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The PGP Problem

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Re: The PGP Problem

#301

Post by w8rbt »

Stop parroting these criticisms of OpenPGP without offering concrete, working replacements that are widely adopted and have open standards.

Some kid recently tried to have OpenPGP support deprecated from Golang's crypto-x package. And that's fine, but do not pull stunts like this without offering a concrete, working and widely adopted replacement. Otherwise, they are just that, publicity stunts with a lot of sound and fury but no solution. That's not helpful to anyone.

A more mature thing to do would be to suggest deprecation in 3 to 5 years and offer a plan of how to get there with other specific tools (some of which do not exist today).

Re: The PGP Problem

#302

Post by jancsika »

mike_hearn wrote: post #228
bennofs wrote: post #176

I understand that there are better tools for encryption, but is there anything that replaces the identity management of PGP? Having a standard format for sharing identities is necessary in my opinion. If I have a friend (with whom I already exchanged keys) refer me to some third friend, it would be nice if he can just send me the identity. Sending me the signal fingerprint isn't a solution for two reasons: - I don't…

The CA system is strictly better than PGP for identity management in every respect. People often think it must be the opposite but this is essentially emotional reasoning: the Web of Trust feels decentralised, social, "webby" un"corporate", free, etc. All things that appeal to hobbyist geeks with socialist or libertarian leanings, who see encryption primarily through the activist lens of fighting governments / existi…

> But there's nothing secure about the WoT.

I haven't read your blog, but this sentence unfairly paints WoT with PGP/GPG's problems.

It's completely reasonable to have a WoT that operates correctly when at least a single participant isn't completely incompetent. That's how git works.

I haven't looked closely but I'd be willing to speculate that PGP is to WoT what C++ is to fast compile times.

Re: The PGP Problem

#303

Post by jancsika »

jancsika wrote: post #302
mike_hearn wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CA system is strictly better than PGP for identity management in every respect. People often think it must be the opposite but this is essentially emotional reasoning: the Web of Trust feels decentralised, social, "webby" un"corporate", free, etc. All things that appeal to hobbyist geeks with socialist or libertarian leanings, who see encryption primarily through the activist lens of fighting governments / existi…

> But there's nothing secure about the WoT. I haven't read your blog, but this sentence unfairly paints WoT with PGP/GPG's problems. It's completely reasonable to have a WoT that operates correctly when at least a single participant isn't completely incompetent. That's how git works. I haven't looked closely but I'd be willing to speculate that PGP is to WoT what C++ is to fast compile times.

Just to drive the point home, compare:

* the amount of time some pedants waste at a PGP "key party"

* the time it takes me to accept a merge request from someone who made a commit in the gitlab UI using Internet Explorer on their grandparents' malware-laden Dell desktop

Both examples leverage WoT.

Edit: hehe I wrote PGP "key party" instead of "key signing party."

Re: The PGP Problem

#304

Post by summitto »

lvh wrote: post #283
summitto wrote: post #281

Until a better solution is brought forward, my team implemented a PGP packet library to make everyone's lives a little bit easier: https://github.com/summitto/pgp-packet-library Using our library you can generate PGP keys using any key derivation mechanism for a large variety of key types! When using it right, this will greatly improve how you can generate and back up your keys!

Does this improve on gpg2 —list-packets for practical debugging/auditing of extant GPG setups, or is just useful for people who want to do alchemy on top of the OpenPGP packet format?

It just parses the packets with a relatively easy API, for those which want to do alchemy or which want to build tools for practical debugging/auditing purposes in C++ instead of using shell commands.

Re: The PGP Problem

#305

Post by lucb1e »

teythoon wrote: post #195

We over at Sequoia-PGP, which gets a honorable mention by the OP, are not merely trying to create a new OpenPGP implementation, but to rethink the whole ecosystem. For some of our thoughts on the recent certificate flooding problems, see https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2019/07/08/certificate-flooding...

The homepage has some meaningless marketing bullet points about the greatness of pgp itself. Where would I find the ways in which you rethink the whole ecosystem? It seems like Sequoia is just a library, not even a client. Wondering how this could change pgp by much if at all.

Re: The PGP Problem

#306

Post by lvh »

w8rbt wrote: post #301

Stop parroting these criticisms of OpenPGP without offering concrete, working replacements that are widely adopted and have open standards. Some kid recently tried to have OpenPGP support deprecated from Golang's crypto-x package. And that's fine, but do not pull stunts like this without offering a concrete, working and widely adopted replacement. Otherwise, they are just that, publicity stunts with a lot of sound an…

I was going to say something about how the article does mention several alternatives, some of which far more widely deployed than OpenPGP.

But first: hold up. "Some kid"? You mean Filippo Valsorda? Google's Go Crypto person? The same person who is writing the replacement for that one use case?

Re: The PGP Problem

#307

Post by tptacek »

belorn wrote: post #287
tptacek wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that use email to convey sensitive messages will be putting themselves and others at risk, whether or not they use PGP, for the indefinite future. That's a simple statement of fact. I understand that you don't like that fact --- nobody does! --- but it remains true no matter how angry it makes you.

I would say that people that use any critical infrastructure not designed with security in mind is putting themselves and others at risk if they convey sensitive information. This is why plain text protocols should be considered insecure. It would be great if we could replace the whole Internet with modern technology rather than relying on ancient systems like BGP and email.

How do you write this after writing that previous comment, which says that what I just wrote is "terrible bad advice"?

Re: The PGP Problem

#308

Post by brobinson »

book-mind wrote: post #208
tptacek wrote: post #2

Really, all I did here was combine posts from Matthew Green, Filippo Valsorda, and George Tankersley into one post, and then talk to my partner LVH about it. So blame them. (also 'pvg, who said i should write this, and it's been nagging at me ever since)

Is it wrong to use openssl to encrypt files? 0. (Only once) generate key pair id_rsa.pub.pem, id_rsa.pem 1. Generate random key openssl rand -base64 32 > key.bin 2. Encrypt key openssl rsautl -encrypt -inkey id_rsa.pub.pem -pubin -in key.bin -out key.bin.enc 3. Encrypt file using key openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in SECRET_FILE -out SECRET_FILE.enc -pass file:./key.bin -- other side -- 4. Decrypt key openssl rsautl…

`enc` doesn't support and will never support _any_ authenticated ciphers. Consider it a red flag when you see it in the future.

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/c03ca3dd090c6eb739...

Re: The PGP Problem

#309

Post by bennofs »

mike_hearn wrote: post #228
bennofs wrote: post #176

I understand that there are better tools for encryption, but is there anything that replaces the identity management of PGP? Having a standard format for sharing identities is necessary in my opinion. If I have a friend (with whom I already exchanged keys) refer me to some third friend, it would be nice if he can just send me the identity. Sending me the signal fingerprint isn't a solution for two reasons: - I don't…

The CA system is strictly better than PGP for identity management in every respect. People often think it must be the opposite but this is essentially emotional reasoning: the Web of Trust feels decentralised, social, "webby" un"corporate", free, etc. All things that appeal to hobbyist geeks with socialist or libertarian leanings, who see encryption primarily through the activist lens of fighting governments / existi…

I am not against CAs but even then, what tool do you use? Personal SSL certificates for signing? Except for s/mime I haven't seen this used anywhere

Re: The PGP Problem

#310

Post by lucb1e »

swores wrote: post #106
DuskStar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your thoughts on Keybase as a secure Slack replacement?

Personally, I love Keybase and it is my #1 choice for communicating with a few people, but bugs are far too frequent for me to consider it for a business. It's getting better, but not close being business ready imo.

I've been using Wire on iOS, web, desktop (electron), and Android, and Keybase on Android and desktop (cli). Both are not great but Keybase is definitely the more buggy. Wire on Android, on the other hand, is also quite unusable due to its battery drainage. And both are pretty much unusable on desktop: Keybase is a CLI (not even a TUI) and Wire is Electron. I'd prefer a TUI over Electron but it's not even a TUI, so I guess Wire wins this round. Keybase also doesn't have a web client, which is why I have experience with the command line client. I think that says enough in and of itself.

What I'm trying to say is, definitely also try Wire as it's similar but slightly better. I also haven't figured out how to verify someone over Keybase, so it's basically unauthenticated or opportunistic encryption. By comparison, Wire is considered secure enough by my company after doing a pentest on it, which says quite something (most customer's stuff we would run from if we were thinking of using it), and we use it as our main communication platform within the company.

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