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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
by 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 agoLeast 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 agoI'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 agoWhat 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 agoYeah, 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 :)
- MKRhere 3y agoAre you with Proton? Maybe the documentation you need is just a lock on the sent email that says "Used key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org", and the recipient could also have a cleartext message saying "Encrypted with key for <email> from keys.openpgp.org"?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tedunangst 3y agoI haven't read as many blog posts where people get encrypted WhatsApp messages and can't decrypt them.
- abofh 3y agooddly, it's because whatsapp has a well integrated keyserver so there's never an issue of not knowing which key to use. Weird.
- darkwater 3y agoIt's not weird. It's the point of the original complain.
- twiss 3y agoPart of the difficulty is that email is a federated system, unlike WhatsApp. Adding end-to-end encryption to a federated system, if it wasn't there before, is a lot more difficult than adding it to an ecosystem that you control in its entirety.
- darkwater 3y agoI understand and agree with this. That's why you cannot single-handedly add a feature like Protonmail's, without risking of breaking someone's workflow. I probably have myself some GPG key uploaded on some public server, tied to i-dont-even-remember-which email address of mine, and when I did that I surely didn't expect or imagined that some provider would pull it automatically to encrypt every mail in which I'm the recipient sent by their systems. I understand Protonmail's approach but I also understand - and share - OP point of view.
- abofh 3y agoThat's the thing though, you almost certainly at the time expected people to use it, and then a decade passed and nobody showed up. The problem isn't that you did it, the problem isn't that they used the information, it's that you were an early adopter who forgot the passphrase to your bitcoins. You put that key there because you wanted it used, you don't get to pretend that you've stopped wanting to use it and everyone should totally know that because you haven't used it. You have a sign out saying encrypted email here, and are mad someone finally read it. Remove the sign, or change it to foo+secrets@mydomain.com Op is mad he left the sign out saying come in and play when people came in to play way after his party ended.
- kelnos 3y agoRight. And PGP doesn't "just work". So it's foolish to blindly assume someone can receive encrypted mail just because you found a key that seems to match on some public keyserver.