4 ms·

PGP is much more than email. It is a general-purpose text and binary encryption system with FOSS libraries and user-facing software for every major platform. I

PGP is much more than email. It is a general-purpose text and binary encryption system with FOSS libraries and user-facing software for every major platform. It can be used for email, IM, package signing, authentication, and many other uses. And it is time-tested, with 25 years of library-building and 25 years of people trying to break it. Yes, it has many features which most projects don't need, and anyone is free to not use those features. Most documents I write do not include tables, but I would not argue that tables are an unnecessary feature. And same with PGP, I don't use most of its features, but I'm OK with them being there.

klodolph 3y ago
25 years of people trying to figure out how to use it. I think the population of PGP users has some extreme selection pressure acting on it--it's a bunch of people who want security and don't care how bad the UX is.
- bscphil 3y ago
  It's a bit like `git` in that yes, it is a complicated tool, but you can do 99% of what most people need to do with like 5 commands. People make exactly the argument you are making about git.
  - slondr 3y ago
    In fact I’d say gpg is even more singularly useful than git. Git has competitors which are superior to it in nearly every way; gpg does not, and likely won’t.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      GPG doesn't have competitors because modern security thought rejects the approach and treats it as a relic. The modern thought is that security can't be an add-on, it needs to be part of the system. So encryption for a chat client and encryption for a web browser, and signatures on a binary are all different problems to be solved differently.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    I have been using PGP a lot longer and still struggle to use it. When you say, "People make exactly the argument you are making about git," well, those people have a point. I use Git in spite of its usability problems because it gets useful work done. I don't see the upside of pushing through the usability problems of PGP. If I somehow put in the hours to get used to it, then what? What am I accomplishing?
morelisp 3y ago
> It is a general-purpose text and binary encryption system That's exactly why it shouldn't exist!
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
  But why?
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Because security is a serious problem that needs to be treated seriously for it to be useful. You can't just sprinkle it on an existing system like fairy dust, it has to be built into the design to be effective, and it needs to be periodically re-thought mercilessly. PGP for instance encourages some terrible habits, like awfully long lived keys. You have somebody signing packages with an ancient DSA-1024 key, perhaps because "SQUEE Philip Zimmermann himself signed that key back in 1996 and I can't part with it". That's not the right attitude to security. Good security requires a solution fit to whatever specific thing you need to secure, a system designed with it in mind, and a lack of sentimentality and backwards compatibility.
    - SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
      I completely agree with your points but you seem to be missing the point which is: why does OpenPGP's versatility make it a bad candidate?
      - morelisp 3y ago
        It is not versatile - multi-purpose - it is weak - general-purpose. "Encrypt/sign these bytes with this cipher, these parameters, and this key" is the least common denominator of cryptographic ability and ignores all the work to build an actual useful cryptographic system around it. On top of this, its specific interfaces for doing that suck, so you can't even bury it as a safe "primitive" in whatever system you're trying to build (even assuming you wanted to bring in the attack surface of a 25 year old C project). Something like libsodium is actually versatile in that it offers primitives to build a broad set of safe tools on top of. It does more by doing less.
tptacek 3y ago
In general, for each major use case of file/message encryption (messaging, backup, transport, package signing, contracts, drive/filesystem encryption, &c), there is a cryptosystem that does the job better than PGP, in part by being built out of modern components and a modern understanding of cryptography†, and in part by being designed around the actual problem and not a lossy abstraction of the problem. So it's frustrating to see PGP advocates talking about these things PGP does that Signal, or Tarsnap, or Minisign, or Certificate Transparency, or whatever don't do on their own. It's like telling a line cook that a Swiss Army Knife is a meaningful competitor to a chef's knife. Like: it doesn't matter, nobody's going to use a Swiss Army Knife on the line, it's not a threat or anything, but it's so obviously wrong. † People tend to forget how underdeveloped our understanding of cryptography engineering was when PGP/GPG first came about; for a crash course, check out the IETF archives of Rogaway pleading with the IPSEC people to avoid chained CBC IVs.
- forgotmypw17 3y ago
  I don’t understand how having multiple tools, each one needing audits and effort and time to make secure, each one needing porting to all the platforms that people use, each one breaking compatibility with legacy platforms and hardware, is better than an existing tool without any of these drawbacks.
  - donaldstufft 3y ago
    Because the existing tool does a bad job at all of them, and those tools do reasonably good jobs at each of their respective tasks. Fundamentally the things you want from a secure crypto system differ depending on the context in which you're applying it. Email needs different things than package signing does than file encryption does. It's silly to pretend that the same tool can provide a good and secure experience for all of them.
    - forgotmypw17 3y ago
      I don’t think it’s that silly, and I don’t think email is that different from packages is that different from files. They’re all data with some attributes, and pgp handles them nicely, if you can write the interface for it.

klodolph 3y ago

25 years of people trying to figure out how to use it. I think the population of PGP users has some extreme selection pressure acting on it--it's a bunch of people who want security and don't care how bad the UX is.

bscphil 3y ago
It's a bit like `git` in that yes, it is a complicated tool, but you can do 99% of what most people need to do with like 5 commands. People make exactly the argument you are making about git.
- slondr 3y ago
  In fact I’d say gpg is even more singularly useful than git. Git has competitors which are superior to it in nearly every way; gpg does not, and likely won’t.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    GPG doesn't have competitors because modern security thought rejects the approach and treats it as a relic. The modern thought is that security can't be an add-on, it needs to be part of the system. So encryption for a chat client and encryption for a web browser, and signatures on a binary are all different problems to be solved differently.
- klodolph 3y ago
  I have been using PGP a lot longer and still struggle to use it. When you say, "People make exactly the argument you are making about git," well, those people have a point. I use Git in spite of its usability problems because it gets useful work done. I don't see the upside of pushing through the usability problems of PGP. If I somehow put in the hours to get used to it, then what? What am I accomplishing?

morelisp 3y ago

> It is a general-purpose text and binary encryption system That's exactly why it shouldn't exist!

SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
But why?
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Because security is a serious problem that needs to be treated seriously for it to be useful. You can't just sprinkle it on an existing system like fairy dust, it has to be built into the design to be effective, and it needs to be periodically re-thought mercilessly. PGP for instance encourages some terrible habits, like awfully long lived keys. You have somebody signing packages with an ancient DSA-1024 key, perhaps because "SQUEE Philip Zimmermann himself signed that key back in 1996 and I can't part with it". That's not the right attitude to security. Good security requires a solution fit to whatever specific thing you need to secure, a system designed with it in mind, and a lack of sentimentality and backwards compatibility.
  - SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
    I completely agree with your points but you seem to be missing the point which is: why does OpenPGP's versatility make it a bad candidate?
    - morelisp 3y ago
      It is not versatile - multi-purpose - it is weak - general-purpose. "Encrypt/sign these bytes with this cipher, these parameters, and this key" is the least common denominator of cryptographic ability and ignores all the work to build an actual useful cryptographic system around it. On top of this, its specific interfaces for doing that suck, so you can't even bury it as a safe "primitive" in whatever system you're trying to build (even assuming you wanted to bring in the attack surface of a 25 year old C project). Something like libsodium is actually versatile in that it offers primitives to build a broad set of safe tools on top of. It does more by doing less.

tptacek 3y ago

In general, for each major use case of file/message encryption (messaging, backup, transport, package signing, contracts, drive/filesystem encryption, &c), there is a cryptosystem that does the job better than PGP, in part by being built out of modern components and a modern understanding of cryptography†, and in part by being designed around the actual problem and not a lossy abstraction of the problem. So it's frustrating to see PGP advocates talking about these things PGP does that Signal, or Tarsnap, or Minisign, or Certificate Transparency, or whatever don't do on their own. It's like telling a line cook that a Swiss Army Knife is a meaningful competitor to a chef's knife. Like: it doesn't matter, nobody's going to use a Swiss Army Knife on the line, it's not a threat or anything, but it's so obviously wrong. † People tend to forget how underdeveloped our understanding of cryptography engineering was when PGP/GPG first came about; for a crash course, check out the IETF archives of Rogaway pleading with the IPSEC people to avoid chained CBC IVs.

forgotmypw17 3y ago
I don’t understand how having multiple tools, each one needing audits and effort and time to make secure, each one needing porting to all the platforms that people use, each one breaking compatibility with legacy platforms and hardware, is better than an existing tool without any of these drawbacks.
- donaldstufft 3y ago
  Because the existing tool does a bad job at all of them, and those tools do reasonably good jobs at each of their respective tasks. Fundamentally the things you want from a secure crypto system differ depending on the context in which you're applying it. Email needs different things than package signing does than file encryption does. It's silly to pretend that the same tool can provide a good and secure experience for all of them.
  - forgotmypw17 3y ago
    I don’t think it’s that silly, and I don’t think email is that different from packages is that different from files. They’re all data with some attributes, and pgp handles them nicely, if you can write the interface for it.