3 ms·
> I'm given to understand that OpenPGP as such is not vile per se; it is a standard on which you can build a secure and flexible system that can evolve as ciph
by woodruffw 3y ago
> I'm given to understand that OpenPGP as such is not vile per se; it is a standard on which you can build a secure and flexible system that can evolve as ciphers evolve, etc. It's GnuPG that gave it all bad fame.
No, OpenPGP is pretty bad as well. The RFC contains all kinds of things that wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a modern design, including:
* Encouraging compression before encryption (Ss. 2.3)
* A pointlessly malleable packet and certificate format, one that allows certificate bindings to be stripped off without invalidating the certificate itself (Ss. 5.5.1.1)
* All kinds of dangerous primitives: DSA, MD5 and SHA-1, etc.
* A brittle not-HMAC for message tampering detection (Ss. 5.14)
And so on; those were just the ones from the top of my head. OpenPGP's decisions were understandable in the early-to-mid 1990s, and justifiable (for compatibility purposes) through the early-to-mid 2000s. But that ship has long since sailed.
- bscphil 3y ago> compression before encryption What's the matter with that? It should be secure with any modern cryptography primitives. (I mean, it's obviously no less secure to do `age -e myfile.7z` than it is to do `age -e myfile`.)
- Avamander 3y agoIt creates a compression oracle, potentially leaking parts of plaintext.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y agoThe compression oracle (a lookup table if I'm not mistaken) would still be encrypted, right?
- dale_glass 3y agoSometimes you can interrogate the compression. CRIME attack: if you can provide something to the target system, then it will compress differently depending on what's provided. If you guess right, then the compressed version will be smaller. VOIP statistics: You can make very good guesses about encrypted voice communication by knowing how it compresses speech, figuring out how long different phonemes are, and statistically trying to reconstruct the conversation.
- the_only_law 3y ago> VOIP statistics: You can make very good guesses about encrypted voice communication by knowing how it compresses speech, figuring out how long different phonemes are, and statistically trying to reconstruct the conversation. This sounds interesting, do you know of any good resources to start learning about how to do this?
- dale_glass 3y agoFound it: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fabian/papers/foniks-oak11.pdf http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fabian/papers/foniks-oak11.pdf
- thayne 3y agoHow would you make a CRIME attack with typical use cases for OpenPGP? Most cases I've seen PGP/GPG used, there isn't any opportunity for chosen plaintext.