But, not having used it for a few years, I went to take a look again - list some keys, maybe SMS some friends to exchange fingerprints and sign their keys, etc... - I'm trying to recall what the relationship between PUB, SUB, UID, Key Fingerprints are. And how do I indicate that I trust a key and upload it back up to pgp.mit.edu?
And I consider myself a member of the 0.1% who at least understand the principals behind PGP/Public Keys/Private Keys/Web of Trust, etc...
So - if I'm having trouble understanding this without a couple hours of study, their is Zero chance that the other 99% of the population will ever be able to wrap their heads around the intricacies of PGP. Something else is going to have to replace it.
[EDIT - as an aside, I've spent the last hour trying to do a "gen-key" on my ubuntu host, and been prevented by lack of entropy - and yes, I've tried running tcpdump, tried egrepping every file on the system for a string, etc... Ended up on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnupg/+bug/706011 and the answer seems to be, "Find a machine that does have entropy, or install a hardware random number generator in your computer."
Please add this to the reasons why normal people never use GPG
Edit-2: It took about 25 minutes, but apparently between find / -type f | xargs grep wontfindme and sudo tcpdump -nnn not port 22, I managed to collect enough entropy to keep gpg moving forward. ]
If the GRND_RANDOM bit is not set, then the /dev/urandom pool will be used. Unlike using read(2) to fetch data from /dev/urandom, if the urandom pool has not been sufficiently initialized, getrandom(2) will block (or return -1 with the errno set to EAGAIN if the GRND_NONBLOCK bit is set in flags).
Then again, that's probably not important if you interactively launch gpg on a desktop system that wasn't just installed a minute ago or so.
Timer EntropyD [1] can be extremely handy (as can the audio-entropy gathering)
This sounds like an implementation fail / lazy implementor. GPG shouldn't need more than 32 bytes of entropy (for keying AES-128 and then encrypting a 128-bit block of data repeatedly until you collect enough randomness.)
haveged is an absolute essential for all servers
that means it will block when it estimates that you have "used up" all of the available entropy
you can check how many bits of entropy your kernel thinks are available easily
cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
edit: i should have mentioned that there is some reason to argue against this behaviour but that doesn't change the usefulness of haveged for existing systems
The random(4) manpage is unfortunately exceptionally misleading, and has sadly led to a small but non-zero numbers of products that try to use /dev/random rather than /dev/urandom.
Sadly, gpg --gen-key doesn't even give you this option - but that's (as noted above) another flaw in GPG.
How's about this: rather than a protocol-up rewrite, how about just writing a library-up rewrite? Write a ground-up implementation of (maybe a subset of) RFC 4880, with opinionated choices of default ciphers (a bit like NaCl). Make it a portable library that can be used on all the popular mobile platforms and from all the popular languages. That's a plenty big enough job, and would fix the concrete pain points with GPG without throwing out the good part.
> We could try to slap a GUI on top of it, but I don't believe great products are made that way. Good UX requires thinking about interactions all the way down to the protocol.
What kind of concrete things would have to change at the protocol level? Plenty of good products conform to existing protocol standards, and a crypto protocol that has survived years of use in a hostile environment is worth its weight in gold. The talk of "modern" seems very handwavey as a reason to throw this out.
> GPG has such a small legacy install base (literally on the order of ~50k users), that there's no reason to maintain compatibility with OpenPGP.
I find it hard to believe there are only 50k users given that OpenPGP is built into the package-management infrastructure that every Debian user uses, and is required on Maven Central which virtually every Java system uses. Yes, these aren't people who actively chose it or are even aware that they're using OpenPGP - but protocols are like that; they're infrastructure.
And as for your 50k, that may be a small number but they're the people who really care about privacy. Snowden is among them. If you're trying to spread crypto, those are the last people you want to alienate.
That's what PBP does:
- Code: https://github.com/stef/pbp
- A short (9:03) talk by the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl_gLMef1mI
Sure there is. For one, we were talking about encryption protocols. Those are not encrypted. The one that is encrypted, HTTPS, sucks (the whole CA system). So after Snowden's documents came out I would've expected more people to say "it's time to get rid of HTTPS". That hasn't quite happened yet, and I'm disappointed by that. In case w
As for TCP/IP, again, not encrypted, and they need to be. In case we've forgotten, TCP/IP and HTTP is what made it happen for the Internet to become a giant spy machine. That to me means they are broken.
We need to switch to something like CurveCP, MinimaLT, Noise, etc, that is encrypted by default at the Transport or even the IP layer. If we agree "encrypting all the things needs" to happen, then the current state of TCP/IP and HTTP is horrible, and we're not moving fast enough to replace them.
The fact that we don't yet have a good encrypted by default alternative to TCP/IP and HTTP/S is what will also bring us a world of hurt when the "Internet of Things" arrives in a big way, along with self-driving "smart" cars that can be remotely updated (and hacked).
Transport is the wrong layer to do encryption (much as I'd love to see more adoption of IPSec) because encryption and authentication are inextricably linked. Suppose you can confirm that you're absolutely, veritably talking to 174.16.23.46, and your messages can't be read by anyone but them. What good does that actually do you?
TLS is, despite all the problematic cipher suites, fundamentally sound infrastructure - which is why it hasn't been replaced. The same is true of OpenPGP. We don't need new protocols, just better implementations - an equivalent of LibreSSL for OpenPGP.
In the current post Snowden climate, can't we agree that this is at least a good thing? The good it does at the most basic level is protect your communications from prying eyes.
Yeah, +1 for this. The lack of a proper GPG library is very strange.
I'm in the process of writing a Python program that interfaces with GPG right now, and I was surprised to learn there isn't an official GPG library. The closest thing seems to be GPGMadeEasy [1], which is an official library wrapper for the interactive program.
Since I need low-level key manipulation (writing out a key with known values), what I've ended up doing is using the BouncyCastle Java library[2] via a separate Java command line program my Python program can call out to. It works, but it's painful.
So, yeah -- what would be the cost/benefit of the project lmm proposes to create a real, portable GPG library? It makes a lot of sense to me.
[1] https://www.gnupg.org/%28it%29/related_software/gpgme/index.... [2] http://bouncycastle.org/
Almost as important as his crypto expertise, moxie's deep understanding of UX and especially barriers to entry and the network effect have concretely made the world a better place, and not just for people like us...but also (and especially) for people like my mom, my partner, and my (mostly non-programmer) friends. Thank you for understanding that their privacy is important and that their human dignity matters--and especially for meeting them where they are.
As a result, now it's not just my colleagues "in tech"--but also essentially all of my friends and family--who are with you!
And yeah, it's true that some of the Snowden docs reference ZRTP attacks & spoofing voice so it's not necessarily foolproof (or her phone could be owned etc.), but another one of the things my mother told me when I was a kid was "the key is to begin." And that's what moxie's done...
I feel like a lot of the things GPG aims to do are fundamentally hard. It's not the technology that sucks, it's the problem. I completely agree that the answer will come from thinking about user interactions first, but I'm not sure that the solution will look much different than a better GPG client.
I think the problems are solvable, but only if we have a different design approach. So when I see projects trying not-PGP, I'm interested. When I see projects building on PGP, I'm less interested.
Also, any vague timeline available for arrival of the desktop Signal version? What about video-chat support? Would that be possible with WebRTC? (although you should probably wait until ORTC is supported within WebRTC - v1.1 I think?) and then add ZRTP on top of it. Or is a desktop, Javascript version, just not secure enough for that to happen? What if you do it like Whatsapp's "web app", that basically only connects locally to the phone?
This is my feeling as well. To optimize for security and privacy, it seems like it needs to be difficult by design. If it's too easy, it's probably less secure.
I'm not sure if anyone has given it seriuos attempts to make it more user friendly, though? Would be surprised if no one has, there should be a great opportunity here. Escpecially now that it has so much focus.
It's made by the CryptoCat author, so make of that what you will.
Literally the second tweet on their twitter account is 'Damn, it works. Got a lawyer who resisted all other methods to encrypt our comms with @Peerio. Big score for usability. Bravo @kaepora & co.' which kind of bugs me, too.
However, I also (like Moxie) believe PGP is not at the sweet spot. It has too much complexity for the most popular use cases. Thank you Moxie and others who are searching for the sweet spots.
Arguably it was easier to use GPG back then than it is now. Pine was my MUA and I had an easy to find public key. Now I have an iPhone, don't use Linux on my laptop anymore, and make heavy use of messaging products.
Here's what I have now that I didn't have then, 2FA. There's an app on my phone that makes it super easy so I use it. If I had to still carry around a separate RSA code generator I probably wouldn't.
Surely we can figure out a way to make encrypted email nearly transparently easy with the major mail providers, and the default mail apps on our laptops and and phones. Surely we can figure out a way to make a trustworthy distributed keystore.
Perhaps this will all change because before Snowden we were blissfully unaware and GPG was a cool toy unless your life was in real danger, post Snowden we're residents of a vast internet police state and my Mom knows how Target was hacked.
I have a strong suspicion we will figure this out, and soon. I wonder, are VC's are looking into funding easy to use consumer encryption?
Every time I see this in regards to email, I'm puzzled. Carnivore was known about in the 90s. Then there was the AT&T Room 641A in the 200s. So I don't know how people were unaware that state level actors could tap connections and record email.
Second, for this threat model, just forcing and validating TLS on SMTP gets you pretty far, does it not? You're then mostly trusting your email provider. And without trusting them, we get into user-unfriendly stuff like not being able to forget your password. (Barring some sort of breakthrough ideas.)
Seriously, has there been any good proposals that provide strong privacy (say, no one but the user can read the message) but aren't complicated or require users to do things they aren't gonna do: validate keys? PGPFone and ZRTP are great because you already have an "out-of-band" key auth mechanism in place, and it's fairly straightforward to check.
Nobody should trust their email provider if they are concerned about the privacy of their email. The Job To Be Done, by an email provider such as gmail/yahoo/hotmail is to act as a mail store, and mta. A user should be able to rely on a local MUA for confidentiality. Admittedly, that shifts the level of trust from the Email Provider to the provider of the MUA software and the Local Hardware, which is why things like OpenBSD/Linux and (hopefully not firmware-tweaked) commodity hardware is so important.
I'm hoping someone comes up with a breakthrough idea here, something fantastic that enables real privacy with no inconvenience. But in 20 years, there's been essentially zero progress on that front. All proposals either violate Most Users' required features, or boil down to offloading trust to the email provider.
It can be very hard to know whether you have the right public key, especially for people that you know only from online activity. And it's not uncommon to find multiple unrevoked keys, with the same email address.
But check out https://keybase.io/mirimir. You can easily get a GnuPG key that signed proofs in my profile here, on GitHub, and on reddit. Also, the email address in my key is linked to a Gravatar that StackExchange and other sites use. So whoever I am, you can be confident that I control that GnuPG key.
Private keys are obviously an issue, but I don't really get why passwords are considered so important.
I like to use GPG when I can for communicating with people, but most of the things I put on it are less private than what you would get if you got my computer.
I don't think passwords protect you if the attacker can install a keylogger (correct me if I'm wrong), so anyone with hardware access or malware isn't going to be stopped. You are only protecting against people that can read files from your computer but not install hardware/software.
I think for the average user the password provides little extra security while having a high UI cost.
If you had to open an app on your phone at each login you'd get crazy real fast :)
I do like your analogy tho. Digital music is a breeze to buy nowadays. Moxie seems to appear as covertly saying its misguided to donate money to GnuPG so that it finally gets good, because, you know, not-moxie-made.
The.. what was it called? Redphone? Whisper? and various other projects - while very cool - didnt achieve even as much popularity as GnuPG (which in itself is far from greatly useable).
I know of one tech that has a chance right now and thats U2F/Fido. It allows for building a framework (being GnuPG or otherwise) around it that's both secure and works for everyone. Why? Because fucking gmail supports it that why. It has nothing to do with the actual tech. It has to do with support. It has to do with my iphone, android, whatever, working with it seamlessly. It a lot to do with "slapping a GUI" at the right places.
The Axolotl protocol that was created for Whisper System's TextSecure is now used, by default, by Cyanogenmod (10 million users) and the Android version of WhatsApp (more than 500 million installs from the play store).
I'd say Moxie's tech has been pretty widely adopted.
If the only "usable" implementation is on a hard-to-physically-secure mobile device that uses a tonne of different uncontrolled network access points a day -- that's not really an option now, is it?
What, Gmail? Yahoo? They exist only because they can read your plain-text email and serve ads against it. Most people get their email through free webmail providers, who have every reason not to make encryption easy.
If you're referring to GPG's shitty interface, then sure. But how much of that is "1990s crypto" and how much is due to the fact that it's one guy working by himself and barely being able to afford it, for years?
GPG with Linux-levels of support would be an entirely different beast.
edit: oh sorry, are we not allowed to disagree with Big Names™?
Not when it comes to cryptography and HN. Moxie, Collin, and tptacek are the only 3 people that can say anything that isn't mainstream pop-crypto. Anyone that dares to disagree with them is clearly wrong and must be punished with downvotes.
Should random software engineers experimenting with crypto claim that they've created a software package worthy of being used by dissidents and whistleblowers?
Absolutely not!
But should we be discouraging random software engineers from experimenting with crypto, and starting open source projects that may gain steam...and eventually, after years of use and audits, gain the standing and reputation to be used by dissidents and whistleblowers?
Again, absolutely not.
I know you said there's no unifying theme to these emails, but can you elaborate? Maybe something about security-obssessed lay people using GPG to send the most trivial of emails? Or something else entirely?
I know stereotypes often treat people unfairly, but the kind of person who has the dedication required to use PGP seems, to me, to often coincide with the people who find fault with everyone who hasn't had the dedication or focus to learn sophisticated software techniques.
And, if I were Moxie, that would be a source of constant frustration to me. The very people who have the ability to make things better -at best- don't empathize with the people they could help, and at worst harbor a bit of contempt for them.
Considering Moxie seems to be dedicating a large part of his life's work to helping average people, I believe the attitude I described could play foil to the inspirational messages he also receives. But I don't pretend to know him or anything.
You may say that, but after the "we specifically work to make TextSecure impossible without Google Play because using Android without google is 'going back to the old broken desktop security model'" thing, I'm not convinced.
I'm sure moxie is good with crypto, but sadly, he's on different side of war on general purpose computers than I am. He's on the side of walled gardens and limits what can you do on your own device, and I can't accept that.
EDIT: and of course he would spit on GPG. For moxie, GPG is competition.
"Way to take a dump on people who make an effort."
Which says something about the downvoters.
Irony everywhere.
... just like Windows users ;)
'People who use Windows do not have both the intelligence not to desire it and the power to do as they wish.'
GPG is a terrible UX. Accidental use of GPG tends to fail open, and insecurity results. Futzing with different keys, rotating them, retracting them, etc, are grievous. I can't reencrypt old stuff to new stuff (e.g., a pw database) without spending a good deal of time thinking about attacks, file safety, etc.
I'm really a distributed encrypted email fan, I guess. I want to securely communicate over email to my friends and family, without having to do the GPG dance.
Every Linux distribution signs packages with it. So that's at least 100M users right there. Several APIs regarding domain name and AS registrations is based on it. I know at least two financial systems that signs their messages with it. That's just mentioning a few I can think of right now. I'm sure it secures a lot lot more. It's used all over the place and it seems to do the job fairly well in most cases.
Is it suitable for signing email in 2015? I don't know. Things could certainly be improved. I know there are more suitable schemes for IM communciation. But the software and the underlying protocol is not something you can break in a heartbeat. It's important software.
Perhaps we need to speak more of the evolving use case in email?
The fact that GPG is used for other things is fine, as it will still exist and can still be used for those things.
The difference being, its worse to make a mistake using GPG than it is to make a mistake using most other programs. In the end, you are securing confidential information, which will always be hard, unnerving and require concentration and care. And this is just inherent to the task, which is fighting an undefined, super-powerful, ill-meaning enemy.
Encryption is violence. The objective is to violently keep an enemy away from your jewels. Instead of using an armed guard at your door, you use mathematical forces which are impossible for your enemy to overcome. Imagine your enemy needs the cleartext to save his own life, how does he feel when he is denied access and unable to gain access? It doesn't matter if its a steel door or a block-cipher.
What people are essentially demanding when they want "easy to use crypto" is a self-firing and self-aiming rifle with friendly-fire detection. "Keep all my adversaries away but don't bother me about it."
That's not how conflict works. If you attempt to secure your communications from a state actor, you are engaging in a full-blown combat against one of the most deadly forces there can be. That conflict will always be demanding and unpleasant. GPG being "hard to use" will be the least of your problems.
But no, we want everything for free. Protecting yourself against the overlords should be easy and painless, almost automatic. The defendant shouldn't have to learn how his defense works or how to properly use it.
Seriously?
EDIT: And what I find unnerving about your post is, suddenly the people who put in the effort to use GPG are the bad guys? The 0.1% who actually take privacy seriously enough to go through the the trouble? Don't get me wrong, I almost never use GPG, not because it's hard to use (M-x epa-encrypt-region, anyone?), but because I don't want to experience the emotional distress related to struggling with a super-powered state.
OTR is much more successful because it allows ad-hoc connections instead of trying to make authenticity guarantees. It encourages authentication, but the decision of when to invest that extra effort is left with the user. Fundamentally, OTR just offers privacy from eavesdroppers, and it does that well. Every other feature is extra. Even better, these new features (e.g. authentication) don't have to start from nothing. A big benefit of separating features is that is added later can leverage the existing infrastructure.
I personally believe the "killer crypto app" that will actually be adopted is a tool that is the opposite of OTR. It should only promise ad-hoc authenticates and do it in an generic style. I mean something that is somewhere between "gpg --clearsign" and 2channel/4chan style tripcodes[1]. In an ideal world, this needs to have a clearsign-style mode, so it can be used on existing forums. If the browser simply offers a "sign this" button next to textareas (no password, auto-gen they key and stuff it on a keyserver, just make it happen), it will be used. On the decode side, any blocks of text the browser sees that look like a signature get check, with the key pinned. That's it. Any features that allow nicer integration with email, forum software, etc, are nice but optional.
This provides a minimum, anonymous level authentication (forgery prevention), and the only UX the user should have to see is the "sign this" button and a loud "possible forgery" warning if a signature doesn't match the pinned key. It even works regardless of who is transporting the message (different websites, email, gopher, avian carriers) without needing an "identify provider". Upgrading this infrastructure of pinned keys into something more interesting can happen later on, if desired.
Would this work? I believe it's worth trying. It is clear that trying to solve all of the security needs in a single tool has not worked, and the one tool that got any adoption at all (OTR) has a much more narrow set of goals.
[[SECURE_CONTENT [email protected] -> [email protected]
BASE64-CONTENT
=====
BASE64-SIGNATURE
]]
For simplicity the registry will do email validation of its' users, it should issue a SALT so that PBKDFx(SALT + email + passphrase) is used to generate the private key... the public key is stored in the registry.
For more control, a given service entry in dns for peer-crypt registry for the given domain can be set as an authority. A distributed system could be used for confirming tokens combined with DNSSEC as a control system for greater availability.
There are flaws with this idea, but it could be something that can be made insanely easy to use, as well as adding a lot of security to email transmission without creating an all new infrastructure, only adding services on top of what exists.
For power users, they could set the public key without salt in the registries, if they wanted to manage their own, instead of relying on the generation mechanism, or to use/keep the same key across different addresses/providers.
Well, that's the issue, right? How does it do this?
What do you think of the Dark Mail effort? And of Pond?
I'm right there with you on that one. So is most of HN I imagine.
But the Apple ][ really brought the PC home for so many more people than it's competitors purely because of it's relatively simple GUI.
Command prompts scare the average user.
I guess that's why I will always be a C=> fan.
Public awareness of privacy especially wrt mass government surveillance, identity theft and high profile corporate breaches seems that such an thing is ripe.
I am naively optimistic given the right implementation a consortium of stakeholders could do something meaningful.
Secure communication is as much a cultural change as a technological one.
There is also the cultural issue of just exchanging fingerprints. Only techies put them on business cards, and even then only some. It needs to be common action.
Another approach for verification is employed by Threema [1]: The server verifies email addresses and phone numbers, so if the address or number is in your contacts you can have more confidence, represented by an orange dot next to the contact. If you verify the fingerprint by scanning QR codes, you get a green dot.
About fingerprints for the masses: I really like the visual fingerprints Peerio is using (basically bigger Github-style generated avatar icons).
Agreed 100%. I just don't have anything to offer in this space :(
It's not that I don't care about privacy, I very much do, and my friends care as well (to a slightly lesser extent I would say and I'm willing to accept more to get to that point than they are). It's just that I am completely overwhelmed, only 1-2 of my friends even understand encryption at a high level and none of them expose private keys for communication. Even other developers I worked with got annoyed with OTR with adium/pidgin to the point I had to turn it off. It's not that I want to throw in the towel, I desperately want a solution, but even easy to use (what I'm looking for) "secure" communication tools get torn to shreds here on HN and so I haven't even considered trying to get them all to switch tools (even I thought it was possible, which I don't).
I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not going to stop talking to my friends and my friends more or less refuse (due to complexity) to use encryption so what is the purpose of me even trying? The end result would be what? Maybe 1-2 people with which I can talk securely? Now I have to have 2 workflows and even if I have super-secure unique PW's, FDE (Full Disk Encryption, which I do use), and take steps to secure all MY data all of my friends are essentially leaking my data. So if the NSA/FBI/China/Hacker/etc want my communications they can just go after the weakest link, the people I talk to. It's very disheartening to say the very least.
I've considered blogging about this a number of times but didn't want to get destroyed here on HN (if I even posted it here, I probably wouldn't due to backlash) for being defeatist or get told how I am the problem. I am not a cryptographer and therefore am not qualified to even attempt to build secure software (if I even thought I was capable of coding up such a project). Even the tools that are easy to use that DO use tried and true encryption (Like PGP gmail/chrome extension, that's all well and good but what if I'm on mobile? Or on a friends computer? It's just too restrictive) are locked to a an OS/Browser/Device. I really do understand I'm asking for quite a lot (Cross-platform AND cross-device) but without those "features" there is no way I could get my peers to switch.
I'd love to have someone reply with how wrong I am how there is X tool/product/service that satisfies my requirements but I've searched high and low so I don't expect such a reply...
It's not just that, though. Anyone else with your knowledge but no standing would be scorched for saying what you just said. "Throw away the one thing that has proven to be secure and write our own protocol" doesn't go hand in hand with "serious cryptographers trust what this person is saying."
The truth is probably that either you do this or nobody will.
You should. The world would be better for it.
I'm not going to back just any crypto project, but with the right people leading the charge I would get behind it.
(Unrelated to GPG, but this goes towards crypto projects by Moxie and other solid people.)
This attitude is why GnuPG (and other PGP implementations) are in a position to be criticized by the Moxies of the world. Is there some particular reason why anybody outside of some recognized elite should be discouraged from at least trying to create a better, improved system? Yeah, they'll probably fail in a lot of cases, but if the world really wants a modern, easy-to-use alternative to PGP (a real alternative, not use-case-specific alternatives like RedPhone and TextSecure; encrypted/signed email is still a valid use case that both those things blissfully ignore, by the way), this sort of attitude - that anyone outside of a select few rightfully deserves to be scolded for trying to make better crypto - is lethally toxic to that goal.
In between the time that a cryptographically illiterate developer releases their MVP 1.0 version and the time that it's discovered that their cryptography is fundamentally flawed --- a window of time that can stretch on for years --- actual people will rely on the tool for their security, not realizing that serious adversaries are reading their messages.
Most new cryptosystems --- a cryptosystem being "anything that uses a cipher, including when the cipher is simply AES --- are terribly broken.
Search for [decryptocat] for an extremely good example of what I'm talking about.
Developers who are new to cryptography that want to learn more about it and eventually use it in their own systems should start by learning how to exploit broken cryptography. If you can't exploit an RSA padding oracle, you shouldn't be designing systems that use public key cryptography. If you can't exploit a CTR nonce stutter, you shouldn't be using block crypto.
Developers who don't want to learn cryptography should work on improving the UX (UI and workflow) of existing cryptosystems. PGP could sure use some help, but even if you don't want to help with PGP, there's a huge green field of work to be done on browser TLS trust and CA user interface. Just as one example.
This results in things like GnuPG being considered hard to use. This results in things like GnuPG struggling along with a single core developer and barely enough funding to support that developer (even now). This results in things like OpenSSL being horribly undermaintained, to the point where nasty bugs like Heartbleed are allowed to exist longer than they should because there is an insufficient quantity of eyeballs to find them and squish them. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon or a cryptographic guru to see that this is nothing but an awful situation for pretty much everyone involved.
i think any 3rd party distributed crypto is only useful against weaker adversaries (weaker than the person doing the distributing). For p2p crypto designed and agreed to by the two parties, there are lots of options, starting with a 1-time pad, CTR mode hash based ciphers, etc...
What's your ideal vision of what end-to-end encryption for the common (wo)man should look like other than "not GPG"?
Two questions whose answers are nonexistent in your article.
> the working hypothesis for privacy enhancing technology was simple: we’d develop really flexible power tools for ourselves, and then teach everyone to be like us... Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish
I think it's self-explanatory why it's not good that users need to know about SERPENT, IDEA, and TwoFish.
> the fundamental architecture of PGP also leaves no room for now critical concepts like forward secrecy.
> a ballooning penumbra of OpenPGP specifications and notes so prolific that the entire picture is almost impossible to grasp... Mailpile had to write 1400 lines of python code just to interface with a native GnuPG installation for basic operations, and it still isn’t rock solid.
> journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”)
UX failure leads to user uncertainty or insecure behavior.
What a better replacement looks like (from the comment here):
> Good UX requires thinking about interactions all the way down to the protocol.
> we can start fresh with modern cryptography, a modern protocol, and a modern design philosophy
Would a ground-up rewrite of OpenPGP have PFS? Of course. Is the functionality important enough to justify a new protocol? Not on its own, IMO.
I'd say user uncertainty and insecure behavior are, each, sufficient criteria to declare a UX a failure.
The second question, however, still isn't adequately answered; "we should be thinking about interactions" and "we should use modern things" are two of the most vague answers possible.
> The frustrating and ironic thing about GPG is that even experts make mistakes with it. Even, as it turns out, Edward Snowden.
> I now had Poitras’ permission to send Snowden her encryption key, but in his first email to me, Snowden had forgotten to attach his key, which meant I could not encrypt my response. I had to send him an unencrypted email asking for his key first.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/28/smuggling-snow...
I don't open a link to Paul Graham's site to read "Shit's bad, guys, and here are some fairly shallow reasons why I feel I can make that statement". I go there to read something that's been thought out by someone 'in the know'. Same goes for when your name is on a post about crypto. This was just whining.
That may be totally acceptable to you, but I don't think I'm alone in expecting more than just an opinion.
In any case, your point still stands, generally speaking.
Go generate a revocation certificate and push it to the global pool. You'll stop getting those disappointing emails.
But seriously, go build something better. I fucking dare you. We'd all be better off for it if you really did.
That's very marketingish of you. Why not fix GnuPG instead? There's more than slapping GUIs to things!
Also, where is your 50K user base number from? According to my SKS keyserver traffic, it's much greater, even if i were to assume 50% of the traffic is non-human.. what the fuck happened to you man?
Also, if it's well done - I'm not against something different from GnuPG. I just disagree with the argument.
Which leads to this question:
which product are you going to announce in 6mo that would be so much better?
Yes, GPG is a powerful tool that makes some encrypted communication possible. But is it really "working" if it's the tool we've had for the past 20 years, and we still ended up in a world where surveillance is so ubiquitous and privacy is so rare? Having used GPG, it seems more likely to me that there are only ~50k GPG users in the world because of the product, not because of weak desire or need for private communication.
I'm not suggesting that there's anything "better," but that it's really sad there isn't. GPG isn't ever going to be anything other than what it is now, and I don't think that's the future we want for ourselves.
We could try to slap a GUI on top of it, but I don't believe great products are made that way. Good UX requires thinking about interactions all the way down to the protocol. The good news is that GPG has such a small legacy install base (literally on the order of ~50k users), that there's no reason to maintain compatibility with OpenPGP. When building new products, we can start fresh with modern cryptography, a modern protocol, and a modern design philosophy.