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The PGP Problem

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Re: The PGP Problem

#311

Post by verytrivial »

tptacek wrote: post #300
verytrivial wrote: post #293

I read these advice columns like "You should stop using hand saws because we now have electric saws which are better in every way that I care about." Great! You use them then. I'll keep using crufty old hand saws wherever I want, you use and proselytize your electric saws and we can get on with our lives. I have my own networks and threat models and my own evaluation functions for these. Hand saws are pretty good.

If your threat models have you using PGP, your threat models are badly engineered.

That's pithy. I have used PGP sign (via an air gap) release tarballs on a public server for clients that have individually verified my org's public key. It made sense in this context and everyone already had the tools. My point is we have our own contexts.

Re: The PGP Problem

#312

Post by megous »

riquito wrote: post #110
garmaine wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? When gmail came out they were explicitly up front about using the content of the email to deliver targeted ads. Has that changed?

There are a lot of misinformations around, and the Google haters crowd has plenty of pitchforks. https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ > Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads.

Depends on what they mean by messages? The whole raw message, incl. all headers? The text user sees?

Google can probably serve nice ads just based on metadata it gathers on the SMTP level, without even using the raw message. Someone mails his bank, maybe show some banking related e-mails, etc.

And it would still stay true to the proclamation on that page.

Re: The PGP Problem

#313

Post by 0xCMP »

They mention encrypted volumes for offline backups and storing files which must be encrypted. For cross platform I'm guessing VeraCrypt is the recommended software now right?

Re: The PGP Problem

#314

Post by lucb1e »

eudora wrote: post #216

Pretty shocking, thanks for such a detailed analysis

It's a large number of minor points. Nothing shocking, no huge issues, and of course nothing we didn't already know. The crypto is good, if you manage it well it stands up to the NSA as far as we know... Sure, it has flaws that make it hard to use in general, and hard to use securely (no long term keys, for example, would make me less paranoid about my private key), but it's still fine despite having huge backwards compatibility.

The author is overly dramatic about it in order to make a point, to hopefully get people looking for alternatives, so that a good one might take it from pgp in the future (and continues to suggest whatsapp and signal, like, really? That's your replacement for pgp?).

Re: The PGP Problem

#315

Post by tzs »

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.

> It would be great if we could replace the whole Internet with modern technology rather than relying on ancient systems like BGP and email

I've occasionally though of starting a long term project that could eventually do that assuming that politicians screw up things the way it looks like they going to do over the next few decades.

The idea is that a group of interested people would develop these new system with no requirement whatsoever to have backward compatibility or interoperability with the current systems.

Of course these new systems would not get widespread adoption. They'd probably only be used by the developers and a few others who are willing to essentially have two completely different systems in parallel: the new stuff for communications among themselves and the current stuff for everything else. That's fine. It means no pressure to compromise to get something out faster.

Lack of adoption is not a problem. That's where politicians come in. What we are counting on is that those idiots are going to manage to cause or fail to prevent some apocalyptic event(s) that will sufficiently destroy the current systems that when the survivors get around to rebuilding the Internet and communication infrastructure they are starting from a clean slate.

Re: The PGP Problem

#316

Post by taeric »

lvh wrote: post #264
taeric wrote: post #97

I don't understand why the use of Yubikeys for a non-exportable key isn't valid for folks that care about security. I mean, I get that not everyone will use it. The vast majority won't. However, the vast majority don't care about security at this level. So... what is the actual criticism? If you care about security, use the keys, right? That feels no different from "use some other product."

Sure. We do that for eg SSH. I don’t think it’s a great idea for our standard audience (startups) to implement.

I'm not sure what you mean. :(

Re: The PGP Problem

#317

Post by fipar »

yitosda wrote: post #250
fipar wrote: post #243

So, as a technical person (I can write and debug software, deploy it to production, etc.) but only an end-user when it comes to cryptography: What are the biggest weakenesses of using PGP for local file encryption? My use case is I have a 'vault' of secrets that I store in a gpg-encrypted org file, with a key binding in emacs to let me easily decrypt this 'vault'. The encryption is done with gnupg's symmetric encrypt…

There's nothing wrong with this. Public/Private keys are for sharing secrets and proving identity. Assuming you are using a sane cipher and mode, your risks boil down to any of a myriad of methods of stealing/bruteforcing your key or grabbing the unencrypted file.

Thanks!

Re: The PGP Problem

#318

Post by wolf550e »

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…

from https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man1/openssl-enc.html

> The enc program does not support authenticated encryption modes like CCM and GCM, and will not support such modes in the future.

> For bulk encryption of data, whether using authenticated encryption modes or other modes, cms(1) is recommended, as it provides a standard data format and performs the needed key/iv/nonce management.

So don't use `openssl enc` to encrypt data.

`openssl cms` that is recommended above is S/MIME. Don't use S/MIME.

I can't wait for Filippo Valsorda's `age` to be done so I would have an answer to the question of "what should I use to encrypt a file?".

Re: The PGP Problem

#319

Post by tebruno99 »

So far there has been a lot of hate on Hacker News about PGP. I'm sure most of it is true, maybe we shouldn't use PGP. However, every single one of these that offers suggestions cops out at end about encrypted files leave people with.. PGP.

Re: The PGP Problem

#320

Post by wolf550e »

roamingnomadic wrote: post #40
lvh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (signal uses PGP with a CA type of thing, so much for "stop using pgp") I legitimately have no idea what this means. > And how is essentially forking pgp with 'age' really going to solve things? Wow thanks another forked app! :^) A big part of the criticism we've gotten when we tell people "PGP bad" is that we're not providing alternatives. age is one of those alternatives, for one of those use cases. > It would be…

Signal uses the same public key/private key cryptography. Hopefully that makes more sense? In any case, after reading the google doc more carefully, I see the idea isn't to be against the whole pub/private key authentication its just a proposal of how pgp works. >age is not unauthenticated encryption, so the criticism does not apply. yeah, I see. its pretty good actually.

Double ratchet using Curve25519 and Ed25519 signatures is not at all the same asymmetric cryptography as PGP.
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