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SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

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Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#151

Post by pvg »

danShumway wrote: post #136
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…

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…

minisign is a few hundred lines of code most of which are setup for calls into libsodium.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#152

Post by paulddraper »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #32
kchamplewski wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably OCaml. While it's been around much longer, it's never really reached mass acceptance (though does get used here and there). Rust is newer but I'd estimate it's already more used, and its adoption in industry is growing quite quickly. This is probably to do with the fact that OCaml doesn't necessarily solve any problems that are apparent to businesses, whereas Rust solves the very apparent "manual memory mana…

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.

Particularly if your talking about a quasi-adademic PGP community.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#153

Post by pvg »

diafygi wrote: post #150
tedunangst wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soup kitchens rarely position themselves as being secure against CIA poisoning attacks.

Can you please explain a bit more about these CIA poisoning attacks? As far as I know, the vulnerability here is just flooding keys with spam signatures so much that the public keys crash sks keyservers and gpg when downloaded. That seems like just a basic DoS attack. Where is the CIA poisoning?

Right upthread, from the very same author of the gist:

https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/f716c3ff4a7068b50f2d8896e54...

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#154

Post by kasey_junk »

ethbro wrote: post #137
kasey_junk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The professionals are trying very hard to tell you it’s not a technically valid solution. The math on public key encryption is not the issue, it’s operationalizing it. Openpgp is a disaster there.

Note I’m not a professional in this field but I occasionally drink with them.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#155

Post by KirinDave »

mycall wrote: post #134
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…

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

Unfortunately these have strong privacy implications as they all phone home an awful lot.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#156

Post by tptacek »

danShumway wrote: post #120
mzs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed: https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/f716c3ff4a7068b50f2d8896e54...

A vulnerability in mission-critical software has been known for years, and they're mad that finally someone got fed up enough to publicly draw attention to it in a way that couldn't be ignored or dismissed by the maintainers? I don't think it's the EFF putting activists at risk here.

I think everyone on this sub thread is on the same page about this.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#157

Post by mirimir »

tptacek wrote: post #106
danShumway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my reaction as well. This seems bad, but... what should I do? What's the alternative? I've seen multiple people say that PGP in general is kind of bad and it would be easy for the tech industry to write a secure alternative if it really wanted to. Cool, but that's not useful right now to ordinary people like me who aren't crypto experts who are trying to decide how we should sign/encrypt messages. I have no i…

To send messages, use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Don't use PGP.

How do you use Signal without a phone number?

I mean:

> Requirements

> Signal uses your existing phone number.

> The number must be able to receive an SMS or phone call.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318691-Re...

You can't use one of those shared SMS services. So what, lease a SIM from some SIM farm in wherever, and hope that they're honest?

No privacy-conscious system would require phone numbers.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#158

Post by mirimir »

Wow, that is quite the KCF. This is the core problem:

> The [SKS] software is unmaintained. Due to the above, there is literally no one in the keyserver community who feels qualified to do a serious overhaul on the [OCaml] codebase.

The solution is simple: don't use the SKS keyserver network.

> High-risk users should stop using the keyserver network immediately.

I used to use it, but mainly I just send people signed messages, and ask them to send me their public keys. I point them to my Keybase page, in case they prefer to encrypted key.

But that isn't generally practical. So about the mitigation.

> Users who are confident editing their GnuPG configuration files should follow the following process:

> Open gpg.conf in a text editor. Ensure there is no line starting with keyserver. If there is, remove it.

This part makes sense.

> Open dirmngr.conf in a text editor. Add the line keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org to the end of it.

I'm not sure whether that's necessary. For Debian users, adding keyring.debian.org makes sense. But otherwise, isn't it best to get keys from first-party sources?

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#159

Post by baby »

acqq wrote: post #91
baby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he say it defends you against crypto attacks? It does defend you against a lot of attacks that would still endanger the system. Think denial of service attacks for exemple. Extremely easy in Python because bugs don't get caught at compile time.

> It does defend you against a lot of attacks that would still endanger the system. Think denial of service attacks for exemple. If you believe that, then read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313787

Not sure what's yur point

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#160

Post by mirimir »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #138

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 ac…

> - 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

Debian keys come from keyring.debian.org, so ??? I'm guessing that chains of trust from there go through the SKS keyservers. If that's so, Debian updates will likely be hosed at some point. Unless you disable authentication.

I have noticed that Whonix now includes onion links to repositories. So maybe that'd be safe enough without GnuPG authentication. Yes?

Edit: It does look bad for the Debian family:

A recent guide[0] recommends pulling missing repository keys from hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net:

> sudo apt update 2>&1 1>/dev/null | sed -ne 's/.NO_PUBKEY //p' | while read key; do if ! [[ ${keys[]} =~ "$key" ]]; then sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys "$key"; keys+=("$key"); fi; done

Just tweak that a hair, and you have a list of all Debian package keys in the keyserver. How long before some jerk hits them with trollwot? I wonder how many millions of Debian family installs could be blocked from updating.

Blame the SKS people, the Debian people, or whatever you like, but this could turn out very painful.

The only bright side, which seemed like a bug until this shit show, is that Debian etc by default don't search for missing keys.

0) https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/06/fix-missing-gpg-key-ap...

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