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Can we stop saying that pgp is busted and just talk about how the keyservers are the problem with how people decides to exchange keys ? I don't use key servers

Can we stop saying that pgp is busted and just talk about how the keyservers are the problem with how people decides to exchange keys ? I don't use key servers. So when I get an encrypted message from my friend I have no issues. Allowing a third party such as a key server to play some role in veifiing the authenticity of a key is basically broken from tht start, and has nothing to do with pgp it's self.

katrielalex 7y ago
That's ok, pgp is also terrible to use on the command line so we can complain about that.
- mbrumlow 7y ago
  Yes
tptacek 7y ago
OpenPGP is broken in the sense discussed in this newsletter: the keyserver system interacts in a catastrophic way with GnuPG's naive key parsing code, and OpenPGP's deployment at scale depends on keyservers. OpenPGP is broken in other ways! But this is a headline given to a particular current events story about OpenPGP.
- mbrumlow 7y ago
  Then there is no need to say OpenPGP is broken. Once you hand off the validation to a 3rd party that does nothing to validate other than a voting system of other people then you are done. You basically put your PGP keys on reddit and decided the key is valid because it made it to the front page. PGP may be many things, but it is not broken, and saying so is blaming the tool for a obviously bad use of it.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    It is obviously broken. Your objection is that it isn't comprehensively or irretrievably broken, and while I disagree, I don't have to litigate that, because the narrower sense of the word carries the article. I don't think you can fall back on this being an "obviously bad use of the tool", by the way, since it's a pretty core use of OpenPGP. I don't use keyservers either (or didn't, when I still used PGP, which I actively avoid doing now), but I'm outnumbered by the people who do.
    - na85 7y ago
      What do you use for secure communication in lieu of openpgp?
      - tptacek 7y ago
        Signal or Wire, magic-wormhole. The obvious stuff.
        mbrumlow 7y ago
        And yet all of those bypass the hard part of validating the sender. These again trust the service. PGP is more than simply encryption. It provides a means of trusted identity. End to End encryption is pointless if you have no way to validate that a message came sender. Relying on automated systems for key exchange will always suffer from this problem.
        tptacek 7y ago
        That "means of trusted identity" doesn't work, to a first approximation nobody even attempts to use it, of those that do, a vanishing fraction "succeed", and their reward for doing so is the adoption of rickety 1990s encryption. Among practicing cryptography engineers, "web of trust" is a punch line, not a goal. The lucky PGP users stick to the command line, which is so clunky that they'll use it rarely. The less fortunate will use PGP email clients which are so poorly thought out that they just last year managed to exfiltrate plaintext to attackers. Signal use in the real world dwarfs that of OpenPGP; it's almost certainly many orders of magnitude.
  - comboy 7y ago
    You seem to be defending PK cryptography instead of OpenPGP.
Nasrudith 7y ago
I wouldn't say the web of trust aspect is broken but non-scaling personally. Key servers and others are "compromises" in a way that can lead to being compromised. If you don't have an effectively auditible trail of knowledge to be able to tell if someone attempted trickery then it doesn't serve the full purpose - but that doesn't scale well.
edoceo 7y ago
Isn't keybase.io trying to solve this?
- yarrel 7y ago
  They decided to bolt on sending cryptocurrency to people they haven't KYC/AML'd instead.
- zaarn 7y ago
  keybase.io also decided that PGP is terrible and made their own ASCII armor format (that is arguably much better than the horrible abomination that PGP likes to produce). Basically unless you plug your GPG installation into keybase or do other GPG specific things, it's not using PGP/GPG at all and instead their own format.
rrggrr 7y ago
No, it's a choice. It's "pretty good" privacy to exchange encrypted comms via Keybase vs. plaintext. And, yes, if it were existentially important than direct key exchange would be better.
runn1ng 7y ago
Well, I always ignore the more grandiose claims - since there is currently no alternative for GPG, and installing Electron apps for Signal or Wire (which then use a single centralized server) really isn’t a viable GPG alternative But even if you don’t agree with the argument that federation is dead and we truly need Electron apps (with eternally outdated Chrome instances) for secure communication, still you have to admit that PGP is arcane, the cryptography is not modern, and people by and large are ignoring the “web of trust” system. PGP needs a dramatic overhaul, at the end it won’t really be PGP. (I am not sure if there isn’t a double ratchet system working in federated way. Jabber with OMEMO/OTRv3? Matrix? I don’t know)
- feanaro 7y ago
  Matrix uses double ratchet crypto and is federated, yes. Encryption is not on by default yet due to UX problems, though. It's supposed to be solved soon.

katrielalex 7y ago

That's ok, pgp is also terrible to use on the command line so we can complain about that.

mbrumlow 7y ago
Yes

tptacek 7y ago

OpenPGP is broken in the sense discussed in this newsletter: the keyserver system interacts in a catastrophic way with GnuPG's naive key parsing code, and OpenPGP's deployment at scale depends on keyservers. OpenPGP is broken in other ways! But this is a headline given to a particular current events story about OpenPGP.

mbrumlow 7y ago
Then there is no need to say OpenPGP is broken. Once you hand off the validation to a 3rd party that does nothing to validate other than a voting system of other people then you are done. You basically put your PGP keys on reddit and decided the key is valid because it made it to the front page. PGP may be many things, but it is not broken, and saying so is blaming the tool for a obviously bad use of it.
- tptacek 7y ago
  It is obviously broken. Your objection is that it isn't comprehensively or irretrievably broken, and while I disagree, I don't have to litigate that, because the narrower sense of the word carries the article. I don't think you can fall back on this being an "obviously bad use of the tool", by the way, since it's a pretty core use of OpenPGP. I don't use keyservers either (or didn't, when I still used PGP, which I actively avoid doing now), but I'm outnumbered by the people who do.
  - na85 7y ago
    What do you use for secure communication in lieu of openpgp?
    - tptacek 7y ago
      Signal or Wire, magic-wormhole. The obvious stuff.
      - mbrumlow 7y ago
        And yet all of those bypass the hard part of validating the sender. These again trust the service. PGP is more than simply encryption. It provides a means of trusted identity. End to End encryption is pointless if you have no way to validate that a message came sender. Relying on automated systems for key exchange will always suffer from this problem.
        tptacek 7y ago
        That "means of trusted identity" doesn't work, to a first approximation nobody even attempts to use it, of those that do, a vanishing fraction "succeed", and their reward for doing so is the adoption of rickety 1990s encryption. Among practicing cryptography engineers, "web of trust" is a punch line, not a goal. The lucky PGP users stick to the command line, which is so clunky that they'll use it rarely. The less fortunate will use PGP email clients which are so poorly thought out that they just last year managed to exfiltrate plaintext to attackers. Signal use in the real world dwarfs that of OpenPGP; it's almost certainly many orders of magnitude.
- comboy 7y ago
  You seem to be defending PK cryptography instead of OpenPGP.

Nasrudith 7y ago

I wouldn't say the web of trust aspect is broken but non-scaling personally. Key servers and others are "compromises" in a way that can lead to being compromised. If you don't have an effectively auditible trail of knowledge to be able to tell if someone attempted trickery then it doesn't serve the full purpose - but that doesn't scale well.

edoceo 7y ago

Isn't keybase.io trying to solve this?

yarrel 7y ago
They decided to bolt on sending cryptocurrency to people they haven't KYC/AML'd instead.
zaarn 7y ago
keybase.io also decided that PGP is terrible and made their own ASCII armor format (that is arguably much better than the horrible abomination that PGP likes to produce). Basically unless you plug your GPG installation into keybase or do other GPG specific things, it's not using PGP/GPG at all and instead their own format.

rrggrr 7y ago

No, it's a choice. It's "pretty good" privacy to exchange encrypted comms via Keybase vs. plaintext. And, yes, if it were existentially important than direct key exchange would be better.

runn1ng 7y ago

Well, I always ignore the more grandiose claims - since there is currently no alternative for GPG, and installing Electron apps for Signal or Wire (which then use a single centralized server) really isn’t a viable GPG alternative But even if you don’t agree with the argument that federation is dead and we truly need Electron apps (with eternally outdated Chrome instances) for secure communication, still you have to admit that PGP is arcane, the cryptography is not modern, and people by and large are ignoring the “web of trust” system. PGP needs a dramatic overhaul, at the end it won’t really be PGP. (I am not sure if there isn’t a double ratchet system working in federated way. Jabber with OMEMO/OTRv3? Matrix? I don’t know)

feanaro 7y ago
Matrix uses double ratchet crypto and is federated, yes. Encryption is not on by default yet due to UX problems, though. It's supposed to be solved soon.