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Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

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Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#71

Post by bscphil »

tptacek wrote: post #66
bscphil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you keep nitpicking tiny aspects of what I'm trying to say? GPG sucks. Everyone agrees it sucks. The consensus of experts is that you should avoid it where possible. I have not denied any of that. The problem is that some experts love to suggest alternatives that have severe limitations that GPG (for all its very real faults) does not have. For 1 to 1 encrypted chats, I would trust Signal provided that OWS hav…

The opposite of what you're saying is true. File transfer is especially straightforward. Group chat on secure messengers works far better than it ever did with PGP. And, incidentally, there is no 10-year rule on cryptography.

Good! So what are the solutions? What file transfer approach

(1) Doesn't require an active connection between sender and receiver over the internet for the duration of the transfer (2) Doesn't require a shared secret

What group chat secure messenger

(1) Doesn't rely on a central server operated by someone else (2) Doesn't use PII as the basis of a user's identity

These are what I regard as the most basic of requirements for each need. PGP provides them (in broken, hard to use ways); others have struggled. If you actually do have solutions here, rather than just complaints about PGP, I do want to hear them. But you've taken this thread down a rabbit hole rather than respond to my original point, which was about the limitations of the suggested alternatives.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#72

Post by hiq »

tptacek wrote: post #51
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you're doing, PGP can improve security. The real problem is that, the moment you're sending information to someone, you're giving that information away, out of your control. If I understand it correctly, all the above points seem to address mostly the technical aspect, that someone who means well may too easily leak previously encrypted information out of ignorance. A possible counter argument could…

No. Secure Messengers are designed to be hard to use unsafely. Nobody accidentally sends plaintext to a counterpart with Signal, because there's no feature in Signal that does that.

You can still send text messages (including to Signal contacts by long-pressing the send button). Obviously it is harder than just sending an encrypted message.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#73

Post by cwyers »

petre wrote: post #21
cwyers wrote: post #2

I am not qualified to review how it implements forward security, for instance. But this shares a lot of the problems that GPG has. It relies on existing mail standards, so it leaks metadata all over the place, and security can easily be defeated by "accidentally replying without encrypting." It's configurable -- every choice you have to make is a chance to make the wrong one. It implements RSA, which nobody should be…

It implements EC with _fallback_ to RSA if EC is not available. Blame OpenSSL, I guess, because this relies on it. Even its CLI seems to be inspired by the atrocious OpenSSL CLI.

Fallback in crypto is wrong. Either succeed or fail. I don't need to sit there guessing how secure my secure messenger is.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#74

Post by hiq »

tptacek wrote: post #54
bscphil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the alternative, for asymmetrically encrypting arbitrary binary data? For sending such data to others, the Latacora article suggest a tool that I've never heard of or heard recommended by other experts called "Magic Wormhole". It's a new tool that (from what I call tell) has a whole crapload of limitations and assumptions that PGP does not have: https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html..…

Wormhole isn't new, and if you haven't heard another "expert" recommend it, you don't hang out with a lot of cryptography engineers. The point about "simply encrypting files" is that nobody is implementing something with PGP's "encrypt-a-file" interface because it's not that useful ; rather, people purposefully design modern systems with cryptography tailored to tasks, like messaging or file transfer or backup. Your…

Is there a similar consensus about Syncthing and whether it is secure enough (or not) for file-sharing among cryptography engineers?

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#75

Post by tptacek »

throw0101a wrote: post #70
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Bernstein doesn't really believe the NIST p-curves are backdoored, and the Koblitz/Menezes paper makes a pretty decent case that they couldn't be, but if you want to tinfoil hat it, just do what every modern system does and use Curve25519. If any of this is new to you, though, you shouldn't be designing cryptosystems. Most people shouldn't! I sure shouldn't! It's an extremely specialized skill, and the world doe…

> but if you want to tinfoil hat it, just do what every modern system does and use Curve25519. What is your take on the NIST curves being "officially" blessed for government data via Suite B (or whatever they're calling it)? If it's good enough for government work, would it be good enough for us in the private sector? What are the chances the the NSA know weaknesses in Curve25519 or ChaCha like they knew about differ…

Frankly I think the kremlinology is a lot less interesting and useful than the engineering facts, which are that Curve25519 is more misuse-resistant, faster, and easier to implement in constant time. People shouldn't be using the P-curves anymore.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#76

Post by hiq »

bscphil wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What experts are you listening to? Are they telling you to use PGP in 2019?

Why do you keep nitpicking tiny aspects of what I'm trying to say? GPG sucks. Everyone agrees it sucks. The consensus of experts is that you should avoid it where possible. I have not denied any of that. The problem is that some experts love to suggest alternatives that have severe limitations that GPG (for all its very real faults) does not have. For 1 to 1 encrypted chats, I would trust Signal provided that OWS hav…

With your requirements from another post in mind:

Regarding file transfer, 'age' was mentioned in a previous thread. Problem is that it hasn't been implemented yet... https://docs.google.com/document/d/11yHom20CrsuX8KQJXBBw04s8...

Regarding a secure group chat messenger with your two requirements mentioned, the consensus (among experts that have given their opinion here) seems to be that there is currently no such solution (I guess some versions of Wire could fit given that they seem to have on-premise deployment: https://wire.com/en/pricing/#pro/).

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#77

Post by bscphil »

hiq wrote: post #76
bscphil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you keep nitpicking tiny aspects of what I'm trying to say? GPG sucks. Everyone agrees it sucks. The consensus of experts is that you should avoid it where possible. I have not denied any of that. The problem is that some experts love to suggest alternatives that have severe limitations that GPG (for all its very real faults) does not have. For 1 to 1 encrypted chats, I would trust Signal provided that OWS hav…

With your requirements from another post in mind: Regarding file transfer, 'age' was mentioned in a previous thread. Problem is that it hasn't been implemented yet... https://docs.google.com/document/d/11yHom20CrsuX8KQJXBBw04s8... Regarding a secure group chat messenger with your two requirements mentioned, the consensus (among experts that have given their opinion here) seems to be that there is currently no such so…

Thanks for the response. That matches my understanding of the situation. I'm not familiar with age, but I hope it turns into usable tool for some of these use cases, particularly asymmetric encryption.

Wire might eventually get there, but as far as I know they still haven't implemented federation, so (though I might be wrong) even their paid deployments would be limited to some particular network on which both conversants had accounts.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#78

Post by zucker42 »

claudius wrote: post #26
cwyers wrote: post #2

I am not qualified to review how it implements forward security, for instance. But this shares a lot of the problems that GPG has. It relies on existing mail standards, so it leaks metadata all over the place, and security can easily be defeated by "accidentally replying without encrypting." It's configurable -- every choice you have to make is a chance to make the wrong one. It implements RSA, which nobody should be…

> It relies on existing mail standards This is a feature, not a bug. Nobody actually wants to rely on a single entity (for or non-profit) for their communication. Nobody wants to be stuck in crappy Electron and mobile clients. I had some hope that Matrix may be able to alleviate those concerns and provide a modern, federated chat solutions. Unfortunately their quality of implementation seems to be rather low with slo…

Have you used Riot on mobile recently? Sure it's not perfect, but it consistently outperforms FB Messenger on my very poor phone.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#79

Post by sucrose »

Goronmon wrote: post #45
dewyatt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're implying, but without context, the screenshot is meaningless. It could be that Phil has a policy of not storing private keys on his iPhone or something. Is that so unusual? Anyways, maybe you're privy to context that I'm missing.

My interpretation is that even if the people who are technically savvy in that specific area, if they have times they won't deal with encrypted information, how often are non-technical people going to want to deal with it?

According to the screenshot, it's not the he won't, it's that he can't.

Re: Opmsg – A GPG Alternative

#80

Post by [deleted] »

zahllos wrote: post #25
wongarsu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It implements RSA, which nobody should be using anymore Can someone elaborate a bit? My impression was that RSA is fine with long keys, elliptic curves mainly provide shorter keys, and no decent quantum resistant algorithm emerged?

There's nothing cryptographically broken about RSA as a cryptosystem per se, but implementing it correctly is difficult. There have been multiple revisions to the standards for RSA over the years in response to various attacks. The current standard is PKCS#1 v2.2 ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8017 ) and we should use RSAES-OAEP / RSASSA-PSS as primitives. However a PKCS#1 1.5 compatibility mode with fixes for Blei…

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