3 ms·

The tech genie is out of the bottle, and the answer isn't more tech--it's getting people, and thus governments, to understand and champion these tools just like

by Decade 11y ago

The tech genie is out of the bottle, and the answer isn't more tech--it's getting people, and thus governments, to understand and champion these tools just like we do. No, the answer includes better tech. OpenSSH and LibreSSL are doing good work in removing insecure codecs. HTTP/2 looks like it should do well, because no client implementation accepts plaintext. I’m hoping that protocols like OTR and Darkmail become more widespread. PGP is basically unusable. You can use it to dump secrets on journalists, after you have trained the journalist. You can’t use it to lead a quiet, private life. I tried. It’s not integrated with anything, and nobody else uses it. It’s fatally flawed. Being riddled with fatal flaws is an aspect PGP shares with the lucrative Certificate Authority system, with S/MIME, with the DNS security system, with IPsec, with cell phone encryption. Worse, actual solutions are orthogonal to big business interests. Decentralized trust? Google has no need for this; Google has its own intermediate CA (which, through the totally broken CA model, means Google can issue valid TLS and S/MIME certificated for any domain in the world). Federated content sharing? Facebook has no need for this; Facebook needs all your data to keep it safe for you, and also to analyze and monetize it. What we need is to follow the article’s plea: Truly understand that the network is hostile, and design our systems to make security the easy default. And drop insecure protocols already, wherever there is a viable alternative.

gonzo 11y ago
> Being riddled with fatal flaws is an aspect PGP shares with the lucrative Certificate Authority system, with S/MIME, with the DNS security system, with IPsec, with cell phone encryption. which fatal flaws are present in "IPsec"?
- mtgx 11y ago
  He may be referring to this: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12...
mtrimpe 11y ago
Amen; I'm still flabbergasted by programmers not acknowledging that it's entirely possible to create a programming language which embeds our concept of privacy in cryptographic reality. All you would need for this is to model each user's interaction with the system as a statement, where a statement could be either code or data, and then sign and encrypt these statements by default and encrypt the statement's decryption key with recipients' public keys as needed. This might sound esoteric but we could already do this today just by taking something like Unison [1] and adding this encryption layer. As geeks we should really own up to the fact that it's perfectly feasible to do this... and get working on it. P.S. For a fun fact; at it's core such a language would pretty much be what John McCarthy described as 'the language for the year 2015.' [2] [1] http://unisonweb.org http://unisonweb.org [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3180 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3180
simoncion 11y ago
> It’s not integrated with anything... It's integrated with Thunderbird via Enigmail. It works at least as well as MS Outlook's integrated message signing. If your reply to that is something like "Everyone uses webmail.", I say "I've been using IMAP to access Gmail since five minutes after the feature was added to Gmail.".
- Decade 11y ago
  Ahem https://lwn.net/Articles/584542/ https://lwn.net/Articles/584542/
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Noted. And, yeah, that sucks... a lot. However, my habit of always composing plain-text messages and exclusively using attached signatures seems to have inadvertently shielded me from those issues. :) It has been more than a year since that article; I wonder if those bugs have been cleaned up. This[0] seems to indicate that the only email client that has real problems with attached signatures is Outlook Express. I can't bring myself to care much about Outlook Express users. (Is OE even installed on Windows 7 and later?) [0] https://www.phildev.net/pgp/pgp_clear_vs_mime.html https://www.phildev.net/pgp/pgp_clear_vs_mime.html
    - Decade 11y ago
      That issue has been in the Thunderbird/Enigmail Rube Goldberg setup forever, and publicly discussed since at least 2006. Always, the response is, Don’t use Enigmail with HTML email. At this point, it would be bigger news if they manage to fix it, so I expect to be informed if it happens. The bigger problems are that it’s not integrated and it’s not effective for shielding metadata. With difficulty and being mindful of the sharp edges, you can use OpenPGP on desktop. You need a clunky third-party email client to get it on mobile. Best case scenario, you send lots of extra data that gets ignored. Worst case, all those attached signatures get downloaded as files, causing confusion and anger. And there’s no interoperability with S/MIME, which actually is supported by most proprietary email clients. OpenPGP does not protect metadata. It piggybacks on SMTP, which publishes the sender, recipient, and subject line in the clear, along with the identity and timing of each server in the transport path from when you send the email to when it lands in your recipient’s mailbox. PGP was originally conceived as the “envelope” to protect your message contents, but in this era of unlimited surveillance we need to do better.

by Decade 11y ago

gonzo 11y ago

> Being riddled with fatal flaws is an aspect PGP shares with the lucrative Certificate Authority system, with S/MIME, with the DNS security system, with IPsec, with cell phone encryption. which fatal flaws are present in "IPsec"?

mtgx 11y ago
He may be referring to this: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12...

mtrimpe 11y ago

Amen; I'm still flabbergasted by programmers not acknowledging that it's entirely possible to create a programming language which embeds our concept of privacy in cryptographic reality. All you would need for this is to model each user's interaction with the system as a statement, where a statement could be either code or data, and then sign and encrypt these statements by default and encrypt the statement's decryption key with recipients' public keys as needed. This might sound esoteric but we could already do this today just by taking something like Unison [1] and adding this encryption layer. As geeks we should really own up to the fact that it's perfectly feasible to do this... and get working on it. P.S. For a fun fact; at it's core such a language would pretty much be what John McCarthy described as 'the language for the year 2015.' [2] [1] http://unisonweb.org http://unisonweb.org [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3180 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3180

simoncion 11y ago

> It’s not integrated with anything... It's integrated with Thunderbird via Enigmail. It works at least as well as MS Outlook's integrated message signing. If your reply to that is something like "Everyone uses webmail.", I say "I've been using IMAP to access Gmail since five minutes after the feature was added to Gmail.".

Decade 11y ago
Ahem https://lwn.net/Articles/584542/ https://lwn.net/Articles/584542/
- simoncion 11y ago
  Noted. And, yeah, that sucks... a lot. However, my habit of always composing plain-text messages and exclusively using attached signatures seems to have inadvertently shielded me from those issues. :) It has been more than a year since that article; I wonder if those bugs have been cleaned up. This[0] seems to indicate that the only email client that has real problems with attached signatures is Outlook Express. I can't bring myself to care much about Outlook Express users. (Is OE even installed on Windows 7 and later?) [0] https://www.phildev.net/pgp/pgp_clear_vs_mime.html https://www.phildev.net/pgp/pgp_clear_vs_mime.html
  - Decade 11y ago
    That issue has been in the Thunderbird/Enigmail Rube Goldberg setup forever, and publicly discussed since at least 2006. Always, the response is, Don’t use Enigmail with HTML email. At this point, it would be bigger news if they manage to fix it, so I expect to be informed if it happens. The bigger problems are that it’s not integrated and it’s not effective for shielding metadata. With difficulty and being mindful of the sharp edges, you can use OpenPGP on desktop. You need a clunky third-party email client to get it on mobile. Best case scenario, you send lots of extra data that gets ignored. Worst case, all those attached signatures get downloaded as files, causing confusion and anger. And there’s no interoperability with S/MIME, which actually is supported by most proprietary email clients. OpenPGP does not protect metadata. It piggybacks on SMTP, which publishes the sender, recipient, and subject line in the clear, along with the identity and timing of each server in the transport path from when you send the email to when it lands in your recipient’s mailbox. PGP was originally conceived as the “envelope” to protect your message contents, but in this era of unlimited surveillance we need to do better.