Signify: Securing OpenBSD from Us to You

@tedu writes:

> There was a PGP usability study conducted a few years ago where a group of technical people were placed in a room with a computer and asked to set up PGP. Two hours later, they were never seen or heard from again.

This argument doesn't hold ground. If "technical people" can not setup a new GnuPG key in 20 minutes, they are obviously not "technical" in this context. I'm 100% sure OpenBSD is absolutely NOT fit for people who find GnuPG confusing enough to avoid usage.

> Or as Prof. Green put it, "Can someone who built GnuPG 2.1.1 on Debian/Ubuntu give me a hint on which libgpg-error you used?" If he doesn't which libgpg-error to use, I doubt I'm going to pick the right one.

I can, here:

    $ pkg info|grep libgpg-error
    libgpg-error-1.19_1            Common error values for all GnuPG components

Given that this is @tedu, I'm sure I missed the point/joke.

The only real argument here is that it's at least 10 times easier to write code than to read another mans code. So I give him that... Which one is more secure, GPG or signify remains to be seen.

GnuPG is complicated, the gpg(1) man page is quite extensive compared to signify.

I imagine very few people have set up PGP without the help of a search engine.

    $ man gpg | pr | grep Page | awk '{print $6}' | tail -1
    58
    $ man signify | pr | grep Page | awk '{print $6}' | tail -1
    2

Another tool that generates compatible signatures: https://jedisct1.github.io/minisign/

The main addition is a "trusted comment" line, that can be used to verify metadata, instead of just the content, for example to verify a timestamp and prevent unwanted downgrades. This is not an issue with packages, but it can be an issue with files that don't contain any version/timestamp.

And since keys are very short, they can also directly be given on the command-line, making the verification very simple from a user perspective. For example the list of public resolvers compatible with DNSCrypt can be verified with a oneliner: https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy#dnscrypt-enabled-...

OpenWRT is now also leveraging Ed25519 signatures to sign their packages, using a slightly modified version of signify. The result is way smaller than GPG, and a better fit for embedded systems. Unfortunately, they sign `sha512(message)` instead of the message itself, making the signature incompatible with signify.

But even though they only do one thing, these tools are overall way easier to use than GPG, way smaller, and having short keys is really great.

I'm surprised that there seems to be a consensus here that using the GPG command line tool is complicated when the HN community regularly discusses, for example, time complexity of algorithms.

I have the misfortune of having encrypted some files in the past with PGP. At the time, the default algorithm appeared to be IDEA which was removed since for patent reasons. Find the old sources and getting it to built is not trivial.

These days I'm leaning towards bundling encrypted files along with the C code that encrypted it and that works better if the latter is small and self-contained.