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Neither the sender nor the recipient made an active decision that the respective mail should be encrypted with pgp. That’s the issue here.

deely3 3y ago
They uploaded PGP key to open directory and then verified email, what is this as not an active decision?
- franga2000 3y ago
  It's an active decision to make their key available to people who wish to send them encrypted email. It's not a decision to receive all email in encrypted form.
  - deely3 3y ago
    Im not sure that I see logic here..
  - nkrisc 3y ago
    > It's not a decision to receive all email in encrypted form. Except, it is. You can’t control of everyone out only some will send you encrypted email.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      I mean, sure, if somebody wants to take a guess on whether I have my private key with me (or even still have access to it at all), that's on them. But if an email provider purportedly bringing email encryption to the non-GPG-trained masses does, it's a different story.
  - PKop 3y ago
    Using Proton for email means it is. Why use Proton otherwise?
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Uploading a key does not imply any decision regarding email. I may need it to sign tarballs or commits for example, and the key could very well have been lost to time. The presence of a key on a key server is in no way or form an explicit opt-in to encrypted email. That's what the CNAME is for.
  - gcr 3y ago
    Exactly. The only way this makes sense is if Google provided a way to import your PGP key into Gmail, which it doesn’t.
  - pxx 3y ago
    Except you explicitly uploaded an encryption key, not a signing key! This action broadcasts to the world the message "you can encrypt communications to this identifier using this key"! This is seriously like telling somebody that you can be contacted on a particular phone number and then getting upset that you're getting phone calls. "Who uses the phone these days," you complain, despite having set into motion the sequence of events that led to you getting a phone call! Worse, in this analogy, it's not like you even said "only text this number"; you explicitly applied metadata saying that you would be open to a phone call.
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      In your analogy, the keyserver is a phone book. You can find keys there, and yes you can try to use them, but it's not like telling someone you can be contacted on a particular phone number, but rather like them digging through a phone book and finding your name in there, possibly for an unused landline that you technically own but isn't wired up - who knows. Telling you to use a particular phone number - say through a business card, a contact page or a profile - is the analogy matching configuration of your domain to publish your intent, similar to how your domain also specify where you mail server is.
input_sh 3y ago
That's a good thing? There's like a billion WhatsApp users encrypting all of their messages without realising it because it just works. GPG will never be that simple to use. Personally, I hate GPG with such passion, but I'm fully aware it's the best thing we have for asynchronous messaging.
- pflenker 3y ago
  Least you can do is document somewhere that you are doing it, and not silently do it. WhatsApp doesn’t keep it a secret, exactly.
  - input_sh 3y ago
    I've never tried Proton myself, but I don't understand how you can consider it to be a "secret". It's literally the only thing I know about them: they've established themselves as a "more secure" email provider, and they back that up by abstracting some of the pain points of using GPG, which is a completely unusable protocol for normal people. If it was some other email provider that did the same, I'd 100% agree. But with Protonmail, GPG is pretty much the entire reason we're all aware of their existence.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      What they do for Proton-to-Proton messages is their business, since they own all the fallout from people losing their keys to that, but to just blindly encrypt to a key somebody might or might not still own the private decryption key for is just reckless. I just tested it myself, and while there is a visual indicator of that automatic key lookup happening, there's zero way to disable it, nor to even verify which key it picked or to display the key hash. It seems like a terrible solution halfway between convenience/opportunistic encryption and actual security, combining the downsides of either (a high risk of sending messages the recipient won't be able to decrypt and a moderate risk of encrypting to a key other than the expected one).
  - twiss 3y ago
    Yeah, we'll work to improve the documentation on this. Though.. note that WhatsApp doesn't have any documentation on their key discovery either, because WhatsApp is not a federated system. Achieving automatic end-to-end encryption in a federated system, when it wasn't there before, isn't so easy. So there's bound to be some growing pains, but we're still trying :)
deleted 3y ago
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deely3 3y ago

They uploaded PGP key to open directory and then verified email, what is this as not an active decision?

franga2000 3y ago
It's an active decision to make their key available to people who wish to send them encrypted email. It's not a decision to receive all email in encrypted form.
- deely3 3y ago
  Im not sure that I see logic here..
- nkrisc 3y ago
  > It's not a decision to receive all email in encrypted form. Except, it is. You can’t control of everyone out only some will send you encrypted email.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    I mean, sure, if somebody wants to take a guess on whether I have my private key with me (or even still have access to it at all), that's on them. But if an email provider purportedly bringing email encryption to the non-GPG-trained masses does, it's a different story.
- PKop 3y ago
  Using Proton for email means it is. Why use Proton otherwise?
arghwhat 3y ago
Uploading a key does not imply any decision regarding email. I may need it to sign tarballs or commits for example, and the key could very well have been lost to time. The presence of a key on a key server is in no way or form an explicit opt-in to encrypted email. That's what the CNAME is for.
- gcr 3y ago
  Exactly. The only way this makes sense is if Google provided a way to import your PGP key into Gmail, which it doesn’t.
- pxx 3y ago
  Except you explicitly uploaded an encryption key, not a signing key! This action broadcasts to the world the message "you can encrypt communications to this identifier using this key"! This is seriously like telling somebody that you can be contacted on a particular phone number and then getting upset that you're getting phone calls. "Who uses the phone these days," you complain, despite having set into motion the sequence of events that led to you getting a phone call! Worse, in this analogy, it's not like you even said "only text this number"; you explicitly applied metadata saying that you would be open to a phone call.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    In your analogy, the keyserver is a phone book. You can find keys there, and yes you can try to use them, but it's not like telling someone you can be contacted on a particular phone number, but rather like them digging through a phone book and finding your name in there, possibly for an unused landline that you technically own but isn't wired up - who knows. Telling you to use a particular phone number - say through a business card, a contact page or a profile - is the analogy matching configuration of your domain to publish your intent, similar to how your domain also specify where you mail server is.

input_sh 3y ago

That's a good thing? There's like a billion WhatsApp users encrypting all of their messages without realising it because it just works. GPG will never be that simple to use. Personally, I hate GPG with such passion, but I'm fully aware it's the best thing we have for asynchronous messaging.

pflenker 3y ago
Least you can do is document somewhere that you are doing it, and not silently do it. WhatsApp doesn’t keep it a secret, exactly.
- input_sh 3y ago
  I've never tried Proton myself, but I don't understand how you can consider it to be a "secret". It's literally the only thing I know about them: they've established themselves as a "more secure" email provider, and they back that up by abstracting some of the pain points of using GPG, which is a completely unusable protocol for normal people. If it was some other email provider that did the same, I'd 100% agree. But with Protonmail, GPG is pretty much the entire reason we're all aware of their existence.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    What they do for Proton-to-Proton messages is their business, since they own all the fallout from people losing their keys to that, but to just blindly encrypt to a key somebody might or might not still own the private decryption key for is just reckless. I just tested it myself, and while there is a visual indicator of that automatic key lookup happening, there's zero way to disable it, nor to even verify which key it picked or to display the key hash. It seems like a terrible solution halfway between convenience/opportunistic encryption and actual security, combining the downsides of either (a high risk of sending messages the recipient won't be able to decrypt and a moderate risk of encrypting to a key other than the expected one).
- twiss 3y ago
  Yeah, we'll work to improve the documentation on this. Though.. note that WhatsApp doesn't have any documentation on their key discovery either, because WhatsApp is not a federated system. Achieving automatic end-to-end encryption in a federated system, when it wasn't there before, isn't so easy. So there's bound to be some growing pains, but we're still trying :)

deleted 3y ago

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