Live data from Hacker News

Gpg.fail

gpg.fail

91–100 of 376 posts

Re: Gpg.fail

#91
post #89
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a better alternative to GPG?

Everything is better than PGP (not just GPG --- all PGP implementations). The problem with PGP is that it's a Swiss Army Knife. It does too many things. The scissors on a Swiss Army Knife are useful in a pinch if you don't have real scissors, but tailors use real scissors. Whatever it is you're trying to do with encryption, you should use the real tool designed for that task. Different tasks want altogether different…

Now can you give us a list of all the features of PGP and a tool that does one specific thing really well?

Re: Gpg.fail

#92
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, in fact, signed by the author. It's just a PKI, so you intermediate trust in the author through an authority. This is exactly analogous to the Web PKI, where you trust CAs to identify individual websites, but the websites themselves control their keypairs. The CA's presence intermediates the trust but does not somehow imply that the CA itself does the signing for TLS traffic.

Not really, uploading via trusted publishers I don't own any private key, as you probably know having implemented it yourself I presume.

Trusted Publishing doesn’t involve any signing keys (well, there’s an IdP, but the IdP’s signature is over a JWT that the index verifies, not an end signature). You’re thinking of attestations, which do indeed involve a local ephemeral private key.

Again, I must emphasize that this is identical in construction to the Web PKI; that was intentional. There are good criticisms of PKIs on grounds of centrality, etc., but “the end entity doesn’t control the private key” is facially untrue and sounds more like conspiracy than anything else.

Re: Gpg.fail

#93
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those better tools? I've been broadly looking into this space, but never ventured too deep.

ssh or minisign for signing age for file encryption

There are people who use GPG for more than that. Those that are fine with just those two features, sure. Heck, you can encrypt with "openssh", no need for age. :D I have a bash function for encryption and decryption!

Re: Gpg.fail

#94
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPG is indeed deprecated. Most people have never heard of it and never used it.

I would be very much surprised if GPG has ever really achieved anything other than allowing crypto nerds to proclaim that things were encrypted or signed. Good for them I guess, but not of any practical importance, unlike SSH, TLS, 7Zip encryption, etc.

They allow some kind of nerd to claim that, but nobody who nerds out on cryptography defends PGP. Cryptographers hate PGP.

Re: Gpg.fail

#95

AFAICT this is GnuPG specific and not OpenPGP related? Since GnuPG has pulled out of standards compliance anyway there are many better options. Sequoia chameleon even has drop in tooling for most workflows.

I think it would be more accurate (and more helpful) to say that the two factions in the OpenPGP standards schism[1] have pulled away from the idea of consensus. There is a fundamental philosophical difference here. The LiberePGP faction (GnuPGP) is following the traditional PGP minimalism when it comes to changes and additions to the standard. The RFC-9580 faction (Sequoia) is following a kind of maximalist approach…

I'm sure getting a "nothing's particularly wrong with the current standards" vibe from this talk.

Re: Gpg.fail

#96
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is better than PGP (not just GPG --- all PGP implementations). The problem with PGP is that it's a Swiss Army Knife. It does too many things. The scissors on a Swiss Army Knife are useful in a pinch if you don't have real scissors, but tailors use real scissors. Whatever it is you're trying to do with encryption, you should use the real tool designed for that task. Different tasks want altogether different…

Now can you give us a list of all the features of PGP and a tool that does one specific thing really well?

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th...

Re: Gpg.fail

#97
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now can you give us a list of all the features of PGP and a tool that does one specific thing really well?

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th...

Saw it, not impressed, GnuPG has a lot of more features than signing and file encryption.

And there are lots of tools for file encryption anyways. I have a bash function using openssh, sometimes I use croc (also uses PAKE), etc.

I need an alternative to "gpg --encrypt --armor --recipient ". :)

Re: Gpg.fail

#98
post #88
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of those WONTFIX's is on an insane vulnerability: you can bitflip known plaintext in a PGP message to switch it into handling compression, allowing attackers to instruct GnuPG packet processing to look back to arbitrary positions in the message, all while suppressing the authentication failure message. GPG's position was: they print, in those circumstances, an error of some sort , and that's enough. It's an attac…

Is there a better alternative to GPG?

Depending on what you are after, an alternative could be using SSH keys for signatures and age[1] for encryption targeting SSH keys.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/age>

Re: Gpg.fail

#99
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is better than PGP (not just GPG --- all PGP implementations). The problem with PGP is that it's a Swiss Army Knife. It does too many things. The scissors on a Swiss Army Knife are useful in a pinch if you don't have real scissors, but tailors use real scissors. Whatever it is you're trying to do with encryption, you should use the real tool designed for that task. Different tasks want altogether different…

Now can you give us a list of all the features of PGP and a tool that does one specific thing really well?

https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/

I wrote this to answer this exact question last year.

Re: Gpg.fail

#100
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th...

Saw it, not impressed, GnuPG has a lot of more features than signing and file encryption. And there are lots of tools for file encryption anyways. I have a bash function using openssh, sometimes I use croc (also uses PAKE), etc. I need an alternative to "gpg --encrypt --armor --recipient ". :)

I guess we'll have to live with you being unimpressed.
Post reply on HN