3 ms·

Just so I understand, you believe that age’s developer hasn’t thought enough about how to design cryptographic systems or tools?

by akerl_ 11mo ago

lrvick 11mo ago
I think even brilliant cryptographers can be wrong, or acting on strong biases formed from a limited perspective. In this case I think they have not thought about personal cryptographic key management and how people use tools like PGP in the wild well enough. An engineer coming from a corporate world where everyone is comfortable with a model of centralized backups, centralized identity, and centralized trust is going to have a very different perspective than say, a Linux distribution maintainer, or those maintaining they core backbone of the internet. I am closer to the latter camp, and obviously have my own biases here, but in spite of them I package Age in stagex, and we support it in keyfork, just so people have choices. Choices are always a good thing. That said, it is my opinion that age does not even begin to approach the threat model or use cases PGP solves for. It does one thing, and it does not even do that thing as well as PGP does in most situations I can think of. Just because someone is experienced in cryptography does not mean they have had significant exposure to environments where decentralized identity and trust are a hard requirement and where no alternatives to PGP exist, and where there is no customer service or IT team to bail you out, which really changes how we tend to think about these problems. In my experience cryptography engineers that work on decentralized open source systems like Tor, blockchains, Linux distributions, etc, tend to strongly favor solutions like PGP as not "good" but the "least bad" option to avoid any single point of trust or failure. Those that have spent their careers in the proprietary FAANG world tend to support using solutions like Fulcio or sigstore and using OIDC to let a central party sign for you with "keyless signing", which to me, is total nonsense. I assume anything that I cannot verify the integrity of for myself to be compromised.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  I think Filippo Valsorda has in fact thought pretty hard about the issues you're talking about, and that, by contrast, the track record of the PGP community on those same issues is pretty dismal.
  - Ferret7446 11mo ago
    I think the tldr of their point is that Filippo thought a lot about cryptography but not about actual users or their requirements. What he thinks are cruft are actual features that users depend on
    - tptacek 11mo ago
      No, I got the tldr of their point just fine. They're just wrong.
      - lrvick 11mo ago
        If I am wrong I challenge you to point at a well specified replacement for PGP with a diversity of competing implementations as a decentralized cryptographic identity and trust system for open source software supply chain signing, authentication, and peer to peer encryption with a variety of smartcard generation, usage, and backup solutions better for every situation PGP is used in today. Also a solution that significantly reduces attack surface enough to motivate a migration from PGP in all the areas it is used, and a specific strategy to migrate everything to it. Also form a standards team to maintain the spec to keep all implementations compatible so this work is useful long term. If all of that happened I would seriously evaluate it and likely even help promote it. Few understand the shortcomings of PGP better than those of us that heavily rely on it! Until then I suggest improving upon what already exists, or at the very least stop steering people away from the best effort solutions we have today and all the hard work from hundreds of people that go into maintaining them for free.
        tptacek 11mo ago
        I'm not the one insulting Filippo Valsorda, for no apparent reason (any of your points could have been made without criticizing him), when he's not present to defend himself in this thread. The onus is squarely on you here. You won't succeed, though, so I don't blame you for not wasting the time.
    - kiitos 11mo ago

Just so I understand, you believe that age’s developer hasn’t thought enough about how to design cryptographic systems or tools?

by akerl_ 11mo ago

Just so I understand, you believe that age’s developer hasn’t thought enough about how to design cryptographic systems or tools?

lrvick 11mo ago

I think even brilliant cryptographers can be wrong, or acting on strong biases formed from a limited perspective. In this case I think they have not thought about personal cryptographic key management and how people use tools like PGP in the wild well enough. An engineer coming from a corporate world where everyone is comfortable with a model of centralized backups, centralized identity, and centralized trust is going to have a very different perspective than say, a Linux distribution maintainer, or those maintaining they core backbone of the internet. I am closer to the latter camp, and obviously have my own biases here, but in spite of them I package Age in stagex, and we support it in keyfork, just so people have choices. Choices are always a good thing. That said, it is my opinion that age does not even begin to approach the threat model or use cases PGP solves for. It does one thing, and it does not even do that thing as well as PGP does in most situations I can think of. Just because someone is experienced in cryptography does not mean they have had significant exposure to environments where decentralized identity and trust are a hard requirement and where no alternatives to PGP exist, and where there is no customer service or IT team to bail you out, which really changes how we tend to think about these problems. In my experience cryptography engineers that work on decentralized open source systems like Tor, blockchains, Linux distributions, etc, tend to strongly favor solutions like PGP as not "good" but the "least bad" option to avoid any single point of trust or failure. Those that have spent their careers in the proprietary FAANG world tend to support using solutions like Fulcio or sigstore and using OIDC to let a central party sign for you with "keyless signing", which to me, is total nonsense. I assume anything that I cannot verify the integrity of for myself to be compromised.

tptacek 11mo ago
I think Filippo Valsorda has in fact thought pretty hard about the issues you're talking about, and that, by contrast, the track record of the PGP community on those same issues is pretty dismal.
- Ferret7446 11mo ago
  I think the tldr of their point is that Filippo thought a lot about cryptography but not about actual users or their requirements. What he thinks are cruft are actual features that users depend on
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    No, I got the tldr of their point just fine. They're just wrong.
    - lrvick 11mo ago
      If I am wrong I challenge you to point at a well specified replacement for PGP with a diversity of competing implementations as a decentralized cryptographic identity and trust system for open source software supply chain signing, authentication, and peer to peer encryption with a variety of smartcard generation, usage, and backup solutions better for every situation PGP is used in today. Also a solution that significantly reduces attack surface enough to motivate a migration from PGP in all the areas it is used, and a specific strategy to migrate everything to it. Also form a standards team to maintain the spec to keep all implementations compatible so this work is useful long term. If all of that happened I would seriously evaluate it and likely even help promote it. Few understand the shortcomings of PGP better than those of us that heavily rely on it! Until then I suggest improving upon what already exists, or at the very least stop steering people away from the best effort solutions we have today and all the hard work from hundreds of people that go into maintaining them for free.
      - tptacek 11mo ago
        I'm not the one insulting Filippo Valsorda, for no apparent reason (any of your points could have been made without criticizing him), when he's not present to defend himself in this thread. The onus is squarely on you here. You won't succeed, though, so I don't blame you for not wasting the time.
  - kiitos 11mo ago