Re:PGP needs to be retired in honor
by mstef on Thursday February 23, 2017 @03:50PM
(#13717647)
pgp does not provide anonymity at least not in the widely accepted form. every message has the recipient keyid in plaintext, unless you --throw-keyids but then you run into incompatibilities and inconveniences that make the whole exercise user unfriendly and widely unsupported.
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> pgp does not provide anonymity
Not quite true.
> every message has the recipient keyid in plaintext
The keys are not required to be centralized in any particular location. There is no way to tie a key to an individual, unless that individual wants to be associated with that key id.
It's common practice to post anonymous, encrypted messages on mailing lists or newsgroups. All you can really tell in those cases is that the recipient is a member of that mailing list or subscribes to the newsgroup (though it's not for sure, with the use of remailers, etc).
It provides pseudonymity. KeyIDs exist but they're not inherently tied to e.g. your real-world location the way a phone number is (to an attacker with access to the towers). Whereas OpenPGP can reasonably be combined with e.g. Tor.