7 ms·
To be frank, at this point, GPG has been a lost cause for basically decades. People who are serious about security use newer, better tools that replace GPG. Bu
by cpach 10mo ago
To be frank, at this point, GPG has been a lost cause for basically decades.
People who are serious about security use newer, better tools that replace GPG. But keep in mind, there’s no “one ring to rule them all”.
- perching_aix 10mo agoWhat are those better tools? I've been broadly looking into this space, but never ventured too deep.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoSequoia for example has been doing a great job and implements the latest version of the standard which brings a lot of cryptography up to date
- perching_aix 10mo agoI'm yet to finish watching the talk, but it starts with them confirming the demo fraudulent .iso with sequoia also (they call it out by name), so this really makes me think. :)
- tptacek 10mo agoSequioa hasn't fixed the attack from the beginning of the talk, the one where they convert between cleartext and full signature formats and inject unsigned bytes into the output because of the confusion.
- akerl_ 10mo agoThe latest version of a bad standard is still bad. This page is a pretty direct indicator that GPG's foundation is fundamentally broken: you're not going to get to a good outcome trying to renovate the 2nd story.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoThat's just not true. Nothing in this page is a problem with the standard and everything in this page is the outdated parts of the old standard.
- akerl_ 10mo agoSo then why do a bunch of these affect Sequoia as well?
- arccy 10mo agossh or minisign for signing age for file encryption
- johnisgood 10mo agoThere are people who use GPG for more than that. Those that are fine with just those two features, sure. Heck, you can encrypt with "openssh", no need for age. :D I have a bash function for encryption and decryption!
- cpach 10mo agoThose people should perhaps ponder if it’s a reasonable thing to insist on using this broken standard/tool in 2025.
- johnisgood 10mo agoYeah, well, I wish I could convince people to use 2-4 different tools when one does it "just fine".
- akerl_ 10mo agoI thought the whole unix philosophy was to have a bunch of tools that each do one thing well, and to compose them into the workflow you want.
- johnisgood 10mo agoAnd I thought most projects would be licensed as GNU by now but alas.
- pabs3 10mo agoThe gpg.fail page mentions minisign vulns too.
- arccy 10mo ago
- ameliaquining 10mo agohttps://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#the-answers https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th... lists a bunch of them.
- p2detar 10mo ago> Encrypting email > Don't. https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#encrypting-email https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#en... I’m not sure I completely agree here. For private use, this seems fine. However, this isn’t how email encryption is typically implemented in an enterprise environment. It’s usually handled at the mail gateway rather than on a per-user basis. Enterprises also ensure that the receiving side supports email encryption as well. edit: formatting
- tptacek 10mo agoYour mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't. A private emailing circle doesn't change that. If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies, I'll just say I ran just such a private circle at Matasano, where we used encrypted mail to communicate about security assessment projects, and unencrypted replies happened.
- p2detar 10mo ago> Your mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't. It is, GPG take care of that. > If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s an enterprise - you cannot send non-encrypted emails from your work mail account, the gateway takes care of it. It has many rules, including such based on the sender and recipient. Surely, someone can print the mail and carry it out of the company’s premises, but at this point it’s intentional and the cat’s already out of the bag.
- ghickPit 10mo ago> To be frank, at this point, GPG has been a lost cause for basically decades. Why do high-profile projects, such as Linux and QEMU, still use GPG for signing pull requests / tags? https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainer-pgp-guide.html https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainer-pgp-guide.html https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/submitting-a-pull-request.html https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/submitting-a-pull-req... Why does Fedora / RPM still rely on GPG keys for verifying packages? This is a staggering ecosystem failure. If GPG has been a known-lost cause for decades, then why haven't alternatives ^W replacements been produced for decades?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- talideon 10mo agoLet's not conflate GPG and PGP-in-general. RPM doesn't use GPG, it uses Sequoia PGP. GPG is what GP is referring to as a lost cause. Now, it can be debated whether PGP-in-general is a lost cause too, but that's not what GP is claiming.
- ghickPit 10mo ago> it can be debated whether PGP-in-general is a lost cause too, but that's not what GP is claiming It is though what both the fine article, and tptacek in these comments, are claiming!
- Avamander 10mo agoThey are also correct, but that's indeed not what the person you replied to said. > then why haven't alternatives ^W replacements been produced for decades? Actually we do have alternatives for it. For example Git supports S/MIME and could absolutely be used to sign commits and tags. Even just using self-signed certificates wouldn't be far off from what PGP offers. However if people used their digital IDs like many countries offer, mission-critical code could have signatures with verifiable strong identities. Though there are other approaches as well, both for signing and for encrypting. It's more that people haven't really considered migrating.