And to answer you, though I don't speak for the person you were relying to: the U.S. government isn't even in my threat model. If the Eye of Sauron points my way, I lose. And so, given that as a prior, a universally trustable third party is not a bad idea. The implementation might totally suck (and I think it's a better practice to have a wide set of vendors and making the acquisition of such a key subsidized, rather than directly provided, by the .gov), but the central point of trust doesn't, and it isn't inherently a problem for it to be state-operated.
""" If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they're going to hold a press conference and say "It wasn't us" as they wear t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY US," and then they're going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. """
A universally trustable third party key provider might not be a bad idea in itself, but a national government - any national government, I was not specifically referring to the US government - seems about as non-trustworthy as any third party gets. To my way of thinking, the whole point of cryptography is to allow the weak to protect themselves from the powerful, and giving the organization which is at least nominally the most powerful agent operating in one's area the opportunity to poison your crypto before you even begin seems... counterproductive.
Hello no. Absolutely not.
We're talking here about a state distributing USB keyz with a certificate to each citizen. The certificate is 'vouched' by the CA, it confirms the name of the citizen and it can be used to sign stuff thanks to private key cryptography.
One usage could be to access public websites, and use that USB key to log in and confirm your identity.
So the primary threat would be impersonation by the trusted party, which would erode the trust pretty quickly. I'm still a bit wary of this approach - do you think we'd manage to keep the keys from also being used for message encryption?
Where I live, there's actually a system somewhat like this in place - banks etc. can provide identity verification to websites upon request. You log in to the bank's system with your account and one-time pad they provide, and the bank tells you what information it will pass on to the requester. It seems pretty decent, and might actually be better than the USB key approach.
Now, that doesn't mean that we have to encrypt stuff. It could be used for the authentication/identification only if that's all one wants to do.
> It seems pretty decent, and might actually be better than the USB key approach.
Same thing. Look at RSA SecurID keys, they do certificate + OTP generators. I've had those at a previous organization, it was well integrated and nice to use.
The certificates provide the identity. A private key or an OTP allows for authentication.
There are multiple ways to handle the identity and the authentication with 2 factors. Exactly what to distribute and who will distribute it is an implementation details.
I lived in a country that did exactly that. And it was a disaster. The keys were trivially easy to steal, even by accident (personal experience here), and you still have the same trust problem as before, except that with a central authority now you do not have as much control.
I have also used the electronic-signature-comes-with-your-ID-card thing, and it was a similar disaster, with dodgy drivers and half-arsed crypto implementations in common software. E.g., try using the same token in Firefox and Thunderbird (or anything else) at the same time.
PGP is fine. It's just that proper security is not easy. And the same applies in the physical world as much as in computing.
The implementation and the technology has some challenges to be executed. Just like everyone tech projects, that doesn't have GooMicroZon people. Nothing special ^^
So distribute keys on smart cards that don't allow you to export the key. This is what Estonia does, and - concerns about their election infosec aside - it seems to work pretty well.
That's what I covered in the second paragraph. :-)
The thing is, both those implementations were a disaster from either a technological or a security point of view. We're not even getting into whether a central source of trust is a good idea or not (you will look at the state of HTTPS and make up your own mind on that). So, to repeat, proper security is hard.
Which country?
If you don't mind me asking, what country?
The second half--the federal government as centralized national PKI, generating everyone's private keys for them--is hilariously terrible.
I can almost hear Moxie, Matt Green, Trevor Perrin, and every infosec researcher and crypto engineer and privacy advocate facepalming in unison.
The government is just an example because they already handle ID for everyone, and they need it to provide their services. It makes sense for them to go digital at some point and to guarantee the ID.
I didn't know that Americans were so anti-American ^^
We are a majorly paranoid society, for no particular good specific reason that I can see.
Shipping a national backdoor is an entirely different topic. Please focus on the use case at hands.
I guess that makes sense. People in the UK don't have any "national ID card". Must be a culture thing.
I guess that makes sense. That's why I have to go through fucking stupid private background check agencies for everything in the UK.
That "U.S. Government" collecting, indexing and analyzing all data of any citizen must be an entirely different entity from the "United States Government" after all.
Every single corporation here and even freelance service workers are required by law to have a key/certificate pair to be able to do file taxes.
Pretty much every single commercial transaction is signed with a certificate.
It is not yet required for every individual citizen to have one, but everything points to that happening at some time in the future.
Estonia does provide S/MIME certificates for every citizen, although I've been told that they're not particularly heavily used.
Between Estonia and the DoD, there's a few million users of S/MIME. Whereas PGP has a few tens of thousands of users. It's clear which product won out in the marketplace.
Calling PGP an utter failure is an understatement. Just like calling a cat a small tiger.
PGP is possibly the WORST experience in usability for any well known software that ever lived.
This thing should be taught in courses for decades to come as how to fail a product by 1) having no UI 2) no integrations with anything 3) zero usability 4) not even trying to give a fuck about normal users 5) in fact, not even trying to make it possible to use for advanced users.
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You want signed email & identities. It's simple.
Just get the national government to distribute RSA USB keys to every citizen. Then they can use them on public government websites (taxes & jobs stuff) to confirm poeple's identities, just plug in the key. Quick and simple. (And that's not incompatible with ALSO asking for a password that was send in a different paper letter. 2FA-style.).
Then later, citizens can sign the emails they send to everyone with gmail/hotmail because they'll add the feature to recognize the national USB identity key, now that there are X millions people using it.