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What's the matter with PGP?

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#41

Post by exelius »

click170 wrote: post #38
_delirium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression (I could be wrong) is that a lot of OTR users in particular are worried mainly about the local adversary: someone on the coffee-shop wifi, or the corporate IT administrator, sniffing their IM traffic. In that case you just have to have an encryption setup that's good enough to circumvent whatever analysis that class of adversary is likely to use.

This is a fair point and one I hear often, but can you be sure that for as long as you live, you will never have a reason to fear the global adversary? I trust my government (within reason) at the moment but I'm not comfortable betting that they will never ever turn anti-gay and start coming after me.

I said this above, but I'll say it again here: if your government has identified you as a target, there's very little you can do but hide and hope you can find another government willing to protect you.

That said, crypto is useful in avoiding their gaze in the first place. For this, vulnerable crypto is better than nothing: assuming the vulnerable crypto requires a non-trivial and non-repeatable process to break, it's unlikely that even a state actor is going to bother breaking it for the entire population.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#42

Post by junto »

I'm using TextSecure on my Android phone as a Messaging replacement and it is great. However it appears to me that the service is not decentralised in any way. Is that assumption correct?

I like the email model such that anyone can install and run an email server. I'd actively push friends, family and colleagues to use a decentralised email replacement that was as easy to use and secure as TextSecure.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#43

Post by michaelt »

tptacek wrote: post #18
michaelt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the hope for transparent key management would be something like the CA system used in TLS, with certain reforms (certificate transparency? Namecoin?) which make it visible when a CA has been hacked or has collaborated with a global adversary. So there's just a dozen or so central authorities who need to handle keys with the utmost severity.

I'm baffled by that attitude (and CT, as well). So, you found out after the fact that the global adversary injected themselves in the middle of your conversation with a source. What do you do now? Move to an apartment in Russia? Also the things that break transparently-keyed systems do so repeatedly . That's what transparent keying means: it's mediated by machines, and factored the slow, clumsy, human interactions ou…

  So, you found out after the fact that the 
  global adversary injected themselves in 
  the middle of your conversation with a 
  source. What do you do now?
If you could reliably detect a CA issuing MITM certs to the global adversary, and if some unstoppable mechanism would respond to such detections by promptly dropping the CA's cert from clients' trust roots, and if being dropped from the trust roots put the CA out of business, then it would be extremely difficult to induce a CA to issue MITM certs.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#44

Post by _delirium »

bad_user wrote: post #40
_delirium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression (I could be wrong) is that a lot of OTR users in particular are worried mainly about the local adversary: someone on the coffee-shop wifi, or the corporate IT administrator, sniffing their IM traffic. In that case you just have to have an encryption setup that's good enough to circumvent whatever analysis that class of adversary is likely to use.

If a global adversary can do it, then it is only a matter of time before a local crime syndicate can do it as well, after all stealing credit cards and other sensitive info is a booming business. And what really bothers me is that this will give people a false sense of security. At least right now I'm seeing regular folks refraining from exposing sensitive info online out of fear of evil hackers that are often the su…

I agree, and I think that's especially a good argument for email. For mail submission at least, I think most users for that use-case are now either using or moving to encrypted SMTP AUTH with certificate checking, which should be fairly robust on the local side (between you and your ISP/company), modulo the problems that exist with the CA system. For IM though I think lots of people are more worried about embarrassment than crime: someone grabbing & posting your cybersex logs online; or your comments about office politics (or an affair, or whatever) being read by snooping IT staff, that kind of thing. Some people specifically use IM for office-politics stuff rather than email, because they assume (probably correctly) that IT staff can more easily pry into their email.

Of course for that use-case you don't really need end-to-end encryption: an encrypted connection to the IM server would be fine, and maybe actually better. But a bunch of services don't support that (though Google Talk does).

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#45

Post by pbsd »

zokier wrote: post #31

> Adding forward secrecy to asynchronous offline email is a much bigger challenge, but fundamentally it's at least possible to some degree. Is it really fundamentally possible? The author asserts this without really backing it with anything. I can understand how OTR-like systems can work between a static pair of clients, but it is not entirely clear if it is possible at all to extend such scheme to work in scenarios…

Matt links to a paper on forward-secure public key encryption in the notes. While this shows it is possible in principle, the actual procedure is pretty awkward, and probably not usable in this current state.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

Just a random thought - maybe there is a way to nail hard the point that "you cannot have security if you're lazy"? The society expects people to do driving licenses before getting behind the wheel. Why not expect people to put some amount of effort to be able to get mortgage or interact with court, etc.? Sure, many people will screw this up, but maybe this will be enough to secure majority.

(confession: I myself am too lazy to use PGP)

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#47

Post by drcube »

_delirium wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An irreconcilable difference between you and I on this point: you think it's a good thing if people use bad crypto instead of no crypto, and I don't. I don't think bad crypto makes the global adversary go "aw, shit, we better target someone else". I think it makes them go "excellent, something else we can get a secret appropriation to go break".

My impression (I could be wrong) is that a lot of OTR users in particular are worried mainly about the local adversary: someone on the coffee-shop wifi, or the corporate IT administrator, sniffing their IM traffic. In that case you just have to have an encryption setup that's good enough to circumvent whatever analysis that class of adversary is likely to use.

That's what ROT-13 and secret decoder rings are for.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#48

Post by bad_user »

exelius wrote: post #41
click170 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fair point and one I hear often, but can you be sure that for as long as you live, you will never have a reason to fear the global adversary? I trust my government (within reason) at the moment but I'm not comfortable betting that they will never ever turn anti-gay and start coming after me.

I said this above, but I'll say it again here: if your government has identified you as a target, there's very little you can do but hide and hope you can find another government willing to protect you. That said, crypto is useful in avoiding their gaze in the first place. For this, vulnerable crypto is better than nothing: assuming the vulnerable crypto requires a non-trivial and non-repeatable process to break, it'…

Or you know, move to a country functioning under the rule of law. I don't get this mentality, but regardless, if you're paranoid then encrypt/decrypt your messages on a computer that's never connected to the Internet. There, problem solved.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#49

Post by Someone1234 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Just a random thought - maybe there is a way to nail hard the point that "you cannot have security if you're lazy"? The society expects people to do driving licenses before getting behind the wheel. Why not expect people to put some amount of effort to be able to get mortgage or interact with court, etc.? Sure, many people will screw this up, but maybe this will be enough to secure majority. (confession: I myself am…

Counter example: I'm not too lazy to use HTTPS.

Maybe if email encryption was more like HTTPS more people would use it? Just transparent and easy.

Re: What's the matter with PGP?

#50

Post by Someone1234 »

micro-ram wrote: post #37
rmoriz wrote: post #19

In my opinion, mail crypto needs to become mainstream usable. E.g. even trivial contents should be encrypted by default and this should be usable by default. Currently, S/MIME does a better job than PGP. While the CA-model seems to be broken in most X.509 use cases, like TLS/SSL, where a duplicate certifcate can be used to do a man-in-the-middle-attack, this does not really affect S/MIME, especially after both partie…

We already have a start there. Make all NON-EV certs free.

I'm all for that, but realistically how will you verify identity? If there is no identity verification what is stopping me from going out and registering for "google.com" and then using it in my MITM attack?
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