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Switching from GPG to Age

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#141

Post by johnisgood »

tptacek wrote: post #112
lrvick wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you not read the post I linked upthread? You were quite confident in refuting its claims, so I assume we shared an understanding here. Update It looks like you drastically edited your comment after I replied to it, in ways that change the meaning of your prompt. That makes it impossible for us to continue discussing anything.

> Did you not read the post I linked upthread?

Oh THAT is why you are steering people away from OpenPGP, gotchu. I have read it a long time ago. I remain to be convinced. The blog post just reeks of "I can't use it, too complex for me therefore it sucks". Yeah, it can be misused, I do not deny that.

(BTW I could not care less about e-mail.)

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#142

Post by tptacek »

johnisgood wrote: post #141
tptacek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the post I linked upthread? You were quite confident in refuting its claims, so I assume we shared an understanding here. Update It looks like you drastically edited your comment after I replied to it, in ways that change the meaning of your prompt. That makes it impossible for us to continue discussing anything.

> Did you not read the post I linked upthread? Oh THAT is why you are steering people away from OpenPGP, gotchu. I have read it a long time ago. I remain to be convinced. The blog post just reeks of "I can't use it, too complex for me therefore it sucks". Yeah, it can be misused, I do not deny that. (BTW I could not care less about e-mail.)

That's your comeback? That PGP is too complex for me to use?

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#143

Post by FiloSottile »

knorker wrote: post #138
aborsy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is what I said.

Well, I'd say you left out all the important bits, to the point where your comment could easily be read as "it's the symmetric key that matters, even with public key". But whatever. Now I know. Both the choice of symmetric key length AND the choice of public key algorithms independent of each other make this format not PQ. Why anyone in their right mind would migrate to such algorithms in 2025 I have no idea, and esp…

128 bits of symmetric keys are enough for post-quantum security. See https://words.filippo.io/post-quantum-age/.

The public key algorithm has been frustratingly blocked on the IETF and CFRG, which are taking more than 15 months since FIPS 203 to stabilize a simple hash-based hybrid combiner.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#144

Post by johnisgood »

tptacek wrote: post #142
johnisgood wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you not read the post I linked upthread? Oh THAT is why you are steering people away from OpenPGP, gotchu. I have read it a long time ago. I remain to be convinced. The blog post just reeks of "I can't use it, too complex for me therefore it sucks". Yeah, it can be misused, I do not deny that. (BTW I could not care less about e-mail.)

That's your comeback? That PGP is too complex for me to use?

No? It is what the blog post you linked says, essentially. You linked it.

In fact, I said "The blog post just reeks of "I can't use it, too complex for me therefore it sucks"".

I do not know if you have written it or not, if you were the one, then yeah.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#145

Post by knorker »

FiloSottile wrote: post #143
knorker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd say you left out all the important bits, to the point where your comment could easily be read as "it's the symmetric key that matters, even with public key". But whatever. Now I know. Both the choice of symmetric key length AND the choice of public key algorithms independent of each other make this format not PQ. Why anyone in their right mind would migrate to such algorithms in 2025 I have no idea, and esp…

128 bits of symmetric keys are enough for post-quantum security. See https://words.filippo.io/post-quantum-age/ . The public key algorithm has been frustratingly blocked on the IETF and CFRG, which are taking more than 15 months since FIPS 203 to stabilize a simple hash-based hybrid combiner.

Glad to hear about 128bit.

I still stand by that one should not migrate to vanilla `age` until the public key part is PQ, or one will need to do two migrations. The incremental improvement from going GPG to age seems pointless given the timelines.

If PQ compliance is urgent, then sure, migrate to age+PQ plugins. Yes I share the frustration about how long it's taking, so in the mean time for PQ requirements I can't get into, I did for some installations need to migrate to a temporary pre-standard (but still holding up) PQ layer.

And I'm itching to migrate to something standard (or at least de facto standard) when it comes.

Frustrating, but understandable, that many people are making excuses that they are focusing on key exchange, not communication over time.

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#146

Post by tarasglek »

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…

I love that age lets one reuse ssh identities and thus identity sharing systems. The single most useful thing I ever wrote was a tool to sync github identities with age. https://github.com/tarasglek/github-to-sops

This way you get git for change tracking on your secrets and who-has-access-to-secrets and key rotation and this can be trivially expanded to other forges.

Its easy to introduce age this way into any modern project whereas gpg would-ve been a non started on most teams I worked on.

disclaimer: this was mostly vibe-coded because I really did not want to work on this and wasnt sure if teammates would adopt it. Then it just worked, so stayed ugly inside

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#147

Post by kiitos »

lrvick wrote: post #35
fsmv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point of age. That pgp is too complex and overloaded with features. By focusing on encryption only he can really get it right.

Even if you ONLY care about encrypting files presumably you want to be able to decrypt them far into the future, with confidence no one else can do so. If that is the case, you probably want: 1. a long lived keychain 2. a way to securely load private keys into smartcards such that they cannot be stolen by malware 3. a strategy to recover lost keys 4. a strategy to migrate from one keychain to another one 5. a way to…

you're just affirming the consequent here, listing various properties of pgp as requirements

in practice, few, if any, of your enumerated "wants" are valuable enough to outweigh their costs to complexity

this should be pretty clear from the fact that statistically nobody uses pgp

Re: Switching from GPG to Age

#148

Post by kiitos »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #97
tptacek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Filippo Valsorda has in fact thought pretty hard about the issues you're talking about, and that, by contrast, the track record of the PGP community on those same issues is pretty dismal.

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

I think you're wildly over-indexing on a statistically insignificant number of users and their expectations
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