10 ms·

> I wonder if pgp is fundamentally flawed, or we have a deep conceptual usability issue here. I don't think the "WoT" is conceptually flawed, and frankly, the

• cabalamat 10y ago
  > I don't think the "WoT" is conceptually flawed, and frankly, the argument that "people of average intelligence" can't grasp the concept comes from a very high horse and is also untrue. I disagree. I have written email encryption software, and I find WoT complicated. In light of this recent article on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13111768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13111768 I suggest you re-evaluate the level of ability of the average user.
• smhost 10y ago
  The standard for adoptability isn't the average person at their peak hours of attention and focus. It's the drunk teenager at 2 in the morning fumbling around in the dark.
  • dublinben 10y ago
    A functional WoT should be no more difficult to use than managing your Facebook friends or contacts on your phone. Neither of those are difficult tasks, and are achieved by normal users every day.
    • jahewson 10y ago
      Yeah I'm sure it's ridiculously simple and all the experts here saying it looks like the idea itself is fundamentally flawed are wrong.
      • dublinben 10y ago
        I never said it was simple, and nobody is. It's clearly not a simple problem, or we'd have a better solution by now!
      • at612 10y ago
        > all the experts here Which experts? And what are those fundamental flaws?
    • sigsergv 10y ago
      What is a “functional WoT”? The main trouble here: it's a really hard conceptually, if you delegate that hardness to 3rd party you will completely lose WoT essence.
  • gvb 10y ago
    You might want to reconsider your analogy. When I was a drunk teenager at 2 in the morning fumbling around in the dark, my attention and focus was at 110%!
    • bbcbasic 10y ago
      And you'd need to rely on a web of trust to avoid getting an infection.
• bisby 10y ago
  Yeah. It takes some reading to understand the different levels of trust for a key. Even rewording those levels could be effective, if perhaps a bit verbose. []Distrust []Trust only this key []Trust this key to automatically trust other keys []This is my key Obviously I dont know what all the levels exactly mean. but as far as I can tell, these are the levels of "web of trust", where for it to truly be a web, #3 should be the default. I either dont trust someone, I trust someone to represent themselves, I trust someone's to vouch for of others, or I am that someone.
  • XorNot 10y ago
    There's also context. I trust the government to represent my bank. I don't necessarily trust it to represent my friends etc.
• zby 10y ago
  Some time ago I had an idea for a web presentation of WoT - I thought it would be fun to explore and also maybe present a kind of gamified incentive to build WoT. I also thought that given how old the thing is there should be good libraries that would make writing it easy. Unfortunately this is was not the case - there are no real libs - there are only some workarounds that shell out the execs to do the work and then parse the output and it would be to resource expensive to run it at a web server. I don't think WoT or PGP are fundamentally flawed - but we need a lot of experimentation to make it work and for that we need good libs.
• tscs37 10y ago
  >A technical criticism of PGP/GPG is of course also possible. The whole thing is a museum of early 1990s crypto, with default ciphers like CAST5 and messages not being authenticated - and even if the message is authenticated most parts of the PGP protocol are not, meaning that you got that big bunch of C code maintained by that one German guy over there that parses unauthenticated bytes that you shipped through half the internet with a big neon-red sticker on it saying "I'M PGP PLEASE TAMPER WITH ME". Honestly, this made me laugh. But it also makes me think. GPG and PGP are ancient pieces of somehow working code that probably should not be allowed to operate any significant parts of human communication. IMO we should aim for a Crypto like Signal presents it; simple yet secure enough for most users. It might be worthwhile to bring Signal (or atleast the idea) to other protocols like E-Mail.
  • gliese1337 10y ago
    > It might be worthwhile to bring Signal (or at least the idea) to other protocols like E-Mail. I'm glad to see someone else thinking the same way as me on this! I got myself an idea for Yet Another Secure Messaging App a while back. After a little market research, I kinda decided, well, everything that I want to do can already be done by PGP, or Signal, or Whisper... except that where they are easy to use, they don't integrate with e-mail, and where the integrate with e-mail, they are not easy to use. So, there's still room for more diversity in the market of providing easy-to-use secure, verifiable messaging, especially without trying to replace e-mail wholesale like so many messaging platforms (secure and otherwise) do. And maybe I'll actually get around to building it someday.
    • tscs37 10y ago
      The easy part is the crypto, that's been done to death and back. Signal has managed to do the "How can we exchange keys while atleast one of us is always offline?" part. So a good and somewhat PFS key exchange should be possible too. Integrating that seamlessly with email is gonna be hard and require a service to register emails or domains that support the new protocol. Otherwise you end up with the PGP situation. One want people's mail to automagically encrypt when both have it. Automagically is the best security there is for Joe Average. On the big list of security problems you face for Jane Average, "Werks Automagically" is Point 1 written in golden ink by the pope himself in 72pt fontsize and "Secure against State Adversaries" is Point 2 written in silver by the pope's cat on the second page in 16pt fontsize. One might also want to introduce a benefit, like disabling it for spammers by having some kind of verification (Phone Number or something?) and heavily police HTML formatting so that little Green Icon next the email means more than "this one spent 30 seconds to find a large prime pair" and more like "this email is probably safe to open, nobody will track you and nobody is going to sell you fake viagra". People should want to use it, not have to use it to be secure or something. But as you said, that all requires work and 99% of my time I personally like being unproductive, so I guess it'll never happen.
• lbenes 10y ago
  I worked in IT for an engineering company that required all external emails to be PGP encrypted. Despite all engineers having Symantec PGP software installed and setup, training, and support of IT, they would often ignore this policy. The excuse, often valid, was it would require IT from both companies to setup the encrypted keys for the first time for new users. If the system is too complex for engineers, the idea of this being usable for the average users is a pipe dream. PGP needs to be as simple as the SSL Lock in a browser if there is to ever be any hope of widespread adoption. There needs to be a single system of trusted PGP universal key servers that allow the details of key generation/management to be hidden from the user, just like SSL is with the web browser. We'd still be using HTTP if SSL was as complex as PGP. Same ssh replacing telnet. E-mail's lack of progress on this front is primarily a UX issue, and until it's solved PGP will remain a tool for the select few.
  • XorNot 10y ago
    99% of crypto would work just fine if you appended an OTR-like protocol over the top of email. First email is "hey we're interested in blah..." and is sent in the clear. Then have the message window change color as subsequent emails get the protocol more secured.
    • DigitalJack 10y ago
      I hate color coding. I'm in the 8-12% of men that have red-green deficient vision. You can use 10% as a rule of thumb. If I'm not mistaken in my probability math, that means in a group of 5 men, there is a 50% chance one of them is "color blind." Yet the world insists on using red/green as bad/good indicators. Drives me nuts.
      • caf 10y ago
        You are mistaken. If probability of each of the 5 men being colorblind is independent (so eg. they're not related etc), then there's a 41% chance that at least one of them is (1 - 0.9⁵). (There's a 33% chance that exactly one of them is: 0.1 × 0.9⁴ × ⁵C₁).
• user5994461 10y ago
  I have to partially disagree with that. Calling PGP an utter failure is an understatement. Just like calling a cat a small tiger. PGP is possibly the WORST experience in usability for any well known software that ever lived. This thing should be taught in courses for decades to come as how to fail a product by 1) having no UI 2) no integrations with anything 3) zero usability 4) not even trying to give a fuck about normal users 5) in fact, not even trying to make it possible to use for advanced users. --- You want signed email & identities. It's simple. Just get the national government to distribute RSA USB keys to every citizen. Then they can use them on public government websites (taxes & jobs stuff) to confirm poeple's identities, just plug in the key. Quick and simple. (And that's not incompatible with ALSO asking for a password that was send in a different paper letter. 2FA-style.). Then later, citizens can sign the emails they send to everyone with gmail/hotmail because they'll add the feature to recognize the national USB identity key, now that there are X millions people using it.
  • cdelsolar 10y ago
    Really? Which national government? Why wouldn't they backdoor it?
    • user5994461 10y ago
      Any government who wants to bring 2FA to its citizens. Shipping a national backdoor is an entirely different topic. Please focus on the use case at hands.
      • spenczar5 10y ago
        I think that issue is central. You're describing a scheme with a central, trusted authority distributing keys. The question is, what's a central authority we can all trust? I think many people wouldn't trust any government. At that point, the design crumbles.
        • user5994461 10y ago
          Well. You trust your government to issue national ID card and e-passports already.
• edejong 10y ago
  The web of trust is fundamentally flawed and for very simple reasons. First of all, the WoT is based on belief networks. What is a belief? Is it based on a probability? Is it binary? Can we believe something negatively? Whatever it is, we know it is subjective and difficult to define quantitively. Second of all, even when formally specifying a belief using a certain quantity, we need to calculate transitive beliefs (person A beliefs with certainty x the identity of person B, C and D, who each believe with certainty y the identity of person E and A). This requires doing some matrix inversions for which the whole matrix needs to be known. However, who do we trust to provide us with the matrix? If I can provide the matrix, I can also tamper by adding extra nodes, thus shifting trust towards nodes I control. We can provide the matrix in a distributed fashion, but how do we prove completeness? Then there is a temporal aspect to WoT which is hard to tackle. I might have a belief now, but that does not entail I will belief it tomorrow. Without a continuous stream of events on a subject, the precision of my beliefs are always diminishing. However, the current WoT networks do not take this fully into account (or transitive beliefs for that matter).
• zeveb 10y ago
  > Web of Trust implies such a glaringly obvious visual metaphor that I am truly in awe that not a single program works that way. Yeah, but it doesn't actually work. The fact that I know you (i.e., I'm willing to certify your identity) implies nothing about my trust in identities you certify. For all I know, you mint a new identity every second, and then use all those newly-minted identities to cross-sign one another's keys.
• morgante 10y ago
  > I don't think the "WoT" is conceptually flawed, and frankly, the argument that "people of average intelligence" can't grasp the concept comes from a very high horse and is also untrue. The average person already struggles to even use a computer and to accomplish tasks which seem very basic to us. [0] I can't imagine them figuring out how to use PGP. The WoT is a complicated system to understand for even technically proficient users, let alone average ones. [0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/