3 ms·

Its benefits are very much completely negated in real-world use. See https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/05/21/PGP-signatures-on-PyPI-worse-than-useless https://blo

Its benefits are very much completely negated in real-world use. See https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/05/21/PGP-signatures-on-PyPI-worse-than-useless https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/05/21/PGP-signatures-on-PyPI... - the data suggests that nobody is verifying these PGP signatures at all.

dig1 2y ago
I stopped reading after this: "PGP is an insecure [1] and outdated [2] ecosystem that hasn't reflected cryptographic best practices in decades [3]." The first link [1] suggests avoiding encrypted email due to potential plaintext CC issues and instead recommends Signal or (check this) WhatsApp. However, with encrypted email, I have (or can have) full control over the keys and infrastructure, a level of security that Signal or WhatsApp can't match. The second link [2] is Moxie's rant, which I don't entirely agree with. Yes, GPG has a learning curve. But instead of teaching people how to use it, we're handed dumbed-down products like Signal (I've been using it since its early days as a simple sms encryption app, and I can tell you, it's gone downhill), which has a brilliant solution: it forces you to remember (better to say to write down) a huge random hex monstrosity just to decrypt a database backup later. And no, you can't change it. Despite the ongoing criticisms of GPG, no suitable alternative has been put forward and the likes of Signal, Tarsnap, and others [1] simply don't cut it. Many other projects running for years (with relatively good security track records, like kernel, debian, or cpan) have no problem with GPG. This is 5c. [1] https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html [2] https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html [3] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-matter-with-pgp/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah I still use pgp a lot. Especially because of hardware backed tokens (on yubikey and openpgp cards) which I use a lot for file encryption. The good thing is that there's toolchains for all desktop OSes and mobile (Android, with openkeychain). I'm sure there's better options but they're not as ubiquitous. I use it for file encryption, password manager (pass) and SSH login and everything works on all my stuff, with hardware tokens. Even on my tablet where Samsung cheaped out by not including NFC I can use the USB port. Replacements like fido2 and age fall short by not supporting all the usecases (file encryption for fido2, hardware tokens for age) or not having a complete toolchain on all platforms.
  - nick__m 2y ago
    I use pcks11 on my yubikeys, would I gain something by using the PGP functionality instead?
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Easier tooling. At least on Linux. PKCS11 requires a dynamically linked library (.so) which you pass to programs using it (like SSH) which is a bit annoying and because it's a binary linking it's not an API you can easily debug. It tends to just crash especially with version mismatches. The GPG agent API is easier for this. It works over a socket and can even be forwarded over SSH connections. Usually you end up using OpenSC/OpenCT for that. Also the tooling to manage the virtual smartcards is usually not as easy. I haven't used PIV for this (which is probably what you use on the yubikey to get PKCS11) but it was much harder to get going than simply using GPG Agent/scdaemon/libpcscd and the command "gpg card-edit" to configure the card itself. It's still not quite easy but I found it easier than PKCS11. I used that before with javacards and SmartHSM cards. The good thing about the PIV functionality is that it integrates really well with Windows active directory, which PGP of course doesn't. So if you're on Windows, PIV (with PKCS11) is probably the way to go (or Fido2 but it's more Windows Hello for Business rather than AD functionality then, it depends whether you're a legacy or modern shop). The big benefit of yubikeys over smartcards is that you can use the touch functionality to approve every use of the yubikey, whereas an unlocked smartcard will approve every action without a physical button press (of course because it doesn't have such a button).
      - aborsy 2y ago
        I second this!
      - nick__m 2y ago
        thank you for the detailed answer.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rtmang 2y ago
  [flagged]
Diti 2y ago
I believe the article you linked to doesn’t seem to say anything about “nobody verifying PGP signatures”. We would need PyPI to publish their Datadog & Google Analytics data, but I’d say the set of users who actually verify OpenPGP signatures intersects with the set of users faking/scrambling telemetry.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I wrote the blog post in question. The claim that "nobody is verifying PGP signatures (from PyPI)" comes from the fact that around 1/3rd had no discoverable public keys on what remains of the keyserver network. Of the 2/3rd that did have discoverable keys, ~50% had no valid binding signature at the time of my audit, meaning that obtaining a living public key has worse-than-coin-toss odds for recent (>2020) PGP signatures on PyPI. Combined, these datapoints (and a lack of public noise about signatures failing to verify) strongly suggest that nobody was attempting to verify PGP signatures from PyPI at any meaningful scale. This was more or less confirmed by the near-zero amount of feedback PyPI got once it disabled PGP uploads.
  - opello 2y ago
    This all makes sense. PEP 740 mentions: > In their previously supported form on PyPI, PGP signatures satisfied considerations (1) and (3) above but not (2) (owing to the need for external keyservers and key distribution) or (4) (due to PGP signatures typically being constructed over just an input file, without any associated signed metadata). It seems to me that the infrastructure investment in sigstore.dev vs. PGP seems arbitrary. For example, on the PGP side, PyPI keyserver and tooling to validate uploads as to address (2) above. And (4) being handled similar to PEP 740 with say signatures for provenance objects. Maybe the sigstore is "just way better" but it doesn't exactly seem so cut-and-dried of a technical argument from the things discussed in these commends and the linked material. It's perfectly responsible to make a choice. It seems unclear just what the scope of work difference would be despite there being a somewhat implicit suggestion across the discussions and links in the comments that it was great. Maybe that's an unreasonable level of detail to expect? But with what seems to come across as "dogging on PGP" it seems what I've found disappointing with my casual brush with this particular instance of PGP coming up in the news.

dig1 2y ago

I stopped reading after this: "PGP is an insecure [1] and outdated [2] ecosystem that hasn't reflected cryptographic best practices in decades [3]." The first link [1] suggests avoiding encrypted email due to potential plaintext CC issues and instead recommends Signal or (check this) WhatsApp. However, with encrypted email, I have (or can have) full control over the keys and infrastructure, a level of security that Signal or WhatsApp can't match. The second link [2] is Moxie's rant, which I don't entirely agree with. Yes, GPG has a learning curve. But instead of teaching people how to use it, we're handed dumbed-down products like Signal (I've been using it since its early days as a simple sms encryption app, and I can tell you, it's gone downhill), which has a brilliant solution: it forces you to remember (better to say to write down) a huge random hex monstrosity just to decrypt a database backup later. And no, you can't change it. Despite the ongoing criticisms of GPG, no suitable alternative has been put forward and the likes of Signal, Tarsnap, and others [1] simply don't cut it. Many other projects running for years (with relatively good security track records, like kernel, debian, or cpan) have no problem with GPG. This is 5c. [1] https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html [2] https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html [3] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-matter-with-pgp/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah I still use pgp a lot. Especially because of hardware backed tokens (on yubikey and openpgp cards) which I use a lot for file encryption. The good thing is that there's toolchains for all desktop OSes and mobile (Android, with openkeychain). I'm sure there's better options but they're not as ubiquitous. I use it for file encryption, password manager (pass) and SSH login and everything works on all my stuff, with hardware tokens. Even on my tablet where Samsung cheaped out by not including NFC I can use the USB port. Replacements like fido2 and age fall short by not supporting all the usecases (file encryption for fido2, hardware tokens for age) or not having a complete toolchain on all platforms.
- nick__m 2y ago
  I use pcks11 on my yubikeys, would I gain something by using the PGP functionality instead?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Easier tooling. At least on Linux. PKCS11 requires a dynamically linked library (.so) which you pass to programs using it (like SSH) which is a bit annoying and because it's a binary linking it's not an API you can easily debug. It tends to just crash especially with version mismatches. The GPG agent API is easier for this. It works over a socket and can even be forwarded over SSH connections. Usually you end up using OpenSC/OpenCT for that. Also the tooling to manage the virtual smartcards is usually not as easy. I haven't used PIV for this (which is probably what you use on the yubikey to get PKCS11) but it was much harder to get going than simply using GPG Agent/scdaemon/libpcscd and the command "gpg card-edit" to configure the card itself. It's still not quite easy but I found it easier than PKCS11. I used that before with javacards and SmartHSM cards. The good thing about the PIV functionality is that it integrates really well with Windows active directory, which PGP of course doesn't. So if you're on Windows, PIV (with PKCS11) is probably the way to go (or Fido2 but it's more Windows Hello for Business rather than AD functionality then, it depends whether you're a legacy or modern shop). The big benefit of yubikeys over smartcards is that you can use the touch functionality to approve every use of the yubikey, whereas an unlocked smartcard will approve every action without a physical button press (of course because it doesn't have such a button).
    - aborsy 2y ago
      I second this!
    - nick__m 2y ago
      thank you for the detailed answer.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rtmang 2y ago
[flagged]

Diti 2y ago

I believe the article you linked to doesn’t seem to say anything about “nobody verifying PGP signatures”. We would need PyPI to publish their Datadog & Google Analytics data, but I’d say the set of users who actually verify OpenPGP signatures intersects with the set of users faking/scrambling telemetry.

woodruffw 2y ago
I wrote the blog post in question. The claim that "nobody is verifying PGP signatures (from PyPI)" comes from the fact that around 1/3rd had no discoverable public keys on what remains of the keyserver network. Of the 2/3rd that did have discoverable keys, ~50% had no valid binding signature at the time of my audit, meaning that obtaining a living public key has worse-than-coin-toss odds for recent (>2020) PGP signatures on PyPI. Combined, these datapoints (and a lack of public noise about signatures failing to verify) strongly suggest that nobody was attempting to verify PGP signatures from PyPI at any meaningful scale. This was more or less confirmed by the near-zero amount of feedback PyPI got once it disabled PGP uploads.
- opello 2y ago
  This all makes sense. PEP 740 mentions: > In their previously supported form on PyPI, PGP signatures satisfied considerations (1) and (3) above but not (2) (owing to the need for external keyservers and key distribution) or (4) (due to PGP signatures typically being constructed over just an input file, without any associated signed metadata). It seems to me that the infrastructure investment in sigstore.dev vs. PGP seems arbitrary. For example, on the PGP side, PyPI keyserver and tooling to validate uploads as to address (2) above. And (4) being handled similar to PEP 740 with say signatures for provenance objects. Maybe the sigstore is "just way better" but it doesn't exactly seem so cut-and-dried of a technical argument from the things discussed in these commends and the linked material. It's perfectly responsible to make a choice. It seems unclear just what the scope of work difference would be despite there being a somewhat implicit suggestion across the discussions and links in the comments that it was great. Maybe that's an unreasonable level of detail to expect? But with what seems to come across as "dogging on PGP" it seems what I've found disappointing with my casual brush with this particular instance of PGP coming up in the news.