SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack • Hacker News Board

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#31

Post by snackematician » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

vermilingua wrote: post #6

To be clear: is this suggesting that it is currently entirely unsafe to update any operation-critical equipment? It seems that now that the PoC is out in the wild, it will be a matter of days/hours before someone hits a major contributor to the major Linux distros; and all package managers begin to fail.

Sibling comments have discussed how this affects Debian, Ubuntu, and opensuse -- any Arch users know how this affects us? Seems like official repos should be fine but what about packages from the AUR?

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#32

Post by AnaniasAnanas » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

kchamplewski wrote: post #26

jlgaddis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#33

Post by hinkley » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

ghuntley wrote: post #14

xvilka wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the code looks fairly simple, I would say.

Looks like fairly standard OCaml and usage of functional programming idioms. Q: Where's the CI and property tests? If you feel uncomfortable maintaining the code base, start there.

Also, there are few enough tests that I had to do a text search for the word test to spot them. How many ml files in the top directory, and the word test appears nine times.

So that’s the second big problem with this code, and it’s a huge one. The crypto project I worked on had better test coverage than anything I ever did before and quite possibly since. Because it was a dangerous animal and, like a responsible exotic pet owner, I treated it with respect at all times. Unlike the guy I took over the project from.

And because of my paranoid fastidiousness, I stopped a user from shipping with only 8 bits of entropy in their key generator. That would have been a fun bug for a DEFCON presentation.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#34

Post by dngray » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

Isn't WKD supposed to help out with key distribution for email?

* https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD

* https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-servic...

I'm thinking that's a better way to publish keys these days anyway.

I have my own domain, so maybe OPENPGPKEY record in my domain as well

DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) Bindings for OpenPGP

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#35

Post by ghuntley » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #30

ghuntley wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like fairly standard OCaml and usage of functional programming idioms. Q: Where's the CI and property tests? If you feel uncomfortable maintaining the code base, start there.

I’ve gotten stuck maintaining Python code for a testing framework and again for a CI/CD system. The fact that I know less than a junior programmer didn’t really slow me down that much, but it did make me a bit anxious. One of those systems involved a large and obvious crypto component. If the python code had been part of that work instead of merely peripheral to it, I would have rewritten it. Why? Because I can make…

I get that but in this case though this codebase has safety guarantees baked in via the Hindley–Milner (HM) type system whereas your python code base did not. Additionally there's a published, peer reviewed paper for this software that serves as a written specification. Those two things are fantastic resources when coming up to speed with an unfamiliar codebase.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#36

Post by Valodim » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

dngray wrote: post #34

Isn't WKD supposed to help out with key distribution for email? * https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-servic... I'm thinking that's a better way to publish keys these days anyway. I have my own domain, so maybe OPENPGPKEY record in my domain as well DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) Bindings for OpenPGP https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929

It would be a better way, but the technology hinges on support by e-mail providers. I wouldn't recommend holding your breath.

The other contender is Autocrypt, which performs key exchange inline in emails in an automated fashion. It only depends on client support, and has gained at least some traction (enigmail, k9, mailvelope, gpgOL, delta.chat, and some others).

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#37

Post by ghuntley » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #24

gravitas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_hominem

That wasn't an argument... It was an expression of confusion as to why the author would say what they said.

Yup.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#38

Post by snackematician » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

The suggested mitigation (editing `gpg.conf` and `dirmngr.conf`) doesn't seem to work for me. In particular I created `~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf` with a line for the `keys.openpg.org` keyserver (and don't have a `~/.gnupg/gpg.conf`), but `gpg --refresh-keys` still uses `hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net` which the gnupg Info (section 3.2 Dirmngr options) says is the default.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#39

Post by secfirstmd » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #10

It's always sad to see someone taking down a project that is run with the best intentions. However, it may be time to move away from the entire PGP ecosystem. Consider the post's "We've known for a decade this attack is possible. It's now here and it's devastating.". Consider also the final section, "PGP is bad technology and it’s making a bad community", of https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/05/17/was-the…

FWIW Robert Hansen is a nice guy and a total gentleman. Met him at a number of internet freedom and privacy conferences.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#40

Post by ghuntley » Sat, Jun 29, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

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.

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