8 ms·
I think what people are saying is that this has been represented as an intrinsic flaw in PGP and that this may cause the media to basically say PGP is broken.
by scandox 8y ago
I think what people are saying is that this has been represented as an intrinsic flaw in PGP and that this may cause the media to basically say PGP is broken.
I agree that this is significant because it affects many users and the potential effect is extremely negative.
On the other hand if the headlines on this were more focused I think people on HN would not have reacted so negatively.
- baby 8y agoWhen almost all implementation of PGP are broken, can we say PGP is broken?
- ComodoHacker 8y agoBut in MOV SS/POP SS case we don't say Intel chips are broken, we fix the OSes and the docs.
- Natanael_L 8y agoWhy not both? Documentation can also be faulty
- LinuxBender 8y agoIs PGP broken? Or the plugins that make PGP easier to use email, that are rendering HTML, or those perhaps what is really broken?
- tptacek 8y agoPretty much the whole cryptography field has been saying PGP is broken for something close to a decade now; the attack published today is an applied refinement of theoretical tools we've had for a very long time. The MAC of a PGP message is the SHA-1 of its plaintext appended to the message. There are coherent ways to downplay today's announcement, but "PGP isn't broken" isn't one of them. The best you can do is "PGP is broken but we already knew that".
- LinuxBender 8y agoWhat would be the most sensible steps forward for the PGP maintainers? Is this a rewrite, or can they iterate though and make incremental improvements around the flaws that have been discussed over the past decade?
- Natanael_L 8y agoA bit of both. We can fix a few bits in compatible ways, but it's not a reliable long term solution. Long term, we really need an upgrade that breaks compatibility with old unfixable clients
- xoa 8y ago>Pretty much the whole cryptography field has been saying PGP is broken for something close to a decade now; the attack published today is an applied refinement of theoretical tools we've had for a very long time. Yes. But unless I've missed something no one has bothered to even attempt any modernized, improved replacement, so we continue to muddle along. I've certainly heard complaints about existing secure email technologies for well over a decade, but at the same time the cryptography field has never offered an upgrade. Instead it's always been "completely give up on the concept of email (which in no way needs to be insecure) for these modern hip non-federated often proprietary clunky slow kitchen sink instant messenger things instead". To which the answer has and continues to be "no". Maybe we live in a world where the creation and upgrading of a technology like email is no longer feasible and that's just how it is. If so though I foresee email as it is existing into the foreseeable future, and in turn it'll be useful to have some sort of crypto bolted on top, as a marginal improvement vs entirely plain text. Hopefully there will be enough security oxygen that OpenPGP could at least modernize the foundations a little even if it meant some breaking changes to old implementations.
- tptacek 8y agoNo, contrary to what you're saying, virtually all the work done in retail cryptography over the last several years has been in secure messaging. Don't send secrets over email; use a cryptographically secure messaging application, like Signal or Wire.
- smsm42 8y agoIn this particular case, some implementations of one of the use cases are broken. This is completely incorrect to say PGP is broken as it implies all (or most) use cases and not only particular scenario.