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SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

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Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#131

Post by rocqua »

tptacek wrote: post #117
danShumway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a realistic solution. SMS-sized messages are the least hard part of this for me. What I want is to be able to point at a file or folder on my computer and say, "sign that with a public key so I can prove I wrote it" or "encrypt that with someone else's public key so only they can read it". At that point, I don't necessary care all that much about how the file gets sent over the network. It doesn't need to…

You asked (among other things) how to send messages securely without PGP. Don't use PGP to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Someone else asked how to email securely without PGP. Email isn't secure with PGP. Don't use PGP to send encrypt emails, and don't use email to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. I acknowledge there are use cases not well covered…

> The current state of file encryption, which is practically the "hello world" of encryption problems, is a travesty.

Do you know of any projects that are aiming to solve this? It feels like all that is needed is a halfway decent standard file format, and some tools to bootstrap it. That seems to be how we got TLS and SSH, which are the two successes of encryption.

I suppose those two protocols have the advantage of interactive negotiation. Whereas software encrypting a file does not get to negotiate any parameters with the software that will later be decrypting it.

Moreover, those protocols had some decent weight behind it. Secure data transport is a problem that matters to essentially everyone these days. Whereas secure and portable file encryption really does not. E-mail is a significant use-case, but only tangentially, and optimal E-mail solutions are not really optimal portable file solutions.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#132

Post by kasey_junk »

ethbro wrote: post #121
tptacek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the difference between a soup kitchen and a neurosurgery clinic.

I believe an apt analogy might be "the lack of a neurosurgery clinic is not a reason to avoid building a health clinic."

Health clinics rarely trumpet themselves as solutions to brain injuries they clearly aren’t capable of working on.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#133

Post by iancarroll »

rocqua wrote: post #131
tptacek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked (among other things) how to send messages securely without PGP. Don't use PGP to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Someone else asked how to email securely without PGP. Email isn't secure with PGP. Don't use PGP to send encrypt emails, and don't use email to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. I acknowledge there are use cases not well covered…

> The current state of file encryption, which is practically the "hello world" of encryption problems, is a travesty. Do you know of any projects that are aiming to solve this? It feels like all that is needed is a halfway decent standard file format, and some tools to bootstrap it. That seems to be how we got TLS and SSH, which are the two successes of encryption. I suppose those two protocols have the advantage of…

My money is on `age` right now. https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1128865803938480128

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#134

Post by mycall »

tptacek wrote: post #117
danShumway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a realistic solution. SMS-sized messages are the least hard part of this for me. What I want is to be able to point at a file or folder on my computer and say, "sign that with a public key so I can prove I wrote it" or "encrypt that with someone else's public key so only they can read it". At that point, I don't necessary care all that much about how the file gets sent over the network. It doesn't need to…

You asked (among other things) how to send messages securely without PGP. Don't use PGP to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Someone else asked how to email securely without PGP. Email isn't secure with PGP. Don't use PGP to send encrypt emails, and don't use email to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. I acknowledge there are use cases not well covered…

[matrix] and Riot.im are alternatives to Signal and Wire.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#135

Post by rocqua »

soulofmischief wrote: post #29
clarkmoody wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of Internet actors (human or machine) owning cryptographic identities in a distributed system is a good one. I don't think we should stray from this approach. From your Matthew Green link: > If PGP went away, I estimate it would take the security community less than a year to entirely replace (the key bits of) the standard with something much better and modern. It would have modern crypto and authentication,…

It's not the silver bullet we need, but I really like Keybase's approach. I think any PGP replacement should take notes from their architecture.

I love their approach, but it is still PGP based. Moreover, it is a bit too centralized.

Thing is, a non-centralized system is really hard to monetize. There might be space for some long-form (as opposed to whatsapp, etc) encrypted messaging. But a solution for portable encrypted files (using either symmetric or asymmetric crypto) is hard to monetize.

Note that, while portable encrypted files could be used for encrypted messaging, the use cases and ergonomics are sufficiently different that a good solution for one will not be a great fit for the other.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#136

Post by danShumway »

tptacek wrote: post #117
danShumway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a realistic solution. SMS-sized messages are the least hard part of this for me. What I want is to be able to point at a file or folder on my computer and say, "sign that with a public key so I can prove I wrote it" or "encrypt that with someone else's public key so only they can read it". At that point, I don't necessary care all that much about how the file gets sent over the network. It doesn't need to…

You asked (among other things) how to send messages securely without PGP. Don't use PGP to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Someone else asked how to email securely without PGP. Email isn't secure with PGP. Don't use PGP to send encrypt emails, and don't use email to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. I acknowledge there are use cases not well covered…

To be clear, I'm not saying that anyone who criticizes PGP needs an easy solution. I agree with all the stuff I'm seeing in this thread, and I get that the current answer might be, "well, the ecosystem is kind of bad right now." But what I'm getting at is that it's one thing to understand that the ecosystem is bad, but that on its own is not information I (or most people) are equipped to act on.

Minisign could solve some of that, but going back to the point that I don't trust myself to audit cryptography software, Minisign also appears to be a one person project, and I can't find very many people online talking about it, using it, or looking for vulnerabilities. It's not that I don't trust you, I see you on HN a lot, but I'd feel more comfortable with Minisign if I could find more security people recommending it.

I can drop PGP for anything where I find a different tool that supports that specific use-case that's trustworthy. I'm not thrilled about that, because part of my security process is trying to make it hard for me to make mistakes as a user, and multiple tools hurt that effort. But I can deal.

BUT, I can't just stop encrypting files. I can start using a lot of tiny, individual tools for some of my use-cases, but occasionally, I'm going to be in a situation where I need to do the "hello world" stuff.

To kind of rephrase what I'm asking, regardless of whether or not PGP is good, is it currently the best solution for handling public/private key encryption in the general use case (particularly if I'm not personally using SKS for anything)? Because I can't just decide not to encrypt files any more; even if the current solution is bad I still need to use something. The Minisign main dev is also recommending Encpipe, which could solve some of my use cases, but doesn't support public keys and, again, looks like it's a hobby project that practically nobody in the security world is talking about or auditing. I guess age[0] also looks promising?

In theory, Age and Minisign could meet the majority of my hard requirements by themselves if I could verify that they're trustworthy. But realizing that PGP has been run essentially as a hobby project, it feels a little weird to move to another piece of software with only one serious maintainer.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11yHom20CrsuX8KQJXBBw04s8...

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#137

Post by ethbro »

kasey_junk wrote: post #132
ethbro wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe an apt analogy might be "the lack of a neurosurgery clinic is not a reason to avoid building a health clinic."

Health clinics rarely trumpet themselves as solutions to brain injuries they clearly aren’t capable of working on.

And yet, if I am suffering from a brain injury and no one in the last 30 years has seen fit to build anything other than a health clinic in my town, I'm probably pretty happy there's a nurse practitioner available.

Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

And with all respect to the professionals in the field, casting operational stones at a technically valid solution seems... myopic.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#138

Post by lifeisstillgood »

My attempt to understand this - please correct liberally

Things I know today that I did not know yesterday

- The GnuPG (GPG) ecosystem seems to suffer from pre-heart bleed-OpenSSL levels of not enough investment and people

- The GPG ecosystem has a trivial DOS attack that can be mounted against it, with bad actors able to append thousands of keys to any users "account" effectively making it impossible to read that account, thus making anything signed by that account impossible to verify

- This may or may not mean that major distributions binary packages will simply stop being verifiable - it depends on who uses what key server in what chain of trust. We probably won't find out till more bad actors poison more wells

- This has been "well known" for some time but the solution is not obvious

- It seems that this is the reason keybase works like it does : if a user simply attests that key X is theirs in a second channel you can trust that as much as you trust the channel. it a key server is the only channel and for reasons will not delete the 150,000 bad keys

- There are many alternatives to GPG it seems - or at least to the sub-functions under its "brand". Signal to send message or minisign to sign documents - it do they have the same "OpenSSL" lack of support in them?

- Don't the million dollar companies like DocuSign use GPG?

So that's me - trying to work out if this is the end of the world or a storm in a teacup - thoughts welcome :-)

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#139

Post by literallycancer »

ghuntley wrote: post #40
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is very popular in academia though, especially in the field of theoretical computer science and formal verification. Coq, Frama-C, Flow, CompCert, etc are all written in OCaml. Heck, if you are running a graphical GNU distribution chances are that you have installed FFTW, which is written in OCaml. The "industry" is not the only thing that matters when considering the adoption of a language.

Reason (the frontend framework/language by Facebook) is OCaml.

Have you used Reason for anything serious? How was it?

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#140

Post by literallycancer »

rurban wrote: post #110
jlgaddis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which is more obscure: OCaml or Rust?

The question is not obscurity, the question is security. And there ocaml wins by miles over rust.

Are you talking about the compiler itself? Or the tooling and the libraries that you have to deal with when you try to actually use the language?
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