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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

#71

Post by worklogin »

tomjen3 wrote: post #31
wuschel wrote: post #5

Quoting Dan Geer: "Convenience, freedom, security - choose two." Solid cryptography concepts were never easy to implement and use. My main problem lies not with the Gnu/PG or PGP software implementations, but with the actual platforms. Do I trust my iPhone/Android/public internet cafe computer/the family computer? Is it compromised? What about your computer manufacturer? Lenovo, perhaps? Or Apple? The problem of info…

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.

More like a theorem. And Dan Geer is totally worth reading.

http://geer.tinho.net/geer.rsa.28ii14.txt

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2...

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

#72

Post by zobzu »

mnem wrote: post #65
zobzu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think he's referring to the number of keys in the "strong set" as described here: http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/

Yeah and thats a flawed number since most ppl dont get a zillion signatures.

What it really means is that people don't use the web of trust that much.

Most people I encounter do not sign keys, they just verify they've seen the same key before.

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

#73

Post by zobzu »

mike_hearn wrote: post #67
viccuad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't have one. Sometimes I wonder how difficult would be to sneak a sabouteur into the crypto community, who advocated for ditching proven and safe crypto tools, wanted his solutions on top of centralized servers owned by others, opposed distribution of signed binaries in FOSS markets, recommended the people to use stock OSs with binary and who-knows-what google libs inside, instead of installing the free count…

The 50k number comes from the number of people who can reach each other through the web of trust. If you take every key uploaded to the key servers ever, then it's more like 4 million. However most of those aren't active. TextSecure, in contrast, has vastly more users than PGP has ever had, despite being a lot newer. Sometimes I wonder how difficult would be to sneak a sabouteur into the crypto community, who advocat…

Having it installed doesn't mean using it, like you said, for the PGP keys being generated but not necessarily in use.

On textsecure usage

In my experience, very very few people actually sign keys, and few people upload them on keyservers. Also, I know very very few people who use textsecure. I used it for a few month, trying to get others to talk to me with it and gave up. And I'm in the bay area working with IT people, most of my friends are IT people mind you, we're exactly the people who try that stuff all the time.

It doesn't mean its bad tech or a bad attempt at all, heck, I would LOVE for it to catch up. But I seriously doubt it has 4 millions active users or more.

On PGP usage

From a key server perspective there are still a large number of keys being downloaded, refreshed and updated daily.

Let's look at Mozilla's stats and they just seem to peer with one low traffic guy and themselves... http://gpg.mozilla.org/pks/lookup?op=stats that's 1k new keys a day, and about 500 updated a day. We're far from the 50k claim since it would reach that in 50 days no matter what.

Of course saying there's only, say a few millions PGP users doesnt mean AT ALL the same as 50k.

On misinformation

Thus I'm calling bullshit. Purposefully misrepresenting data (large order of magnitudes, at that) is a big minus in my book. Being well-known shouldn't mean you can tell people bullshit - if anything, you have a greater responsibility when you do.

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

#75

Post by lmm »

moxie wrote: post #46
lmm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

So yeah, you're relying on a central authority to maintain the prekeys and only give out each one once. The within-session ratchet is cool but I'm not sure if it's relevant to an async use case like email where messages can be sent months apart (would you ever even use a session for more than 1 message?) and the user /wants/ to retain the ability to read their old messages. Likewise the non-repudiation aspect of PGP is by design: it's meant for a use case where you want to "get something in writing", it's supposed to behave like a signature on a letter. (And by the same token it's very much an inappropriate protocol for e.g. IMs, which is why even big fans of GPG will use OTR or some such for those instead).

There's maybe a case for a protocol that offers both (though in practice I've just seen people sign their OTR key fingerprints with their PGP key), but that goes against the simplicity that you're emphasising.

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

#76

Post by e12e »

rakoo wrote: post #68
e12e wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the initial key exchange out of the way, both parties can then continue communicating with an OTR-style protocol as usual. Since the server never hands out the same prekey twice (and the client would never accept the same prekey twice), we are able to provide forward secrecy in a fully asynchronous environment. So, my laptop is off-line, and I have access to a recipients public key. How do I encrypt my message…

> (the message will only be encrypted when the pre-key can be retrieved). The pre-key is needed when you have never talked to someone (I guess it's also needed when the last conversation is really old, I haven't dug throuh the code); it's a necessary bootstrap step. After that all you need is inside your client. > So, my laptop is off-line, and I have access to a recipients public key. How do I encrypt my message, be…

> The pre-key is needed when you have never talked to someone (I guess it's also needed when the last conversation is really old, I haven't dug throuh the code); it's a necessary bootstrap step. After that all you need is inside your client.

Well, no. It's needed when you client has never talked to someone. If you have a pad, a phone and a laptop, they all need a pre-key to talk to the same person. If the person's server is down, the system breaks down (you can't have just anyone mirror the pre-keys).

> From a user pov, there is no difference between: > > - I type the message and hit send, the message is encrypted now and sent when I have connectivity > > - I type the message and hit send, the message is encrypted and sent when I have connectivity

Perhaps not. But there's a difference between being alerted that you can't reach the recipient securely before you type the message, and getting that message (no pre-key available) after you've taken the time to write the message.

Not to mention that hopefully the device has FDE, so there aren't any plain-text messages around for when you go through customs, or when someone steals your phone etc. But I'll concede that device security is probably outside the realm of what a message system should deal with.

Don't get me wrong, I welcome improvements like this -- I just don't think it's comparable to pgp (which is both good and bad).

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

#77

Post by mike_hearn »

zobzu wrote: post #73
mike_hearn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 50k number comes from the number of people who can reach each other through the web of trust. If you take every key uploaded to the key servers ever, then it's more like 4 million. However most of those aren't active. TextSecure, in contrast, has vastly more users than PGP has ever had, despite being a lot newer. Sometimes I wonder how difficult would be to sneak a sabouteur into the crypto community, who advocat…

Having it installed doesn't mean using it, like you said, for the PGP keys being generated but not necessarily in use. On textsecure usage In my experience, very very few people actually sign keys, and few people upload them on keyservers. Also, I know very very few people who use textsecure. I used it for a few month, trying to get others to talk to me with it and gave up. And I'm in the bay area working with IT peo…

> It doesn't mean its bad tech or a bad attempt at all, heck, I would LOVE for it to catch up. But I seriously doubt it has 4 millions active users or more.

The 4 million figure was total users of GPG ever, not TextSecure. TextSecure for Android has had about 1 million installs.

However, it's also been integrated into the Cyanogen mod which added about 10 million users, and the tech has been integrated into WhatsApp, which got the underlying crypto code (though not the UI) to about 400 million+ users.

So if by "TextSecure" we mean the technology rather than the actual UI widget code, which is generic anyway, then it's in a whole other league by orders of magnitude.

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

#78

Post by Gumbi »

TomMasz wrote: post #25

I have Exchange/Outlook (w/Gpg4Win) at work and OS X Mail w/GPGTools) at home. I can't send GPG signed/encrypted emails between work and home. But I can with the S/MIME implementation built into Outlook (w/certificate from Comodo, hmmmm). Add-ons for email programs just don't seem to be the answer, at least so far.

Hi Tom, gpg4win is really awkward in terms of compatibiltiy (beside other lacking features). I exchange a lot of encrypted mails with different people - among them Apple users. Take a look at gpg4o (http://www.gpg4o.com) which is my preferred solution.

Gumbi

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

#79

Post by zobzu »

mike_hearn wrote: post #77
zobzu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having it installed doesn't mean using it, like you said, for the PGP keys being generated but not necessarily in use. On textsecure usage In my experience, very very few people actually sign keys, and few people upload them on keyservers. Also, I know very very few people who use textsecure. I used it for a few month, trying to get others to talk to me with it and gave up. And I'm in the bay area working with IT peo…

> It doesn't mean its bad tech or a bad attempt at all, heck, I would LOVE for it to catch up. But I seriously doubt it has 4 millions active users or more. The 4 million figure was total users of GPG ever, not TextSecure. TextSecure for Android has had about 1 million installs. However, it's also been integrated into the Cyanogen mod which added about 10 million users, and the tech has been integrated into WhatsApp,…

You compared the total of PGP users to textsecure saying textsecure has more hence my reply on that (just clarifying)

Or least, that was my understanding of your previous comment You're basically kinda saying there is between 11millions and 400 millions users, and, you know, i dont trust that at all and would compare it to notepad/paint being installed on windows but not actually used.

Anyway, whichever tech really catches up would be a good thing. I just dislike the manipulation of information for marketing of one tech over another for fame, money, power etc. Specially when that means bad mouthing free and open source projects :)

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