61–70 of 197 posts
A bit more[1] on consequences of this attack, gist from the same author. [1] https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/f716c3ff4a7068b50f2d8896e54...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best replacement to PGP would be a messaging network with opt-in, poorly supported encryption? https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avyen/sad_state_o... I don't know what it is with people and Matrix. It seems like a good project, hamstrung by its overzealous cheering section.
> opt-in Device cross-signing (from my understanding, the last must-have feature before e2ee is considered ready to be the default) is very close to being merged now that Matrix 1.0 is out. Yes, it took several years to get there, but I think its fair to say that the e2ee design now looks much better than anything else available (and had to solve many more technical problems than [for instance] Signal, due to the nee…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don’t think the AUR has a concept of package signing—a PKGBULD will often download a tarball from somewhere and any signing is ad-hoc. The official repositories use their own key ring (which is distributed without a key server).
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unofficial_user_reposit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes this seems like it's going to range from very bad to outright terrible. In particular if the issue propagates prior to patching something like gpg as the package managers would be locked out from updates. Every time there's an article about IoT security there's a discussion about lack of (security) updates and an upcoming Armageddon. Interestingly it'll be those devices that do not update that are immune to this…
>> immune to this type of thing. The _only_ type of thing that they are immune to. This is like saying “a car with a broken engine is the safest car in the world - it never moves!”.
So the SKS software is only a part of the problem. Another part is GnuPG, which is unable to deal with a public key with many signatures attached.
GnuPG is written in C (not OCaml) and seems to be well maintained. Looks like fixing it can be an effective mitigation against this attack. Or do I miss something?
I feel like part of the problem is that anyone who's skilled enough to implement solutions has better things to do with their time than participate in a discussion of that quality.
I believe this is a project trying to replace the old school key servers. https://github.com/google/keytransparency/
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…
The idea of Internet actors (human or machine) owning cryptographic identities in a distributed system is a good one. I don't think we should stray from this approach. From your Matthew Green link: > If PGP went away, I estimate it would take the security community less than a year to entirely replace (the key bits of) the standard with something much better and modern. It would have modern crypto and authentication,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Efail was one of the best crypto breaks of 2018, accepted into both Usenix Security (a top-tier academic venue) and BHUSA (the top tier industry venue), and virtually universally lauded by actual cryptography engineers and researchers. What you've said here is false, a personal attack on the researchers, and absolutely unacceptable on HN. Take this stuff somewhere else.
Efail was a symptom of bad PGP implementations in email clients, not a flaw in PGP. It was overblown trash designed to bring fame to the "discoverers" at the expense of the reputation of PGP and its authors. If you think that this statement doesn't belong here, you can take it up with the mods, a group which spending lots of time on HN does not qualify you for.
Since I am apparently replying too fast and I need to slow down, here is my reply to the child post by Sir_Cmpwn:
> I don't really see the link between the email you posted and efail
GPG decrypts the whole message which might be gigaoctets long and throws it to the output. After it has been decrypted it checks the MDC (if it exists) and throws an error if the MDC does not match or if it is missing. Meanwhile if a OpenPGP message was composed of small authenticated packets GPG would be able to first authenticate if the MAC of the packet is correct and then return an error right away if it does not match. If it did match it would return plaintext and move on to the next packet. You can see now how efail would be prevented, right?
> PGP
Do people use PGP nowadays? I was under the impression that pretty much everyone used GPG ever since it was released.