On the one hand, I like this idea.
On the other hand, I prefer to avoid linking identities, especially in a publicly visible way.
I see how it's useful for those that do!
Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both RSA and ECC still stand strong, AFAIK. What are you saying here?
I was referring to CAST5
Based on my reading, there are no serious known issues with CAST5, with a minor issue being its small block size. [1]
Is there anything else?
[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/24045/is-cast5-st...
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> are superior in every way. Besides the fact that a signify/minisign are a raw key instead of being padded with identity information, in what way are they actually better? Similarly, minisign makes no claims at identity at all. You get a random string, and the user is responsible for knowing which key is for what user. The minisign public key contains nothing but the key. To me, that is a horrible user experience. A…
PGP is bloated and complex, trying to be the Swiss Army Chainsaw of encryption and verification. It lacks modern features of encryption tools such as channel binding (which opens whole categories of exploits) and perfect forward secrecy (instead preferring to use long-lived keys, which are a nightmare of their own). PGP also allows a host of insecure options without mandating secure ones: while it does offer good alg…
> PGP is bloated and complex, trying to be the Swiss Army Chainsaw of encryption and verification. It lacks modern features of encryption tools such as channel binding (which opens whole categories of exploits) and perfect forward secrecy (instead preferring to use long-lived keys, which are a nightmare of their own).
Strong identity and long lived keys are a requirement. Perfect forward secrecy does not make sense in a world were I want to prove that all things signed by me are in fact signed by me. If I generated a new key, how do I distribute that key to someone else in a way they can trust that key? And if you have that secure channel working and trust worthy, why do you even need to sign anything?
Even in the case of debian apt signing changes, all the key signing happens in the public view, there is nothing secret about it.
Perfect forward secrecy is only for encryption and does not make sense in the case of signatures, but even in the case of encryption (age) you have a similar key distribution problem. If you are constantly making ephemeral keys that's great, but it also means you need the receiver to make a new key on every file the sender wants to send. This means people will still have long lived keys, and perfect forward secrecy does not apply.
Lastly, in most async communication, like email, PFS is very difficult because you don't have channels that can easily negotiate channels. There is autocrypt which gets pretty far, but has it's own troubles. For any real time communication, TLS and Olm are the way to go. But at this point we are very very far away from minsign which.
> PGP also allows a host of insecure options without mandating secure ones: while it does offer good algos and distribution mechanisms (e.g. WKD), it also offers poor/deprecated algos and disasters like keyserver pools.
PGP has been around for a long long time. None of the options were insecure when they were implemented. Minsign and age have decided that their tools will only have 1 algo, the correct and most secure one. However that can change in just a few years. At which point it will either become more like PGP or we will have to migrate everyone to the new best tool. This is madness.
A PGP implementation that was more aggressive at deprecating weak methods is far better than this new pointy tools.
> As for Signify: Minisign supports trusted and untrusted comments in signatures to supply metadata.
As you say this data is untrusted and unsigned. Having it proves nothing about the ownership of the private key.
> Some distributions like OpenBSD and Void Linux have finally upgraded their package signing from PGP to Signify; Debian is in the process of migrating from PGP to Ed25519 sigs (https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Apt/Spec/AptSign). If we manage to switch enough distros off PGP, maybe we can remove the need to have PGP installed by default.
I have read their reasoning on this several, and I firmly believe this is a huge mistake. Or at the very least a lot of work that provides no actual value. However the keys here are distributed by packages, so there is already a TOFU when you install the system. In the end there is not actual end user impact here, besides making it much more difficult to know if the signature of a package is valid manually.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not OP, but feel similarly about Keybase. When it originally launched, it marketed itself as directory where you could link your social accounts using cryptographic proofs, so that anyone who was wondering if "@lutoma" on twitter and "lutoma" on Hacker News are the same person could easily check. I.e. pretty much what Keyoxide now seems to aim to do. Simple enough and reasonably useful. But then at some point the…
Seems like the problem is that their core service simply did not make any money
That's because the service was to capture users to then monetize them and the people visiting the site to verify their ID. Ads, other services, etc.
Every tech startup does the same thing. Capture users with something useful for free, get them hooked, go public, and then bilk them just enough that, well, just enough of them stick around...while monetizing the data they give you, even if it's just their IP address at any given moment.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#45There's also https://keys.pub/ (from someone ex-Keybase, if I remember correctly). I haven't looked at either closely. Can anyone compare and contrast?
fwiw keys.pub has not had a commit to any of their GitHub repos since July 9 of this year
No, within the last month.
One thing is that I don't see anything about auditing for Keyoxide, but Keys is up-front with a warning.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both RSA and ECC still stand strong, AFAIK. What are you saying here?
I was referring to CAST5
This might represent a common misconception about PGP. The algorithm preference information is embedded in the PGP identity. It is signed by the certification/signing key. So a downgrade attack would involve breaking the cryptogrphy used for the certification/signing key. CAST5 is not used for certification or signing and has been nowhere close to the start of the preferences for a really long time. Having CAST5 as some sort of last ditch backward compatibility thing is no more of a weakness than the fact that the computer I am using to write this has an MD5 command.
Having said that, what is wrong with CAST5 for PGP application? What does it have to do with a system that is all about signing things?
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> are superior in every way. Besides the fact that a signify/minisign are a raw key instead of being padded with identity information, in what way are they actually better? Similarly, minisign makes no claims at identity at all. You get a random string, and the user is responsible for knowing which key is for what user. The minisign public key contains nothing but the key. To me, that is a horrible user experience. A…
PGP is bloated and complex, trying to be the Swiss Army Chainsaw of encryption and verification. It lacks modern features of encryption tools such as channel binding (which opens whole categories of exploits) and perfect forward secrecy (instead preferring to use long-lived keys, which are a nightmare of their own). PGP also allows a host of insecure options without mandating secure ones: while it does offer good alg…
>PGP is bloated and complex...
Not in any relative sense. The commonly used Signal protocol for example is much more complex and is only applicable to one narrow category of application. In the Keyoxide case we are only doing signing so that is the only part of the OpenPGP standard that would be applicable.
>...channel binding...
Could you expand on how that might relate to PGP applications?
>...perfect forward secrecy...
... is not relevant for the protection of things like files. Even for messaging it is rarely of any value as users like to keep their old messages around.
>...poor/deprecated algos...
See my other reply:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138592
...OpenBSD...
OpenBSD needed something compatible with the license of the base distribution. The mistake made was that signify was not made to use a preexisting format. So it is an attempt to create a whole new standard in a way that provides no benefit to anyone.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#48Sounds like what I hoped would become of Keybase.
What has become of Keybase instead?
In addition to what all the other comments have said about the history of keybase, the present-day state of it is a sorry one. There was a drastic cut to development activity, suggesting it has gone into "maintenance mode" ever since the Zoom acquisition.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
fwiw keys.pub has not had a commit to any of their GitHub repos since July 9 of this year
No, within the last month. One thing is that I don't see anything about auditing for Keyoxide, but Keys is up-front with a warning.
Keyoxide doesn't use any cryptography, everything is handled by identities in PGP. I doubt it needs any auditing.
The only reasonable attack vector I can see is hijacking the website (or proxy server) to return different keys or show something is verified when it's actually not.
Re: Keyoxide: A privacy-friendly platform to establish your decentralized identity
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what the best implementation of decentralized identity is (although proof-of-personhood systems like BrightID seem interesting[0]), but ideally the different platforms would cryptographically sign statements for you like "This user has a positive reputation on our platform" which you can disclose to other platforms without them being able to learn your username on the original platform. [0] https://www.b…
A tool like TLS Notary could be used to generate proofs of this nature. And do not require the participation of the host / subject of proof. https://github.com/tlsnotary Has some issues, but I find the approach very interesting.
I think it's not really viable to expect people to install a browser extension that interferes with their login sessions to sensitive websites, but if this technology was built into browsers it could be very interesting.
The UX might be a little awkward, but you could have a "Notarised documents" location under "Save Page As" which stores the current page with an accompanying file containing the notary details. Then you'd be able to upload these documents via a web interface to a smart contract.
There would have to be some way to cryptographically blind the connection between the distributed ID and these documents, though, as the documents would be plaintext and contain actual usernames.