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Switching from GPG to Age

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#101

Post by tptacek »

lrvick wrote: post #48
jcgl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unclear to me any stateful keychains are implied here. The decrypting system has N number of keys available. It tries to authenticate the ciphertext with those N keys. If the ciphertext authenticates, then return the decrypted cleartext. What’s more, it’s unclear to me why point 5 belongs in the cryptosystem layer (such as with PGP) rather than on some higher, more adaptable layer. All that is needed for that hi…

> It’s unclear to me any stateful keychains are implied here. Encrypted files are encrypted to a key. It could be a one time use key encrypted to another key as PGP and Age both do, but still there is a long lived secret a user must maintain somewhere, somehow, and have a strategy for backup, rotation, discovery, validation, etc etc. > it’s unclear to me why point 5 belongs in the cryptosystem layer (such as with PGP…

Wait, how does minisign "pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist"? Minisign is an example of a purpose-built tool designed specifically to address a problem PGP attempts to solve. We're now talking about two different tools each of which addresses something in PGP's scope. If we keep fleshing out PGP's scope, we'll keep finding more tools like this, because very few people operationalize PGP and lots of people have the problems PGP attempts to solve.

Your argument doesn't cohere.

I feel like the rhetorical sleight of hand PGP advocates too often fall back on is the idea that while there may be tools that do some of what PGP does, and those tools put together may comprise a superset of PGP's functionality, there is no one tool that does everything PGP does by itself. But that's the whole point. Part of what makes PGP so bad is that it's a Swiss Army Knife.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#102

Post by tptacek »

lrvick wrote: post #79
tux1968 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to know how these pieces fit together, especially if you have a fuzzy mental-model of the objectives and potential benefits. Is there a gentle introduction you'd recommend?

There are many ways to use PGP just as there are many ways to use openssl or any other cryptographic suite of tools. For most individuals seeking to establish a long term durable personal keychain they want others to be able to externally trust and verify easily, I would suggest the following, which is more or less what most people in my circles do: 1. Buy a smartcard with touch support such as a Nitrokey 3 2. Ideall…

There are many ways to use PGP just as there are many ways to use openssl or any other cryptographic suite of tools.

This is a very bad thing, because it is not in fact the case that there is one cryptosystem equally suited to all these tasks.

That you chose OpenSSL as your corroborating example is especially funny, because there is exactly one thing that OpenSSL is actually well-suited to doing (setting up TLS sessions), and then 20+ years of people getting themselves into grave trouble trying to get that library to do other things.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#103

Post by tptacek »

aborsy wrote: post #2

Age is super clean and very nice. But I don’t think it will ever be a replacement for gpg (and might have already passed its window to replace it for file encryption). It just does file encryption. GPG does tons of other things that you will find are very useful (like around key management and signatures).

Repeating a comment elsewhere on the thread so I'll keep this very brief, but it is in fact bad that PGP "does tons of other things that you will find are very useful".

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#104

Post by lrvick »

zaphar wrote: post #63
lrvick wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By very small niche group, you mean every maintainer of every widely used production linux distribution and most of the core packages that form the supply train trust layer for the entire internet? Or every reasonably competent security vulnerability disclosure team? (Even Google and Apple!) PGP is the only standardized cryptographic online identity layer we have and still very heavily used by anyone working on secur…

Yes. That they have a large impact does not change the fact that not I nor anyone in my close circle uses it for that. It has been relegated to a specialized domain and use case. I have no use for maintaining a signing key. All the communications I need to secure and verify identity use a different technology for it. The fact that some tools I run might use it in the background is entirely abstracted away for me and…

If you write open source code others rely on, or have any online identity that could be used for harm if stolen, it is irresponsible to not have a well published public identity signing key that cryptographically ties together your online presences to make you hard to impersonate. A key used to sign commits, binaries, code reviews, emails, or anything else of public value you produce.

If you do not do anything of consequence outside of corporate walls and are just a passive consumer of technology, then you probably do not need one.

The fact you have keybase in your profile indicates to me that you at least at one point mildly cared about having a cryptographic identity. Keybase just happened to have been a wildly broken implementation. Keyoxide is the path today.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#105

Post by lrvick »

tptacek wrote: post #78
lrvick wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we looking at the same links? It is provided as an option, the ONLY option, for those that feel encryption is merited for a sensitive report. Google page: "If you feel the need, please use our PGP public key to encrypt your communications with us." Apple page: "Apple security advisories are signed with the Apple Product Security PGP key. Sensitive security information may be encrypted to this key when communicati…

I think you missed some subtext that I thought was pretty obvious which is that most people don't encrypt bug bounty submissions in 2025.

> Neither Google nor Apple rely on PGP for vulnerability disclosure handling.

They support and rely on it exclusively for security disclosures sensitive enough to merit encryption.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#106

Post by tptacek »

lrvick wrote: post #105
tptacek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed some subtext that I thought was pretty obvious which is that most people don't encrypt bug bounty submissions in 2025.

> Neither Google nor Apple rely on PGP for vulnerability disclosure handling. They support and rely on it exclusively for security disclosures sensitive enough to merit encryption.

"Sensitive enough" is smuggling in a presumption of yours that isn't supported by evidence. Whether or not submissions are PGP-encrypted (in my experience: they very rarely are) is uncorrelated with their severity.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#107

Post by lrvick »

tptacek wrote: post #99
Ferret7446 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the tldr of their point is that Filippo thought a lot about cryptography but not about actual users or their requirements. What he thinks are cruft are actual features that users depend on

No, I got the tldr of their point just fine. They're just wrong.

If I am wrong I challenge you to point at a well specified replacement for PGP with a diversity of competing implementations as a decentralized cryptographic identity and trust system for open source software supply chain signing, authentication, and peer to peer encryption with a variety of smartcard generation, usage, and backup solutions better for every situation PGP is used in today.

Also a solution that significantly reduces attack surface enough to motivate a migration from PGP in all the areas it is used, and a specific strategy to migrate everything to it.

Also form a standards team to maintain the spec to keep all implementations compatible so this work is useful long term.

If all of that happened I would seriously evaluate it and likely even help promote it. Few understand the shortcomings of PGP better than those of us that heavily rely on it!

Until then I suggest improving upon what already exists, or at the very least stop steering people away from the best effort solutions we have today and all the hard work from hundreds of people that go into maintaining them for free.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#108

Post by lrvick »

tptacek wrote: post #101
lrvick wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s unclear to me any stateful keychains are implied here. Encrypted files are encrypted to a key. It could be a one time use key encrypted to another key as PGP and Age both do, but still there is a long lived secret a user must maintain somewhere, somehow, and have a strategy for backup, rotation, discovery, validation, etc etc. > it’s unclear to me why point 5 belongs in the cryptosystem layer (such as with PGP…

Wait, how does minisign "pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist"? Minisign is an example of a purpose-built tool designed specifically to address a problem PGP attempts to solve. We're now talking about two different tools each of which addresses something in PGP's scope. If we keep fleshing out PGP's scope, we'll keep finding more tools like this, because very few people operationalize PGP and lots of people h…

Minisign and Age entirely dodge the actually hardest problem with humans using cryptography, that PGP puts front and center: identity and public key discovery. You cannot just skip these!

If a human focused cryptography tool gives a user no way to know if they are encrypting to the correct public key of someone else, or no way to distinguish a real signature from one of an impersonator, then the tools failed to do their job.

Age is maybe useful for personal encryption use cases, but it is no way a replacement for all encryption use cases of PGP, especially between humans. Let alone signing and authentication which would be a prerequisite to do this safely.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#109

Post by tptacek »

lrvick wrote: post #108
tptacek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how does minisign "pretend the problems PGP solves do not exist"? Minisign is an example of a purpose-built tool designed specifically to address a problem PGP attempts to solve. We're now talking about two different tools each of which addresses something in PGP's scope. If we keep fleshing out PGP's scope, we'll keep finding more tools like this, because very few people operationalize PGP and lots of people h…

Minisign and Age entirely dodge the actually hardest problem with humans using cryptography, that PGP puts front and center: identity and public key discovery. You cannot just skip these! If a human focused cryptography tool gives a user no way to know if they are encrypting to the correct public key of someone else, or no way to distinguish a real signature from one of an impersonator, then the tools failed to do th…

PGP does an absolutely dreadful job of key discovery, and further, there is no reason to couple one mode of "key discovery" to a signing tool. Different business domains will have different optimal key discovery architectures.

My guess is that at this point more professional environments (think on the level of "companies and projects") have integrated age and minisign than have integrated PGP, which is striking given how long PGP has had to demonstrate success. In 2025, if you built a new identity system for, say, code, virtual machine or container provenance, or secure messaging, your competent security team would very likely shoot you down.

This is just another instance of the same sleight of hand I identified upthread. It's actually bad that PGP does all this stuff, for the simple reason that different real-world problems have different cryptography requirements. For that reason, competently built systems don't do what the PGP ecosystem does, of fielding a Swiss Army Knife instead of a chef's knife or a table saw. Then the PGP ecosystem tries to ding those tools for not repeating PGP's mistake.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#110

Post by lrvick »

tptacek wrote: post #102
lrvick wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways to use PGP just as there are many ways to use openssl or any other cryptographic suite of tools. For most individuals seeking to establish a long term durable personal keychain they want others to be able to externally trust and verify easily, I would suggest the following, which is more or less what most people in my circles do: 1. Buy a smartcard with touch support such as a Nitrokey 3 2. Ideall…

There are many ways to use PGP just as there are many ways to use openssl or any other cryptographic suite of tools. This is a very bad thing, because it is not in fact the case that there is one cryptosystem equally suited to all these tasks. That you chose OpenSSL as your corroborating example is especially funny, because there is exactly one thing that OpenSSL is actually well-suited to doing (setting up TLS sessi…

You spend a lot of energy steering people away from PGP, but what is your alternative to solve the same problems with the same threat models?

What do you want to shift the entire software supply chain security foundation of the internet to use instead and how?

Complaining the existing solution is not good enough is easy. Making things better and educating on current best efforts without creating centralized points of trust is hard.

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