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PGP is an alright protocol but I cannot recommend gpg for daily use by non-technical users. They make it extremely difficult to use long-term and simple issues

PGP is an alright protocol but I cannot recommend gpg for daily use by non-technical users. They make it extremely difficult to use long-term and simple issues like gpg-agent running as a background process become controversies where they could have just made it optional. Honestly,I think it's an alright piece of software but the project became the way it is as a result of the massive gnupg adoption in the *nix world and lack of competition. If it isn't cross-platform and user friendly,it shouldn't be used by the average citizen. As much as the cryptonerd in me likes this news,Gnupg as it is shouldn't be used for official matters. Most lawyers and judges would struggle to use it.

x220 8y ago
>If it isn't cross-platform and user friendly,it shouldn't be used by the average citizen You will never have cross-platform and user friendly signing software that also has bulletproof security. Let the people who are skilled enough to know what they are doing continue using GnuPG.
- lfam 8y ago
  Why won't we ever have cross-platform and usre friendly signing software that also has bulletproof security? We already have many programs that are cross-platform and user-friendly while also addressing way more complicated use cases than cryptographic singing.
- packet_nerd 8y ago
  This is the exact attitude that has gotten us where we are today (as in, pervasive bad security). "Do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got."
  - x220 8y ago
    I disagree. It is possible to make decent, good, and perhaps great security that is easy to teach and not too inconvenient that users will rebel. I think it is unreasonable to keep someone from using GnuPG in a legal fashion because average people cannot use it. You will never find signing software with sufficiently bulletproof security that average people can use. To suggest such also implies that average people need to regularly perform notarial acts, which I think is imaginative.
    - packet_nerd 8y ago
      The guy in the cubical next to me made a comment along the lines of "security is always inconvenient and hard" earlier today. And he's just expressing a widespread attitude, but I think it's not (or at least doesn't need to be) always true. If we do it right, we can make simple systems built from the ground up on fundamentally secure principals. Example: Think of the simplicity and security of a cryptocurrency transaction as compared to a traditional bank. The crypto transaction is so much simpler, easier, and much much more secure. I work in a bank, and there are so so many moving parts all with a myriad security weaknesses all chained together to make a transaction happen. First there's the web portal where the customer initiates the transaction. This is HTTPS which has well known flaws and so many things that could go wrong. Then his transaction goes into a SQL DB in the bank intranet, could be attacked hundreds of ways, then scripts process it into an ACH file, encrypt it with PGP, and SFTP it to the Fed. Those PGP keys were exchanged through unencrypted email, and the SFTP password was exchanged over the phone. Then the Fed uses a similar process to send it on to the destination bank, each step adding additional weak points. The cryptocurrency transaction, on the other hand, is a well defined mathematical problem with no ambiguity, few variables, and a few easy concepts to understand. Yes, there are a handful of things that could go wrong, but they are well define and well understood. In comparison to the bank transaction, the whole thing is just so simple, beautiful, and easy.
      - fwip 8y ago
        I would argue that the failure modes of a bank transfer are much better understood than any cryptocurrency. Or was the parity wallet multi-sig attack something that most lay-people knew about as a risk before it happened?
        gruez 8y ago
        >Or was the parity wallet multi-sig attack something that most lay-people knew about as a risk before it happened? IMO that's more of a problem with smart contracts than with cryptocurrencies as a whole. if you allow anyone to write code that controls millions of dollars, there's going to be ten different implementations and a hack in one of them is virtually guaranteed. on the other hand if the multisig mechanism is part of the network protocol, there's only 1 implementation which will be better scrutinized. even if there was a bug, at least the intention is clearly conveyed and can be fixed with a non-controversial hard fork. see: bitcoin's block reward integer underflow hack vs ethereum's DAO hack.
- laumars 8y ago
  Keybase managed it. The "cross platform" bit is completely irrelevant. The user friendly and strong security (there's no such thing as bullet proof security) points are certainly achievable with a little effort.
  - yayana 8y ago
    Keybase doesn't do smart card/token support so it would at most be replacing keyserver usage for a notary that would need to continue to use pgp keys.
    - fwip 8y ago
      It doesn't now, but it could.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    Cross platform is important for official matters because allowing a platform specific tool means the government,legal community and fellow citizens are also expected to use that platform to interact with content made or consumed by that platform specific tool.
    - laumars 8y ago
      I'm a strong advocate for writing platform agnostic code. My point was being cross platform is irrelevant to making something user friendly or secure.
      - badrabbit 8y ago
        In that case I agree with you,except to say "your platform isn't supported" is user-unfriendly.
        laumars 8y ago
        Sorry but you're still missing my point (though I didn't really make it all too clear). User friendly design is about understanding user behaviours, UI/UX, etc. It's about designing sane workflows and user interfaces. Whereas writing cross platform code is a technical complication regarding the internals of a particular application. The crossover is between cross platform development and user friendly design is just which UI toolkit you choose to use (ie Electron, Qt, native platform-specific widgets, etc?) and even that is really just an implementation detail rather than a fundamental roadblock in designing user friendly applications. Thus the requirement for something being user friendly shouldn't affected by the requirement for something being cross platform. This is why I say the cross platform point is irrelevant. Not because cross platform solutions aren't important but rather because they're not the reason many solutions aren't user friendly (the reason is much more simple than that: they were designed by technical people to be used by technical people).
- badrabbit 8y ago
  "Bulletproof" is a loaded term,something that is bulletproof may not be sulfiric acid proof for example. Anyway, the puropose of a security solution is to reduce risk to an acceptable degree. There are already plenty of apps and protocols that allow for secure message transmission and storage(signal,wire,tls,ssh,etc...) Why do you think GPGs task is special? FYI -- gpg is just a pgp client.
incompatible 8y ago
How is it not cross-platform? It does run on "both Windows and macOS" which seems to be the usual definition.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  Also runs on Android. Dunno about iOS.
  - Jgrubb 8y ago
    Yep, it does.
- badrabbit 8y ago
  I meant in general if the software isn't cross-platform and user friendly,it shouldn't be used for official purposes since a significant amount of citizens would be forcibly excluded. Gnupg gets the job done and is cross-platform but isn't user friendly.
Osiris 8y ago
Usability is a key issue. My employer requires that emails with certain types of content be sent with a GPG signature. I spent a few hours today figuring out the best way to do it. First, I used the CLI to < echo "..." | gpg --clear-sign > and paste that into Gmail (web), but the receiver didn't know how to verify the signature (Mac Mail with GPG Tools). Eventually I settled on Thunderbird with an add-on. It took some googling because the add-on defaulted to "Junior" mode. Eventually, I was able to send emails both signed and encrypted. So, the issue to me is that there needs to be a standard that can be easily integrated into commonly used communication tools, like Gmail, SMS, etc. Private key portability is also a problem. I have a USB-C yubikey, and it works on my laptop and my phone. Once USB-C becomes common, maybe carrying your private keys around with you will be much easier.
- caro_douglos 8y ago
  I like keybase.io for this. I don't recommend gpg stuff to non-techs...except when it's fairly straight forward, they do a good job. No affiliation with them. Just have an account and dig their ability to make pgp less intimidating. I'm looking forward to a chip implant from yubikey on their next gen!
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  Ask if they'll let you send text and zip files as attachments instead. You just save the file, use the encrypt file option, an encrypted file is generated, and attach that to the email. The receiver does gpg -d (file). It's how I use it. Let's me ignore most of GPG complexity and its potential risks. Also, I use zip with obscure names to hide content type. Just make extra, extra sure you click the encrypted file in attach dialog, not original. It can help to put them in different directories.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
travbrack 8y ago
Motivated non-technical users figured out how to use it to buy drugs on the dark web. It's not that hard to read a tutorial.

x220 8y ago

>If it isn't cross-platform and user friendly,it shouldn't be used by the average citizen You will never have cross-platform and user friendly signing software that also has bulletproof security. Let the people who are skilled enough to know what they are doing continue using GnuPG.

lfam 8y ago
Why won't we ever have cross-platform and usre friendly signing software that also has bulletproof security? We already have many programs that are cross-platform and user-friendly while also addressing way more complicated use cases than cryptographic singing.
packet_nerd 8y ago
This is the exact attitude that has gotten us where we are today (as in, pervasive bad security). "Do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got."
- x220 8y ago
  I disagree. It is possible to make decent, good, and perhaps great security that is easy to teach and not too inconvenient that users will rebel. I think it is unreasonable to keep someone from using GnuPG in a legal fashion because average people cannot use it. You will never find signing software with sufficiently bulletproof security that average people can use. To suggest such also implies that average people need to regularly perform notarial acts, which I think is imaginative.
  - packet_nerd 8y ago
    The guy in the cubical next to me made a comment along the lines of "security is always inconvenient and hard" earlier today. And he's just expressing a widespread attitude, but I think it's not (or at least doesn't need to be) always true. If we do it right, we can make simple systems built from the ground up on fundamentally secure principals. Example: Think of the simplicity and security of a cryptocurrency transaction as compared to a traditional bank. The crypto transaction is so much simpler, easier, and much much more secure. I work in a bank, and there are so so many moving parts all with a myriad security weaknesses all chained together to make a transaction happen. First there's the web portal where the customer initiates the transaction. This is HTTPS which has well known flaws and so many things that could go wrong. Then his transaction goes into a SQL DB in the bank intranet, could be attacked hundreds of ways, then scripts process it into an ACH file, encrypt it with PGP, and SFTP it to the Fed. Those PGP keys were exchanged through unencrypted email, and the SFTP password was exchanged over the phone. Then the Fed uses a similar process to send it on to the destination bank, each step adding additional weak points. The cryptocurrency transaction, on the other hand, is a well defined mathematical problem with no ambiguity, few variables, and a few easy concepts to understand. Yes, there are a handful of things that could go wrong, but they are well define and well understood. In comparison to the bank transaction, the whole thing is just so simple, beautiful, and easy.
    - fwip 8y ago
      I would argue that the failure modes of a bank transfer are much better understood than any cryptocurrency. Or was the parity wallet multi-sig attack something that most lay-people knew about as a risk before it happened?
      - gruez 8y ago
        >Or was the parity wallet multi-sig attack something that most lay-people knew about as a risk before it happened? IMO that's more of a problem with smart contracts than with cryptocurrencies as a whole. if you allow anyone to write code that controls millions of dollars, there's going to be ten different implementations and a hack in one of them is virtually guaranteed. on the other hand if the multisig mechanism is part of the network protocol, there's only 1 implementation which will be better scrutinized. even if there was a bug, at least the intention is clearly conveyed and can be fixed with a non-controversial hard fork. see: bitcoin's block reward integer underflow hack vs ethereum's DAO hack.
laumars 8y ago
Keybase managed it. The "cross platform" bit is completely irrelevant. The user friendly and strong security (there's no such thing as bullet proof security) points are certainly achievable with a little effort.
- yayana 8y ago
  Keybase doesn't do smart card/token support so it would at most be replacing keyserver usage for a notary that would need to continue to use pgp keys.
  - fwip 8y ago
    It doesn't now, but it could.
- badrabbit 8y ago
  Cross platform is important for official matters because allowing a platform specific tool means the government,legal community and fellow citizens are also expected to use that platform to interact with content made or consumed by that platform specific tool.
  - laumars 8y ago
    I'm a strong advocate for writing platform agnostic code. My point was being cross platform is irrelevant to making something user friendly or secure.
    - badrabbit 8y ago
      In that case I agree with you,except to say "your platform isn't supported" is user-unfriendly.
      - laumars 8y ago
        Sorry but you're still missing my point (though I didn't really make it all too clear). User friendly design is about understanding user behaviours, UI/UX, etc. It's about designing sane workflows and user interfaces. Whereas writing cross platform code is a technical complication regarding the internals of a particular application. The crossover is between cross platform development and user friendly design is just which UI toolkit you choose to use (ie Electron, Qt, native platform-specific widgets, etc?) and even that is really just an implementation detail rather than a fundamental roadblock in designing user friendly applications. Thus the requirement for something being user friendly shouldn't affected by the requirement for something being cross platform. This is why I say the cross platform point is irrelevant. Not because cross platform solutions aren't important but rather because they're not the reason many solutions aren't user friendly (the reason is much more simple than that: they were designed by technical people to be used by technical people).
badrabbit 8y ago
"Bulletproof" is a loaded term,something that is bulletproof may not be sulfiric acid proof for example. Anyway, the puropose of a security solution is to reduce risk to an acceptable degree. There are already plenty of apps and protocols that allow for secure message transmission and storage(signal,wire,tls,ssh,etc...) Why do you think GPGs task is special? FYI -- gpg is just a pgp client.

incompatible 8y ago

How is it not cross-platform? It does run on "both Windows and macOS" which seems to be the usual definition.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
Also runs on Android. Dunno about iOS.
- Jgrubb 8y ago
  Yep, it does.
badrabbit 8y ago
I meant in general if the software isn't cross-platform and user friendly,it shouldn't be used for official purposes since a significant amount of citizens would be forcibly excluded. Gnupg gets the job done and is cross-platform but isn't user friendly.

Osiris 8y ago

Usability is a key issue. My employer requires that emails with certain types of content be sent with a GPG signature. I spent a few hours today figuring out the best way to do it. First, I used the CLI to < echo "..." | gpg --clear-sign > and paste that into Gmail (web), but the receiver didn't know how to verify the signature (Mac Mail with GPG Tools). Eventually I settled on Thunderbird with an add-on. It took some googling because the add-on defaulted to "Junior" mode. Eventually, I was able to send emails both signed and encrypted. So, the issue to me is that there needs to be a standard that can be easily integrated into commonly used communication tools, like Gmail, SMS, etc. Private key portability is also a problem. I have a USB-C yubikey, and it works on my laptop and my phone. Once USB-C becomes common, maybe carrying your private keys around with you will be much easier.

caro_douglos 8y ago
I like keybase.io for this. I don't recommend gpg stuff to non-techs...except when it's fairly straight forward, they do a good job. No affiliation with them. Just have an account and dig their ability to make pgp less intimidating. I'm looking forward to a chip implant from yubikey on their next gen!
nickpsecurity 8y ago
Ask if they'll let you send text and zip files as attachments instead. You just save the file, use the encrypt file option, an encrypted file is generated, and attach that to the email. The receiver does gpg -d (file). It's how I use it. Let's me ignore most of GPG complexity and its potential risks. Also, I use zip with obscure names to hide content type. Just make extra, extra sure you click the encrypted file in attach dialog, not original. It can help to put them in different directories.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

travbrack 8y ago

Motivated non-technical users figured out how to use it to buy drugs on the dark web. It's not that hard to read a tutorial.