS directly? Nope.

What PGP/GPG actually needs is a nice UI. What's been holding it back is webmail. PGP and webmail are incompatible. Now that mobile is starting to take over people are using non-web based mail clients again and PGP becomes viable again. Imagine integrating Keybase with Mail.app. Now when you send an email to people it's automatically encrypted and verified. As you compose your message you can see that is known on Twitter as @exampleIgor and on Facebook as /exampleIgor and on HN as exir.

This is where we should be heading: building on top of the PGP protocol (and fixing the protocol where 20 year old warts are popping up, such as issues with forward secrecy).

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

#42

Post by feld »

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.…

My keybase.io account is useless because of an error I cannot comprehend. I've never had a problem with my key, and it was working just fine when I signed up!

  Your public key appears corrupted (no valid primary key self-signature)
edit: my self signature is fine, as far as i can tell

https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x983B64501F...

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

#43

Post by lmm »

moxie wrote: post #36

I'm not really positioning TextSecure as a secure mail solution, but this article says that the TextSecure protocol can't support asynchronous operations or federated namespaces. To clarify, that's incorrect, the TextSecure protocol was actually designed from the ground up for asynchronous communication, and is designed to support a federated namespace: https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ That leav…

> Yes, but it's cryptographically well understood not to provide the properties we need.

If you're talking about perfect forward secrecy, surely that's fundamentally impossible for a protocol that is both asynchronous and decentralized? If one party can only send a single async message to another, then that message necessarily must be decryptable by that second party using only what that second party knows, and you lose PFS. PFS only works for synchronous communications where both parties can use a key exchange protocol, or centralized communications where an asynchronous message can be implemented as a synchronous message to a central authority. No?

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

#44

Post by ryanlol »

Retric wrote: post #33
tomjen3 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably shouldn't go around and disagree with quotes from people I have never heard about, but there is no law that means encryption has to be ackward, user-unfriendly or badly designed.

Can you name a single counterexample? HTTPS: You can give up freedom and some security for convenience of 3rd party registrars! You can roll your own which is less convenient and likely less secure… Not really sure of the 3rd option here.

OTR?

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

#45

Post by pbsd »

lmm wrote: post #43
moxie wrote: post #36

I'm not really positioning TextSecure as a secure mail solution, but this article says that the TextSecure protocol can't support asynchronous operations or federated namespaces. To clarify, that's incorrect, the TextSecure protocol was actually designed from the ground up for asynchronous communication, and is designed to support a federated namespace: https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ That leav…

> Yes, but it's cryptographically well understood not to provide the properties we need. If you're talking about perfect forward secrecy, surely that's fundamentally impossible for a protocol that is both asynchronous and decentralized? If one party can only send a single async message to another, then that message necessarily must be decryptable by that second party using only what that second party knows, and you l…

It is not fundamentally impossible. It has been shown [1] that forward-secure public-key encryption can be done without the key size blowing up with the expected number of encrypted messages, though it's not very practical. The trivial case of §3.2, in which the key is simply a tuple of N keys which are erased as messages are encrypted/decrypted, seems similar to what TextSecure does.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/083

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

#46

Post by moxie »

lmm wrote: post #43
moxie wrote: post #36

I'm not really positioning TextSecure as a secure mail solution, but this article says that the TextSecure protocol can't support asynchronous operations or federated namespaces. To clarify, that's incorrect, the TextSecure protocol was actually designed from the ground up for asynchronous communication, and is designed to support a federated namespace: https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ That leav…

> Yes, but it's cryptographically well understood not to provide the properties we need. If you're talking about perfect forward secrecy, surely that's fundamentally impossible for a protocol that is both asynchronous and decentralized? If one party can only send a single async message to another, then that message necessarily must be decryptable by that second party using only what that second party knows, and you l…

https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/simplifying-otr-deniability/

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

#48

Post by martinkl »

IgorPartola wrote: post #41

It's actually quite simple. PGP/GPG is the equivalent of the S in HTTPS. It's a trust model + ciphersuite + tools and libraries for using it. Would you ask your users to use TLS directly? No, you would not. Would you be surprised if the users hated using TLS directly? Nope. What PGP/GPG actually needs is a nice UI. What's been holding it back is webmail. PGP and webmail are incompatible. Now that mobile is starting t…

The problem is that, on the whole, users simply don't care. They have more important things to worry about than email encryption (you know, stuff like spouse, kids, mortgage, partying, etc).

The only way I can see end-to-end crypto really being adopted is if it's turned on by default everywhere. The selling point can't be the security, because people don't care about security -- the selling point has to be something else. Anything that requires a manual adoption step is going to automatically limit itself to a very niche audience.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

zobzu wrote: post #37
moxie wrote: post #36

I'm not really positioning TextSecure as a secure mail solution, but this article says that the TextSecure protocol can't support asynchronous operations or federated namespaces. To clarify, that's incorrect, the TextSecure protocol was actually designed from the ground up for asynchronous communication, and is designed to support a federated namespace: https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ That leav…

Still would like to see your source for the "50k active user base" claim.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by maxtaco »

feld wrote: post #42
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.…

My keybase.io account is useless because of an error I cannot comprehend. I've never had a problem with my key, and it was working just fine when I signed up! Your public key appears corrupted (no valid primary key self-signature) edit: my self signature is fine, as far as i can tell https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x983B64501F...

I moved this to an issue on Github [1]. The key you uploaded to our server has a UID that expired on 2014-11-09. The key you linked to on the MIT key server has updated self-signatures (and subkeys), so doesn't have this problem.

[1] https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/1410

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