4 ms·

The GP only said you should know it not the reinvent it. The rant you are quoting does not add too much to that point IMHO (age, what the author suggest does n

by riedel 7y ago

The GP only said you should know it not the reinvent it. The rant you are quoting does not add too much to that point IMHO (age, what the author suggest does not solve many problems) So what do you use for signing and encryption today when setting up a heterogeneous system like email or git?

pcr910303 7y ago
> So what do you use for signing and encryption today when setting up a heterogeneous system like email or git? I don't. For Email, quoting the aforementioned post[0]... > Encrypting Email > Don’t. > Email is insecure. Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else (we don’t know a PGP email user who hasn’t seen this happen). PGP email is forward-insecure. Email metadata, including the subject (which is literally message content), are always plaintext. > This isn’t going to get fixed. To make actually-secure email, you’d have to tunnel another protocol over email (you’d still be conceding traffic analysis attacks). At that point, why bother pretending? > Encrypting email is asking for a calamity. Recommending email encryption to at-risk users is malpractice. Anyone who tells you it’s secure to communicate over PGP-encrypted email is putting their weird preferences ahead of your safety. For signing commits in git, I'll quote Filippo[1]'s 'Sigining git commits considered harmful'[2] rant on Twitter. > One of my issues with it is that it's marketed for a problem it does not solve (git metadata authentication and identity) and it's way suboptimal for the problem it solves (signed releases). > I don't believe it works for that. You need at least a rebase (and key rotation, and identity) story for that. > Pushes can be just as important as contents (imagine force pushing an old signed vulnerable tree to master) and are completely unprotected by this model. > In the security space I struggle to see the line between "doesn't do the job" and "harmful", but sure, I am willing to downgrade "considered harmful" to "doesn't make sense". If you still want to encrypt something plain text though, I would recommend age[3], which is: > A simple, modern and secure encryption tool with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability. [0]: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html#encrypting-email https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html#... [1]: https://filippo.io https://filippo.io [2]: https://twitter.com/filosottile/status/1248110291751231488 https://twitter.com/filosottile/status/1248110291751231488 [3]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age https://github.com/FiloSottile/age
- riedel 7y ago
  I think the people you are quoting live in a different world than me. I don't talk to whistle blowers that much. And sure there are still attack vectors. However I want to protect my email that may contain personal information from being leaked. Both SMIME and PGP do a reasonably good job. Until something usable and widespread appears. Also digital signing seems to be better to me than sending scans with signatures . This is the reality. People would call me nuts for sending them age signed content. I see really no benefit in using different keys . It seems also not formally verified . To much evangelism for me.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > However I want to protect my email that may contain personal information from being leaked. Both SMIME and PGP do a reasonably good job. Until something usable and widespread appears. PGP provides essentially no additional protection beyond SMIME, and provides a false sense of security. PGP is a bad standard that should die. Age doesn't have much to be formally verified. It uses well understood crypto primitives from the go standard library. What formal verification do you want? That the arguments are passed to the underlying libraries correctly?
    - riedel 7y ago
      Why would pgp need to add sth over smime cryptowise? To me the difference is trust allowing sth. like autocrypt to be implemented . For me both work when build into a client: Regarding proofs, i was just trying to comment on all the go/rust praises. Why would i need type safety if its such a thin layer. I am using openssl with bash for trivial encryption tasks. Not much can go wrong either. An Ada spark re-implementation of gpg would be still prefered by me if you just complain about too much nonauditable code.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        If it didn't add security, why use it?

by riedel 7y ago

pcr910303 7y ago

> So what do you use for signing and encryption today when setting up a heterogeneous system like email or git? I don't. For Email, quoting the aforementioned post[0]... > Encrypting Email > Don’t. > Email is insecure. Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else (we don’t know a PGP email user who hasn’t seen this happen). PGP email is forward-insecure. Email metadata, including the subject (which is literally message content), are always plaintext. > This isn’t going to get fixed. To make actually-secure email, you’d have to tunnel another protocol over email (you’d still be conceding traffic analysis attacks). At that point, why bother pretending? > Encrypting email is asking for a calamity. Recommending email encryption to at-risk users is malpractice. Anyone who tells you it’s secure to communicate over PGP-encrypted email is putting their weird preferences ahead of your safety. For signing commits in git, I'll quote Filippo[1]'s 'Sigining git commits considered harmful'[2] rant on Twitter. > One of my issues with it is that it's marketed for a problem it does not solve (git metadata authentication and identity) and it's way suboptimal for the problem it solves (signed releases). > I don't believe it works for that. You need at least a rebase (and key rotation, and identity) story for that. > Pushes can be just as important as contents (imagine force pushing an old signed vulnerable tree to master) and are completely unprotected by this model. > In the security space I struggle to see the line between "doesn't do the job" and "harmful", but sure, I am willing to downgrade "considered harmful" to "doesn't make sense". If you still want to encrypt something plain text though, I would recommend age[3], which is: > A simple, modern and secure encryption tool with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability. [0]: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html#encrypting-email https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html#... [1]: https://filippo.io https://filippo.io [2]: https://twitter.com/filosottile/status/1248110291751231488 https://twitter.com/filosottile/status/1248110291751231488 [3]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

riedel 7y ago
I think the people you are quoting live in a different world than me. I don't talk to whistle blowers that much. And sure there are still attack vectors. However I want to protect my email that may contain personal information from being leaked. Both SMIME and PGP do a reasonably good job. Until something usable and widespread appears. Also digital signing seems to be better to me than sending scans with signatures . This is the reality. People would call me nuts for sending them age signed content. I see really no benefit in using different keys . It seems also not formally verified . To much evangelism for me.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > However I want to protect my email that may contain personal information from being leaked. Both SMIME and PGP do a reasonably good job. Until something usable and widespread appears. PGP provides essentially no additional protection beyond SMIME, and provides a false sense of security. PGP is a bad standard that should die. Age doesn't have much to be formally verified. It uses well understood crypto primitives from the go standard library. What formal verification do you want? That the arguments are passed to the underlying libraries correctly?
  - riedel 7y ago
    Why would pgp need to add sth over smime cryptowise? To me the difference is trust allowing sth. like autocrypt to be implemented . For me both work when build into a client: Regarding proofs, i was just trying to comment on all the go/rust praises. Why would i need type safety if its such a thin layer. I am using openssl with bash for trivial encryption tasks. Not much can go wrong either. An Ada spark re-implementation of gpg would be still prefered by me if you just complain about too much nonauditable code.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      If it didn't add security, why use it?