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Do we ever learn anything from past security breaches? What is the compelling security reason to ditch pgp? The _one_ thing it is good at is long-term identity
by exabrial 5y ago
Do we ever learn anything from past security breaches? What is the compelling security reason to ditch pgp?
The _one_ thing it is good at is long-term identity. There's ECDSA keys available now in PGP, and Ed25519 wouldn't be a stretch.
This looks and smells like NIH syndrome. PGP has had a lot of time to bake. Let's make incremental improvements, not start all of over because you don't understand history.
Oh and going all eggs in on one algorithm is stupid. Thinking there will never be problems with Ed25519 is naive. PGP was designed to be extended.
- tptacek 5y agoThese ideas are pretty close to discredited in cryptography engineering. Diversity in signature algorithms doesn't help when everyone uses the same algorithm anyways, and, more importantly, a negotiated algorithm makes it harder to recover from an new attack on algorithms, not easier: with a non-negotiable algorithm, you version the entire repository, and can reliably rule out vulnerable signatures. Negotiation and downgrade attacks have been endemic in "ciphersuite" schemes. There's a reason the field is moving towards simple, modern schemes like this one, and Debian has more experience than most in trying to make broken, crufty old PGP work.