Gpg.fail

Post by woodruffw » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 11:08 PM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #127

woodruffw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by maxtaco » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 11:18 PM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #129

soatok wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Post by palata » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 11:39 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #89

akulbe wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a better alternative to GPG?

Everything is better than PGP (not just GPG --- all PGP implementations). The problem with PGP is that it's a Swiss Army Knife. It does too many things. The scissors on a Swiss Army Knife are useful in a pinch if you don't have real scissors, but tailors use real scissors. Whatever it is you're trying to do with encryption, you should use the real tool designed for that task. Different tasks want altogether different…

Post by afiori » Sat, Dec 27, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

65a wrote: post #124

kaoD wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Post by woodruffw » Sun, Dec 28, 2025, 12:04 AM UTC

some_furry wrote: post #138

woodruffw wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s an ephemeral VM that you have root on. You don’t own it, but you control it in every useful sense of the word. But also, that’s an implementation detail. There’s no reason why PyPI couldn’t accept attestations from local machines (using email identities) using this scheme; it’s just more engineering and design work to determine what that would actually communicate.

It might be worthwhile for someone to do this engineering work; e.g., to make attestations work even for folks that use platforms like Codeberg or self-hosted git.