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Gpg.fail

gpg.fail

121–130 of 376 posts

Re: Gpg.fail

#121
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be more accurate (and more helpful) to say that the two factions in the OpenPGP standards schism[1] have pulled away from the idea of consensus. There is a fundamental philosophical difference here. The LiberePGP faction (GnuPGP) is following the traditional PGP minimalism when it comes to changes and additions to the standard. The RFC-9580 faction (Sequoia) is following a kind of maximalist approach…

I'm sure getting a "nothing's particularly wrong with the current standards" vibe from this talk.

The talk doesn't even cover anything from the current afaict

Re: Gpg.fail

#122
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure getting a "nothing's particularly wrong with the current standards" vibe from this talk.

The talk doesn't even cover anything from the current afaict

I believe that's incorrect but we may be referring to different things as "current".

Re: Gpg.fail

#123
post #40
post #33

Okay, since there’s so much stuff to digest here and apparently there are issues designated as wontfix by GnuPG maintainers, can someone more in the loop tell us whether using gpg signatures on git commits/tags is vulnerable? And is there any better alternative going forward? Like is signing with SSH keys considered more secure now? I certainly want to get rid of gpg from my life if I can, but I also need to make sur…

These are not vulnerabilities in the "remote exploit" sense. They should be taken seriously, you should be careful not to run local software on untrusted data, and GPG should probably do more to protect users from shooting themselves in the foot, but the worst thing you could do is panic and throw out a process your partners and colleagues trust. There is nothing here that will disturb your workflow signing commits o…

It reads to me like attempting to verify a malicious ascii-armoured signature is potential RCE.

Re: Gpg.fail

#124
post #73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I certainly want to get rid of gpg from my life if I can I see this sentiment a lot, but you later hint at the problem. Any "replacement" needs to solve for secure key distribution. Signing isn't hard, you can use a lot of different things other than gpg to sign something with a key securely. If that part of gpg is broken, it's a bug, it can/should be fixed. The real challenge is distributing the key so someone els…

This is not the first time I see "secure key distribution" mentioned in HN+(GPG alternatives) context and I'm a bit puzzled. What do you mean? Web of Trust? Keyservers? A combination of both? Under what use case?

In a signature context, you probably want someone else to know that "you" signed it (I can think of other cases, but that's the usual one). The way to do that requires them to know that the key which signed the data belongs to you. My only point is that this is actually the hard part, which any "replacement" crypto system needs to solve for, and that solving that is hard (none of the methods are particularly good).

Re: Gpg.fail

#125
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be more accurate (and more helpful) to say that the two factions in the OpenPGP standards schism[1] have pulled away from the idea of consensus. There is a fundamental philosophical difference here. The LiberePGP faction (GnuPGP) is following the traditional PGP minimalism when it comes to changes and additions to the standard. The RFC-9580 faction (Sequoia) is following a kind of maximalist approach…

I'm sure getting a "nothing's particularly wrong with the current standards" vibe from this talk.

Some of these are suggesting that an attacker might trick the victim into decrypting a message before sending to the attacker. If that is really the best sort of attack you can do against PGP then, yeah, that is the kind of vibe you might get.

Re: Gpg.fail

#126
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming they mean the old way of signing each others signatures. As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people. Or at least, more realistically, to few nerds. I think I signed 3-4 peoples signatures. The process had - as they say - a low WAF.

> As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people. GPG is terrible at that. 0. Alice's GPG trusts Alice's key tautologically. 1. Alice's GPG can trust Bob's key because it can see Alice's signature. 2. Alice's GPG can trust Carol's key because Alice has Bob's key, and Carol's key is signed by Bob. After that, things break. GPG has no tools for findi…

What's funny about this is that the whole idea of the "web of trust" was (and, as you demonstrate, is) literally PGP punting on this problem. That's how they talked about it at the time, in the 90s, when the concept was introduced! But now the precise mechanics of that punt have become a critically important PGP feature.

Re: Gpg.fail

#127
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy in what way? Can you explain? On my web server where the certificate is signed by letsencrypt I do have a file which contains a private key. On pypi there is no such thing. I don't think the parallel is correct.

With Let’s Encrypt, your private key is (typically) rotated every 90 days. It’s kept on disk because 90 days is too long to reliably keep a private key resident in memory on unknown hardware. With attestations on PyPI, the issuance window is 15 minutes instead of 90 days. So the private key is kept in memory and discarded as soon as the signing operation is complete, since the next signing flow will create a new one.…

I think you are conflating a CI runner I don't really control with my machine?

Re: Gpg.fail

#128
post #120
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like GPG solves for secure key distribution. GPG keyservers are a mess, and you can't trust their contents anyways unless you have an out of band way to validate the public key. Basically nobody is using web-of-trust for this in the way that GPG envisioned. This is why basically every modern usage of GPG either doesn't rely on key distribution (because you already know what key you want to trust via a pre-es…

Yes, not saying that web of trust ever worked. "Pre-established channel" are the other mechanisms I mentioned, like a central authority (https) or TOFU (just trust the first key you get). All of these have some issues, that any alternative must also solve for.

So if we need a pre-established channel anyways, why would people recommending a replacement for GPG workflows need to solve for secure key distribution?

This is a bit like looking at electric cars and saying ~"well you can't claim to be a viable replacement for gas cars until you can solve flight"

Re: Gpg.fail

#129
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you shouldn't have long-lived public keys used for confidentiality. This statement is generic and misleading. Using long-lived keys for confidentiality is bad in real-time messaging, but for non-ephemeral use cases (file encryption, backups, archives) it is completely fine AND desired. > Would "fetch a short-lived age public key" serve your use case? Sadly no.

(This is some_furry, I'm currently rate-limited. I thought this warranted a reply, so I switched to this account to break past the limit for a single comment.) > This statement is generic and misleading. It may be generic, but it's not misleading. > Using long-lived keys for confidentiality is bad in real-time messaging, but for non-ephemeral use cases (file encryption, backups, archives) it is completely fine. What…

You introduced "short-lived" vs "long-lived", not me. Long-lived as wall-clock time (months, years) is the default interpretation in this context.

The Alice / Bob comparison is asymmetric in a misleading way. You state Bob Ltd retains all private keys indefinitely. A Heartbleed-style attack on their key storage infrastructure still compromises 30 years of backups, not 90 days. Rotation only helps if only the current operational key is exposed, which is an optimistic threat model you did not specify.

Additionally, your symmetric key point actually supports what I said. If data is encrypted with ephemeral symmetric keys and the asymmetric key only wraps those, the long-lived asymmetric key's exposure does not enable bulk decryption without obtaining each wrapped key individually.

> "There is no way to securely satisfy your use case"

No need to be so dismissive. Personal backup encryption with a long-lived key, passphrase-protected private key, and offline storage is a legitimate threat model. Real-world systems validate this: SSH host keys, KMS master keys, and yes, even PGP, all use long-lived asymmetric keys for confidentiality in non-ephemeral contexts.

And to add to this, incidentally, age (the tool you mentioned) was designed with long-lived recipient keys as the expected use case. There is no built-in key rotation or expiry mechanism because the authors considered it unnecessary for file encryption. If long-lived keys for confidentiality were inherently problematic, age would be a flawed design (so you might want to take it up with them, too).

In any case, yeah, your point about high-fan-out keys with large blast radius is correct. That is different from "long-lived keys are bad for confidentiality" (see above with regarding to "age").

Re: Gpg.fail

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people. GPG is terrible at that. 0. Alice's GPG trusts Alice's key tautologically. 1. Alice's GPG can trust Bob's key because it can see Alice's signature. 2. Alice's GPG can trust Carol's key because Alice has Bob's key, and Carol's key is signed by Bob. After that, things break. GPG has no tools for findi…

What's funny about this is that the whole idea of the "web of trust" was (and, as you demonstrate, is) literally PGP punting on this problem. That's how they talked about it at the time, in the 90s, when the concept was introduced! But now the precise mechanics of that punt have become a critically important PGP feature.

I don't think it punted as much as it never had that as an intended usage case.

I vaguely recall the PGP manuals talking about scenarios like a woman secretly communicating with her lover, or Bob introducing Carol to Alice, and people reading fingerprints over the phone. I don't think long trust chains and the use case of finding a trust path to some random software maintainer on the other side of the planet were part of the intended design.

I think to the extent the Web of Trust was supposed to work, it was assumed you'd have some familiarity with everyone along the chain, and work through it step by step. Alice would known Bob, who'd introduce his friend Carol, who'd introduce her friend Dave.

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