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GPG and Me

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Re: GPG and Me

#241

Post by JackC »

lmm wrote: post #161
moxie wrote: post #48

A lot of the comments I've been getting are in the genre of "well... but GPG works." Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible . But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the…

HTTP is '90s tech. TCP/IP is '70s tech. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. 1400 lines of python that tries to pretend that an interactive program is a library is definitely a problem though. How's about this: rather than a protocol-up rewrite, how about just writing a library-up rewrite? Write a ground-up implementation of (maybe a subset of) RFC 4880, with opinionated choices of default ciphers (a bit like…

> 1400 lines of python that tries to pretend that an interactive program is a library is definitely a problem though.

Yeah, +1 for this. The lack of a proper GPG library is very strange.

I'm in the process of writing a Python program that interfaces with GPG right now, and I was surprised to learn there isn't an official GPG library. The closest thing seems to be GPGMadeEasy [1], which is an official library wrapper for the interactive program.

Since I need low-level key manipulation (writing out a key with known values), what I've ended up doing is using the BouncyCastle Java library[2] via a separate Java command line program my Python program can call out to. It works, but it's painful.

So, yeah -- what would be the cost/benefit of the project lmm proposes to create a real, portable GPG library? It makes a lot of sense to me.

[1] https://www.gnupg.org/%28it%29/related_software/gpgme/index.... [2] http://bouncycastle.org/

Re: GPG and Me

#242

Post by arcfor »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #96
the_af wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Moxie, it intrigues me that the first thing you mention in your post isn't technical or even about UX (which is what most people in this thread are focusing on). Instead, it's that you're starting to dislike reading emails from the kind of person who would "voluntarily use GPG". I know you said there's no unifying theme to these emails, but can you elaborate? Maybe something about security-obssessed lay people us…

It might be people who miss the forest for the trees. Right now Moxie is working on bringing encryption to the masses. That involves a whole-product view, with empathy for the unsophisticated (think about a kid who's only computing device is a phone). I know stereotypes often treat people unfairly, but the kind of person who has the dedication required to use PGP seems, to me, to often coincide with the people who fi…

> Right now Moxie is working on bringing encryption to the masses.

And in the meantime? That's one of the main arguments against his attitude. The PGP-encrypted email senders he's complaining about realistically had two options:

1) Send email PGP-encrypted 2) Send email unencrypted

Additionally, neither he nor (I would assume) the sender is part of "the masses".

Re: GPG and Me

#243

Post by ptaffs »

markwakeford wrote: post #12

I am curious as to to know what mail clients people are using with GPG. In OSX I am not a big fan of the native mail client at all but it seems thats the only approach if you want to use GPG. I am currently on a quest to find a decent mail client that looks good and works well and I am currently trialling Airmail 2 but its GPG support is buggy at best.

In previous years I've had GPG/PGP configured, but not had anyone to write to or anything to write about.

We need entry-level e-mail clients to have GPG/PGP built in. Your post highlights the need to select a client which is why GPG/PGP has a niche user-base who send dull e-mail to Internet Celebrities who happen to share public keys. I mean my parents e-mail client, which would naturally be the default for their operating system (yes, Windows Live Mail), should have in-built GPG/PGP capability and the address book should auto encrypt any messages to me with the public key in my "contact" info, and decrypt any from me with their private key which is created and stored without them even realizing (as SSH does). It's hard to select an e-mail client anyway, but convincing my parents to select an e-mail client and/or plug-in, isn't going to happen.

I've been puzzled why fat clients traditionally have S/MIME built in, but certificates are complex to obtain, and don't have GPG/PGP with easy to create keys.

Re: GPG and Me

#244

Post by whyever »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #225
whyever wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPG at least has the web of trust, with all its privacy problems. Most technologies just use "trust on first use".

That doesn't actually solve the problem though. It helps in theory, but it requires the user to understand what they're doing to a level most won't. There is also the cultural issue of just exchanging fingerprints. Only techies put them on business cards, and even then only some. It needs to be common action.

Well, at least they try to solve it.

Another approach for verification is employed by Threema [1]: The server verifies email addresses and phone numbers, so if the address or number is in your contacts you can have more confidence, represented by an orange dot next to the contact. If you verify the fingerprint by scanning QR codes, you get a green dot.

About fingerprints for the masses: I really like the visual fingerprints Peerio is using (basically bigger Github-style generated avatar icons).

[1] https://threema.ch/en/faq

Re: GPG and Me

#245

Post by TheJH_ »

kS6n6GN8If wrote: post #209
ghshephard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPG is way, way, way to complex for all but the 0.01% of people who are GPG experts. It's too complex for me - and I've read (and enjoyed) Applied Cryptography. But, not having used it for a few years, I went to take a look again - list some keys, maybe SMS some friends to exchange fingerprints and sign their keys, etc... - I'm trying to recall what the relationship between PUB, SUB, UID, Key Fingerprints are. And ho…

There has been a number of studies ( http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom ; I don't agree with everything but interesting reading anyway) showing that entropy from Linux random is not better than from urandom (once urandom has been properly seeded). For this reason, I patched my rndlinux.c GnuPG source code file to always use urandom. Makes key generation instantaneous. When a software is stupid, I don't want to ins…

I think that on linux, you ideally don't want /dev/urandom, you want a recent kernel and getrandom(buf, len, 0). From the manpage:

If the GRND_RANDOM bit is not set, then the /dev/urandom pool will be used. Unlike using read(2) to fetch data from /dev/urandom, if the urandom pool has not been sufficiently initialized, getrandom(2) will block (or return -1 with the errno set to EAGAIN if the GRND_NONBLOCK bit is set in flags).

Then again, that's probably not important if you interactively launch gpg on a desktop system that wasn't just installed a minute ago or so.

Re: GPG and Me

#246

Post by mark-r »

> “I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”

That could be fixed with a simple terminology change, call it the "secret" key rather than the "private" key.

Re: GPG and Me

#247

Post by lmm »

lmm wrote: post #208
scintill76 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I was only quoting the article, but it sounds like he has a good point that the protocol doesn't support forward secrecy. I also tend to trust his judgment that it's too complicated, and/or the complication adds little value for "normal" users. I guess some of this can be isolated as an app/API problem rather than protocol, as you say.

Perfect forward secrecy is of course better than not, but I'm not convinced it actually helps a lot for realistic threat models. It means that when you utterly screw up and reveal today's treason you won't also be revealing last week's treason - but for someone who's using crypto for serious reasons, how often is it that last week's message would get you in trouble and today's message is innocuous? Would a ground-up…

Follow-up: on more thinking, I don't think it's possible at all without compromising important properties of GPG.

Re: GPG and Me

#248

Post by maaku »

caf wrote: post #141
maaku wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPG still could be much better for those applications. For example, it is still impossible to do GPG multi-sig (e.g. have the application developer and the distribution release manager sign off on the binaries).

Can't you just create two detached signatures?

At the expense of lower validation speed and requiring every higher level protocol using the signatures to be aware of whatever signing scheme you are using.

Re: GPG and Me

#249

Post by rakoo »

markwakeford wrote: post #12

I am curious as to to know what mail clients people are using with GPG. In OSX I am not a big fan of the native mail client at all but it seems thats the only approach if you want to use GPG. I am currently on a quest to find a decent mail client that looks good and works well and I am currently trialling Airmail 2 but its GPG support is buggy at best.

If you're not afraid of NCurses, sup (http://supmua.org/) manages GPG.

Re: GPG and Me

#250

Post by patcon »

unicornporn wrote: post #148
moxie wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a definite answer. There's the path we're executing on at Open Whisper Systems, but there are a bunch of other projects working in this area as well (Mailpile, LEAP, etc). I think the problems are solvable, but only if we have a different design approach. So when I see projects trying not-PGP, I'm interested. When I see projects building on PGP, I'm less interested.

I'll take the opportunity to say that it saddens me that I still can not communicate using TextSecure with iOS users. It's been almost two years[1] since iOS support was "promised". TS is great, but we need to be able to communicate with iOS users. [1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/sure/

Not the place :/
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