3 ms·
I tried to find something in the article that bothered me, but I don’t find it very convincing. Points like "someone can forward your email unencrypted after th
by pheggs 9mo ago
I tried to find something in the article that bothered me, but I don’t find it very convincing. Points like "someone can forward your email unencrypted after they decrypt it" are just... well, yeah - that can happen no matter what method you choose. It feels like GPG gets hate for reasons other than what’s actually mentioned, and I'm completely oblivious to what those reasons might be.
- tptacek 9mo agoIt's not that someone can forward your mail unencrypted. It's that in the normal operation of the system, someone taking the natural next step in a conversation (replying) can --- and, in the experience of everyone I've talked to who has used PGP in anger for any extended period of time, inevitably does --- destroy the security of the entire conversation by accidentally replying in plaintext. That can't happen in any modern encrypted messenger. It does happen routinely with encrypted email.
- mjevans 9mo agoYes, it's a problem with _email_. pgp as a tool could integrate with that, but in practice fails for... many reasons, the above included. All the other key exchange / etc issues as well.
- pheggs 9mo agowell that's fair, but sounds more like a email client issue than an actual issue with gpg/pgp. My client shows pretty clearly when it gets encrypted. But maybe I am oblivious.
- tptacek 9mo agoI agree that it's an email problem, which is why I wrote a whole article about why email can't be made secure with any reasonable client. But email is overwhelmingly the messaging channel PGP users use; in fact, it's a common-cited reason why people continue to use PGP (because it allows them to encrypt email).
- pheggs 9mo agoout of curiosity, would you like to share why you think it's an email protocol problem? Because I see that more as an email client problem
- akerl_ 9mo agoA protocol that doesn’t enforce security and relies on clients to choose to implement it is a broken protocol, from a security standpoint. Even if secure email clients exist that always make right choices, because you can’t know what client all your recipients are using, all it takes is one person with a “bad” client (which, keep in mind, is a client that accurately implements the protocol but doesn’t enforce additional security rules on top) to ruin things.
- bgwalter 9mo agoYes, it is odd that this criticism is only allowed for gpg while worse Signal issues are not publicized here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/russia-targeting-signal-messenger https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus... Some Ukrainians may regret that the followed the Signal marketing. I have never heard of a real world exploit that has actually been used like that against gpg.
- tptacek 9mo agoWhy would anyone care if you brought phishing attacks on Signal users up?
- bgwalter 9mo agoPeople who do not wish to get killed may care.
- tptacek 9mo agoThose people shouldn't be, and thankfully aren't, using PGP. Nobody is suppressing this report on phishing attacks against Signal users; it's just not as big a deal as what's wrong with PGP.
- bgwalter 9mo agoAccidentally replying in plaintext is a user error, scanning a QR code is a user error. Yet one system is declared secure (Signal), the other is declared insecure. Despite the fact that the QR code issue happened in a war zone, whereas I have not heard of a similar PGP fail in the real world.
- tptacek 9mo agoFirst of all, accidentally replying in plaintext is hardly the only problem with PGP, just the most obvious one. Secondly, it's not user error: modern messaging cryptography is designed not to allow it to happen.