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When the crypto crowd complains about PGP being obsolete, they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives. One of the most frequent recommendati

When the crypto crowd complains about PGP being obsolete, they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives. One of the most frequent recommendations is instead of using ordinary email and trying to bolt PGP onto it with individual contacts, use an encrypted messenger. I have been using Signal for four years now with the same install moved from phone to phone, and it has worked just fine. I can chat with my friends and relatives with E2E encryption, while I could have never got them to use PGP at all. [0] https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html

phone8675309 3y ago
Are you aware of any other widely deployed, stable tools that meet the other uses cases from the parent comment?
dig1 3y ago
> When the crypto crowd complains about PGP being obsolete, they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives Those alternatives have different use cases compared to (open)PGP. So, Moxie said GPG is too complicated? If Signal goes down, how long will it take you to spin up your instance of server and clients, ready for delivery? How much would cost running reliably that infra? For email and GPG, I can get everything in 15-20 minutes, including registering the DNS name, DKIM, and SPF. I can also sign documents, images, and invoices with GPG; in short, I can do business. What can I do with Signal: chat, send nice emojis, and make calls? Proper security and encryption isn't a toy, and let's not kid ourselves by skinning apps with shiny buttons and cool claims that everything people have done before sucks.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  If you are concerned about digital document signing, then that is a different use case from the OP who speaks of encryption and being “[not] safe from state-sponsored hackers”. For digital signing, business sectors like e.g. banking rely on PDF e-signatures[0], not PGP. [0] https://www.adobe.com/sign/hub/how-to/how-banks-use-electronic-signatures.html https://www.adobe.com/sign/hub/how-to/how-banks-use-electron...
  - dig1 3y ago
    "digital signing" in banking sector means something completely different than PGP-like "digital signing". PGP-like digital signatures can be applied on any document and file and you can easily validate the author by their public key and can't be easily forged.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Your post said “documents, images, and invoices” and “business”. In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format. Even images get embedded in PDFs a lot of the time. PDF e-signatures can be validated, the technology is based on very standard crypto with FOSS implementations. Fine if you have a different workflow that requires PGP, but most people clearly don’t feel it is impossible to “do business” otherwise.
      - dig1 3y ago
        > In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format In your real world, probably. In actual real world, people use MS Word/Excel (or LibreOffice) and images a lot, beside PDF. Good luck using e-signatures with that :)
      - BeetleB 3y ago
        > In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format This is evasive and dismissive. When your parent is talking about the issue, there's a good chance he is already using it. Telling him what "the real world" does is irrelevant. He has a use case already, and needs a solution for his use case, not for the rest of the world.
        OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        Almost every time on HN that there is a discussion of changes in technology that experts would argue are overall good, there is always someone who says “But that would break my use case!” This even got lampooned at xkcd[0]. OK, I understand that he finds this trend vexing. But no party to this discussion is obliged to spend their time and effort on suggesting a solution, especially when we don’t know his specifics and our suggestion might simply be rejected out of hand. [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- tptacek 3y ago
  The alternatives are generally far better than email, which is why normal people (and most of us) get so little email these days. My email accounts have more life as a transaction recording system for online shopping than they do for interpersonal communication. Email has largely been superseded. That alarms nerds like us, the way it alarmed people when HTTP superseded purpose-built network protocols, but there is a losing side of this argument, and it's the side that is still using Mutt.
denton-scratch 3y ago
Got it: "There's a technical issue with email encryption, but we have a solution: don't use email! instead, use this different protocol, that doesn't work with email clients or email addresses, but instead uses a telephone number as an identifier!" I've never tried Signal, because I don't want my telephone number used as my identifier. A bug in email encryption can be fixed by fixing the bug; proposing a completely different protocol/application isn't fixing that bug, it's just saying that this other protocol/application doesn't have the same bug. It's not a solution; at least, not for me.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
  The biggest bug in email encryption is that important message data & metadata can't be encrypted for SMTP to work. It's a bug in email, and there's no backwards compatible fix.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  It's a pity, but email never was designed for security, and you can't graft it on. GPG doesn't really do much for security, because a lot can be told from simply who communicates with who and when, and GPG does absolutely nothing there.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  This is like asking how to drive across the ocean and getting mad when someone tells you that you need to take a boat. Email just fundamentally isn't encryptable; the protocol and the way it actually works in practice (hi, antispam!) requires that important parts of the email not be encrypted, and things like asynchronous communication make it difficult to do encryption to the gold standard of quality. Also, turning on encrypted email also disables several email features from the perspective of the user (hope you didn't want to search your emails!). The end result is that email encryption is, as someone else put it, LARPing rather than security. There are a few very narrow use cases for which encrypted email may make sense (largely in cases where you're not concerned about hiding the existence of communication channels, just message contents, and you can do out-of-band public key communication). But notice that those use cases don't include "I want to message someone else securely," and it's definitely not someone that would work if you tried to let regular users do it.
lucideer 3y ago
There's plenty of competition in the IM space for E2E realtime chat; none are positioning themselves as an alternative to email. > they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives What alternatives do they mention?
jwr 3y ago
That solution won't let me encrypt my backups, I think. Incidentally, Signal is another example of an impractical solution being pushed without consideration for practical requirements. Signal will LOSE ALL YOUR DATA if your phone (iOS) dies. There is no way to backup your chat history and images. It's been like that for years and we get silly features instead of this fundamental thing. Yes, I know many people like it this way — you are in the minority, and there should be a configuration switch saying "do not backup my data". Most people do not expect that their entire history will be gone one day. Phones die, phones get stolen, and you expect you'll get your history and photos back when restoring from an (encrypted!) backup. Not so with Signal. So the next time you tell people to use Signal over WhatsApp, don't forget to tell them that Signal will lose everything one day, while WhatsApp will not. Back to my original point: before anyone knocks "old obsolete" apps, consider carefully if the new shiny thing really does everything that the "old obsolete" app did, is it reliable, maintained, and will it stay around for 10+ years.
- skovati 3y ago
  Signal does have offline backup support though? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
  - jwr 3y ago
    It does not on iOS, and the webpage you linked to specifically states that.
- jraph 3y ago
  > Signal will LOSE ALL YOUR DATA if your phone (iOS) dies I'm seeing this often on HN. While it's a pain, it is not impractical. Most people don't care about this. They don't come back in time in the conversations. If you really care about this. Like, you care that much. Just pair Signal Desktop and make a regular backup of your profile. All your messages and attachments are there. If your Signal ever gets borked, you can always put your machine offline and open Signal-Desktop on this backed-up folder. You can also open the db with sqlcipher and access all you data with it, the scheme is not too complicated to grasp. Ask me how I know. And since Signal is open source, you can always read its code in case of doubt. Someone could build a convenient UI to display or export the messages and attachments in a user-friendly format. This can happen after the backup is done and Signal breaks. All this said, people may expect privacy when using Signal, so make sure your backups are well protected. This is the hard part, actually.
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I'm not sure I want to route all my email through my mobile phone. Though yes... it's more secure than SMS.

phone8675309 3y ago

Are you aware of any other widely deployed, stable tools that meet the other uses cases from the parent comment?

dig1 3y ago

> When the crypto crowd complains about PGP being obsolete, they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives Those alternatives have different use cases compared to (open)PGP. So, Moxie said GPG is too complicated? If Signal goes down, how long will it take you to spin up your instance of server and clients, ready for delivery? How much would cost running reliably that infra? For email and GPG, I can get everything in 15-20 minutes, including registering the DNS name, DKIM, and SPF. I can also sign documents, images, and invoices with GPG; in short, I can do business. What can I do with Signal: chat, send nice emojis, and make calls? Proper security and encryption isn't a toy, and let's not kid ourselves by skinning apps with shiny buttons and cool claims that everything people have done before sucks.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
If you are concerned about digital document signing, then that is a different use case from the OP who speaks of encryption and being “[not] safe from state-sponsored hackers”. For digital signing, business sectors like e.g. banking rely on PDF e-signatures[0], not PGP. [0] https://www.adobe.com/sign/hub/how-to/how-banks-use-electronic-signatures.html https://www.adobe.com/sign/hub/how-to/how-banks-use-electron...
- dig1 3y ago
  "digital signing" in banking sector means something completely different than PGP-like "digital signing". PGP-like digital signatures can be applied on any document and file and you can easily validate the author by their public key and can't be easily forged.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Your post said “documents, images, and invoices” and “business”. In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format. Even images get embedded in PDFs a lot of the time. PDF e-signatures can be validated, the technology is based on very standard crypto with FOSS implementations. Fine if you have a different workflow that requires PGP, but most people clearly don’t feel it is impossible to “do business” otherwise.
    - dig1 3y ago
      > In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format In your real world, probably. In actual real world, people use MS Word/Excel (or LibreOffice) and images a lot, beside PDF. Good luck using e-signatures with that :)
    - BeetleB 3y ago
      > In the real world, documents and invoices in business are overwhelmingly sent in PDF format This is evasive and dismissive. When your parent is talking about the issue, there's a good chance he is already using it. Telling him what "the real world" does is irrelevant. He has a use case already, and needs a solution for his use case, not for the rest of the world.
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        Almost every time on HN that there is a discussion of changes in technology that experts would argue are overall good, there is always someone who says “But that would break my use case!” This even got lampooned at xkcd[0]. OK, I understand that he finds this trend vexing. But no party to this discussion is obliged to spend their time and effort on suggesting a solution, especially when we don’t know his specifics and our suggestion might simply be rejected out of hand. [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
tptacek 3y ago
The alternatives are generally far better than email, which is why normal people (and most of us) get so little email these days. My email accounts have more life as a transaction recording system for online shopping than they do for interpersonal communication. Email has largely been superseded. That alarms nerds like us, the way it alarmed people when HTTP superseded purpose-built network protocols, but there is a losing side of this argument, and it's the side that is still using Mutt.

denton-scratch 3y ago

Got it: "There's a technical issue with email encryption, but we have a solution: don't use email! instead, use this different protocol, that doesn't work with email clients or email addresses, but instead uses a telephone number as an identifier!" I've never tried Signal, because I don't want my telephone number used as my identifier. A bug in email encryption can be fixed by fixing the bug; proposing a completely different protocol/application isn't fixing that bug, it's just saying that this other protocol/application doesn't have the same bug. It's not a solution; at least, not for me.

SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
The biggest bug in email encryption is that important message data & metadata can't be encrypted for SMTP to work. It's a bug in email, and there's no backwards compatible fix.
dale_glass 3y ago
It's a pity, but email never was designed for security, and you can't graft it on. GPG doesn't really do much for security, because a lot can be told from simply who communicates with who and when, and GPG does absolutely nothing there.
jcranmer 3y ago
This is like asking how to drive across the ocean and getting mad when someone tells you that you need to take a boat. Email just fundamentally isn't encryptable; the protocol and the way it actually works in practice (hi, antispam!) requires that important parts of the email not be encrypted, and things like asynchronous communication make it difficult to do encryption to the gold standard of quality. Also, turning on encrypted email also disables several email features from the perspective of the user (hope you didn't want to search your emails!). The end result is that email encryption is, as someone else put it, LARPing rather than security. There are a few very narrow use cases for which encrypted email may make sense (largely in cases where you're not concerned about hiding the existence of communication channels, just message contents, and you can do out-of-band public key communication). But notice that those use cases don't include "I want to message someone else securely," and it's definitely not someone that would work if you tried to let regular users do it.

lucideer 3y ago

There's plenty of competition in the IM space for E2E realtime chat; none are positioning themselves as an alternative to email. > they don’t just knock PGP, they very often mention alternatives What alternatives do they mention?

jwr 3y ago

That solution won't let me encrypt my backups, I think. Incidentally, Signal is another example of an impractical solution being pushed without consideration for practical requirements. Signal will LOSE ALL YOUR DATA if your phone (iOS) dies. There is no way to backup your chat history and images. It's been like that for years and we get silly features instead of this fundamental thing. Yes, I know many people like it this way — you are in the minority, and there should be a configuration switch saying "do not backup my data". Most people do not expect that their entire history will be gone one day. Phones die, phones get stolen, and you expect you'll get your history and photos back when restoring from an (encrypted!) backup. Not so with Signal. So the next time you tell people to use Signal over WhatsApp, don't forget to tell them that Signal will lose everything one day, while WhatsApp will not. Back to my original point: before anyone knocks "old obsolete" apps, consider carefully if the new shiny thing really does everything that the "old obsolete" app did, is it reliable, maintained, and will it stay around for 10+ years.

skovati 3y ago
Signal does have offline backup support though? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
- jwr 3y ago
  It does not on iOS, and the webpage you linked to specifically states that.
jraph 3y ago
> Signal will LOSE ALL YOUR DATA if your phone (iOS) dies I'm seeing this often on HN. While it's a pain, it is not impractical. Most people don't care about this. They don't come back in time in the conversations. If you really care about this. Like, you care that much. Just pair Signal Desktop and make a regular backup of your profile. All your messages and attachments are there. If your Signal ever gets borked, you can always put your machine offline and open Signal-Desktop on this backed-up folder. You can also open the db with sqlcipher and access all you data with it, the scheme is not too complicated to grasp. Ask me how I know. And since Signal is open source, you can always read its code in case of doubt. Someone could build a convenient UI to display or export the messages and attachments in a user-friendly format. This can happen after the backup is done and Signal breaks. All this said, people may expect privacy when using Signal, so make sure your backups are well protected. This is the hard part, actually.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

I'm not sure I want to route all my email through my mobile phone. Though yes... it's more secure than SMS.