Signal does make a bigger deal about trying to get you to verify, but in practice for both systems casual users don't do it. Most of my Signal contacts aren't verified.
Without this step an attacker can MITM these protocols because the identity problem is hard and cannot be waved away.
I'd prefer to verify all of my contacts but, given my security model, this is good enough and a huge step up from email.
I don't need to verify the code because everything else about the communication matches.
> Turn on this setting to receive notifications when a contact's security code has changed. Your messages and calls are encrypted regardless of this setting.
Or more so, DON'T have. I don't know if I'd qualify for "ordinary person" here but regardless, of the emails I went through this morning I don't think I can think of ONE that I cared about actually being from the sender it said it was from. There are very few that matter that much.
I'm not sure how PGP would help though, as the user also has to check, if the email from his bank was signed with the correct key. Checking the exact domain name is something he can already do and I guess is also easier to understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_authentication etc. Perhaps you can do it with asynchronous protocols too, though it seems harder.
Well, some of the oldest corporate systems (Lotus Notes, MS Exchange) did (and I think still do) have the capability for transparent secure messaging. Still, sysadmins rarely ever bother to use it. I believe the cause is that nobody wants to operate a certificate authority if they can avoid it, and when they can't, they'd rather restrict it to the bare minimum (servers that are absolutely necessary).
If corporate sysadmins can't be bothered to look after keys, you can imagine how motivated the average user will be to do the same.
The truth is that X509 remains a clusterfuck: it's just too burdensome. LetsEncrypt is a first step in the direction of replacing it with something better and more automated. "LetsEncrypt for email" would be very welcome - although I bet the security services of the world would be really pissed off.
It's not just people are not learning. I don't see any ordinary email client is encouraging people to use signing or encryption. Which is very odd to me.
Just imagine what if all the email client start asking their user to sign their email, and mark unsigned email as "Untrustful".
With things like signal or whatsapp you get encryption and signing automatically and everybody uses it.
Why don’t people use signing with email then? Because it is not the default, not built in and not the standard everywhere. Blaming those people for it is wrong. Blame those who didn’t manage to implement the standards and stand in the way of making it the default