What's the matter with PGP?
blog.cryptographyengineering.com
What's the matter with PGP?
1–10 of 166 posts
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#2PGP needs to onboard themselves with Elliptic Curve Crypto... significantly smaller makes them more distributable which solves a few of the problems mentioned.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#3At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP.
Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy.
It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transparent keying. But that's belied by the fact that, with a very few exceptions (that probably prove the rule), cryptosystems aren't directly attacked by most adversaries... except the global adversary.
In the absence of routine attacks targeting cryptography, it's easy to believe that systems that don't annoy their users with identity management are superior to those that do. They do indeed have an advantage in deployability! But they have no security advantage. We'll probably find out someday soon, as more disclosures hit the press, that they were a serious liability.
There is a lot wrong with PGP! It is reasonable to want it to die. But PGP is the only trustworthy mainstream cryptosystem we have; I mean, literally, I think it might be the only one.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#4PGP needs to onboard themselves with Elliptic Curve Crypto... significantly smaller makes them more distributable which solves a few of the problems mentioned.
Most systems should switch from simple multiplicative group crypto to elliptic curve, but it's hard to make an argument that doing that would resolve any of the problems Matt is referring to.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#5At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity, and if everyone in the conversation maintains the integrity of a given thread (in the email case).
There are a precious few individuals for whom I have that level of trust in their management of their private key. I could not even trust my wife to manage a hardware key that I gave her, it would fall apart immediately; "I cannot use this key on my chrome book? I cannot use this key on my Galaxy? I cannot use this key on my iPad? Give me a soft key that I can use, or a cloud service..."
Therefore, PGP is not mainstream. There is a large population of people doing it incorrectly, and they must because they have no other real choice.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#6At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity, and if everyone in the conversation maintains the integrity of a given thread (in the email case). There are a precious few individuals for whom I have that level of trust in their management of their private key. I could not even trust my wife to manage a hardware key that I gave her, it would fall apart immediately; "I cannot use…
Both of these statements can't possibly be true:
* PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity.
* Transparent key management systems that rely entirely on heuristics and click-through warnings are trustworthy.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#7At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity, and if everyone in the conversation maintains the integrity of a given thread (in the email case). There are a precious few individuals for whom I have that level of trust in their management of their private key. I could not even trust my wife to manage a hardware key that I gave her, it would fall apart immediately; "I cannot use…
See, for example, "De-Anonymizing alt.anonymous.messages" for an example of people doing crypto -including PGP- wrong.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#8At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
I think the argument is that PGP is so difficult to use that by and large people just won't bother.
Yes, transparent key systems would likely be less secure than PGP. If the usability were significantly better and people used them, that is better than the alternative of using nothing. For many of these solutions, there is a window of vulnerability surrounding the key exchange that closes if you aren't snooping traffic at that moment, so it's not like they're completely insecure options; just that their attack vectors that may be considered acceptable risks in many situations.
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#9At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
PGP is only trustworthy if both parties treat key management with the utmost severity, and if everyone in the conversation maintains the integrity of a given thread (in the email case). There are a precious few individuals for whom I have that level of trust in their management of their private key. I could not even trust my wife to manage a hardware key that I gave her, it would fall apart immediately; "I cannot use…
Can you (or anyone else) point me and others to a good text on properly handling keys? Thanks!
Re: What's the matter with PGP?
#10At one point in this essay, Matt suggests that every successful end-to-end encryption scheme has employed transparent (or "translucent") key management. What he's referring to is the idea behind, say, OTR: two people can use it without the key handshake required by PGP. Matt is wrong about this. He's being victimized by a pernicious fallacy. It certainly appears that the most "successful" cryptosystems have transpare…
I think the argument is that PGP is so difficult to use that by and large people just won't bother. Yes, transparent key systems would likely be less secure than PGP. If the usability were significantly better and people used them, that is better than the alternative of using nothing. For many of these solutions, there is a window of vulnerability surrounding the key exchange that closes if you aren't snooping traffi…
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".