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Re:Modern Alternatives to PGP by Quekid5 on Friday February 15, 2019 @04:20PM (#19174823)
Fair enough, I suppose.

I'm not sure it's just me being behind the times, but it seems that quite a few of the ideas behind PGP (specifically: asymmetric encryption) aren't really being exploited seriously. Instead there's lots of halfhearted "oh, let's just encrypt thing X with a password stored in thing Y" where Y is presumably more 'secure'. This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it interesting and depressing that industry has learned very little, if anything.

Re:Modern Alternatives to PGP by tptacek on Friday February 15, 2019 @04:22PM (#19174848)
This article explicitly points out modern alternatives to PGP's clunky, 1990s implementation of asymmetric encryption.

But, tangentially, it's a bad idea to use asymmetric encryption when you don't absolutely need it. Modern symmetric AEAD ciphers, which are implicated in pretty much all serious public-key designs anyways, are safer to use that asymmetric cryptography.

Seeing a public key in a design that doesn't demand public keys is a cryptographic engineering code smell.