Re:Rpgp: Pure Rust implementation of OpenPGP
by remram on Monday April 08, 2024 @09:49AM
(#39969694)
> In other words: you always need to perform OOB identity verification
Web-of-trust alleviates that, to some extent.
Re:Rpgp: Pure Rust implementation of OpenPGP
by woodruffw on Monday April 08, 2024 @10:32AM
(#39970134)
The WoT has been defunct in PGP for over 4 years at this point[1]. It was also never a particularly good solution to this problem, because it (1) was itself largely unauthenticated and blindly trusted by relying parties, much like a normal key directory, and (2) failed to encode what key holding parties were trusted for (the classic example being that I absolutely trust party A to do C for me, but this does not imply that I want to encourage networked party B to trust A for D). And of course the keyserver birthday attacks and DoS, as cherries on top :-)
(I think WoTs can solve these problems. But PGP's implementation has been so far the most ambitious tried by a semi-large audience, and it didn't hold up. We need a better starting point.)
In other words: you always need to perform OOB identity verification, regardless of your messaging system of choice. There is no way around this; it’s a fundamentally social and UX problem rather than a cryptographic one. But this doesn’t change the fact that, once you have a trusted identity, Signal’s MITM protections are significantly stronger than PGP’s (including forward secrecy, as noted before).