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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 oth

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.
        mbrumlow 7y ago
        I am not trying to win a popularity contest. If you care about secure messaging, and want to be sure you about who you are talking to -- then you have to use something like pgp. I don't think the number of people using something invalidates a technology's technical merits. All we now have is a bunch of people thinking they are secure to one day have a very rude awakening not if, but when their communications are compromised at for the sake of popularity and ease of use. Most of the arguments against PGP are about clunky clients, and such, this again is not a argument refuting the technology. Meanwhile the new systems solve the ui problems by dropping the most important part of encryption -- the ability to validate. So for me, I will stick with gpgp and the like.
        tptacek 7y ago
        The only people who agree with you about the need for PGP in serious secure messaging are members of the PGP cheering section. They're an old and venerable social organization dating back to the pre-HMAC CFB-mode cryptography in PGP itself. I have nothing bad to say about their justified and ancient society other than that they are wrong about everything involving cryptography and that they recommend tools that get people hurt. People who care very deeply about these problems and who have studied them more carefully than almost any message board commenter have evaluated PGP and Signal. Among secure messaging and cryptography engineers, PGP is alternately either amusing or an unfunny hindrance to progress. Signal, on the other hand, won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto. Don't use PGP.
    - dependenttypes 7y ago
      Would you happen to know if you can send stuff using Signal to someone whose phone is offline? You do seem to be able to do it using Wire but I would rather avoid it as the device verification seems broken.
      - haffenloher 7y ago
        Sure. Messaging via Signal (or via any other modern mobile messaging app) is designed to be asynchronous and doesn't require all participants of a chat to be online at the same time.
        dependenttypes 7y ago
        Signal has perfect forward secrecy though. I am unsure how that could be achieved if phone 1 sends a message, the phone gets disconnected and then phone 2 connects to it.
        haffenloher 7y ago
        For an explanation on how Signal achieves forward and future secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/ https://signal.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/ (or https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ for something more detailed).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
comboy 7y ago
You seem to be defending PK cryptography instead of OpenPGP.

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.
      - mbrumlow 7y ago
        I am not trying to win a popularity contest. If you care about secure messaging, and want to be sure you about who you are talking to -- then you have to use something like pgp. I don't think the number of people using something invalidates a technology's technical merits. All we now have is a bunch of people thinking they are secure to one day have a very rude awakening not if, but when their communications are compromised at for the sake of popularity and ease of use. Most of the arguments against PGP are about clunky clients, and such, this again is not a argument refuting the technology. Meanwhile the new systems solve the ui problems by dropping the most important part of encryption -- the ability to validate. So for me, I will stick with gpgp and the like.
        tptacek 7y ago
        The only people who agree with you about the need for PGP in serious secure messaging are members of the PGP cheering section. They're an old and venerable social organization dating back to the pre-HMAC CFB-mode cryptography in PGP itself. I have nothing bad to say about their justified and ancient society other than that they are wrong about everything involving cryptography and that they recommend tools that get people hurt. People who care very deeply about these problems and who have studied them more carefully than almost any message board commenter have evaluated PGP and Signal. Among secure messaging and cryptography engineers, PGP is alternately either amusing or an unfunny hindrance to progress. Signal, on the other hand, won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto. Don't use PGP.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    Would you happen to know if you can send stuff using Signal to someone whose phone is offline? You do seem to be able to do it using Wire but I would rather avoid it as the device verification seems broken.
    - haffenloher 7y ago
      Sure. Messaging via Signal (or via any other modern mobile messaging app) is designed to be asynchronous and doesn't require all participants of a chat to be online at the same time.
      - dependenttypes 7y ago
        Signal has perfect forward secrecy though. I am unsure how that could be achieved if phone 1 sends a message, the phone gets disconnected and then phone 2 connects to it.
        haffenloher 7y ago
        For an explanation on how Signal achieves forward and future secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/ https://signal.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/ (or https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ for something more detailed).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

comboy 7y ago

You seem to be defending PK cryptography instead of OpenPGP.