4 ms·

Forgive me, but I don't understand how what you're describing is remotely possible. Cracking a single bcrypted passphrase should take an average time on the ord

Forgive me, but I don't understand how what you're describing is remotely possible. Cracking a single bcrypted passphrase should take an average time on the order of years. NSA and their ilk can maybe reduce that significantly, but they still won't be cracking an entire system any time soon, even if it's only 1,000 user accounts. We must be talking past each other. I promise I'm not trying to be obtuse--could you please try again?

jmillikin 14y ago
A malicious provider wouldn't have to brute-force the key; they could compromise your browser to steal the key and install a keylogger to take your password. Browser exploits aren't expensive, and zero-days are discovered semi-regularly. A sufficiently well-capitalized provider could even pay researchers to find new browser exploits, so they don't have to depend on scavenging them out of feral malware samples. This would probably work only once or twice, but would give that provider the ability to read any encrypted payloads that they have recorded.
- napoleond 14y ago
  Ahh yes, we did somehow manage to misunderstand each other completely. There is no scenario in my system in which the browser sees any keys or passphrases, encrypted or otherwise--that would only happen in a signed standalone client program capable of running native code. (The browser does see a password in the potential "send-only" scenario I described earlier, but that's a separate secret unrelated to the PGP key.) Yes, it would be possible to maliciously alter that code and redistribute it, but it would be difficult since the source would be open and anyone could verify the hash. At that point, it's probably easier to just infect the host computer with a keylogger some other way (and wait for the user to lose their key so that they need to use their passphrase, then intercept 2 factor auth somehow), but that's like the deus ex machina of computer security (and still not at all automatable at large scale as far as I can see, especially due to 2FA).
  - jmillikin 14y ago
    If the user's browser runs in the same account as the user's mail client, then any browser exploit will be able to access the user's key. The keylogger would be to take the user's key password. To my knowledge, there is no way to hook up 2FA for accessing a GPG(,etc) key.
    - napoleond 14y ago
      I think you're making some assumptions which don't apply to the system I'm working on. We're getting pretty far to the right margin in this thread, but I would love to continue this discussion out of band (and it's entirely possible that I really have missed something, in which case I would like to know it sooner rather than later). My email is in my profile :)

jmillikin 14y ago

A malicious provider wouldn't have to brute-force the key; they could compromise your browser to steal the key and install a keylogger to take your password. Browser exploits aren't expensive, and zero-days are discovered semi-regularly. A sufficiently well-capitalized provider could even pay researchers to find new browser exploits, so they don't have to depend on scavenging them out of feral malware samples. This would probably work only once or twice, but would give that provider the ability to read any encrypted payloads that they have recorded.

napoleond 14y ago
Ahh yes, we did somehow manage to misunderstand each other completely. There is no scenario in my system in which the browser sees any keys or passphrases, encrypted or otherwise--that would only happen in a signed standalone client program capable of running native code. (The browser does see a password in the potential "send-only" scenario I described earlier, but that's a separate secret unrelated to the PGP key.) Yes, it would be possible to maliciously alter that code and redistribute it, but it would be difficult since the source would be open and anyone could verify the hash. At that point, it's probably easier to just infect the host computer with a keylogger some other way (and wait for the user to lose their key so that they need to use their passphrase, then intercept 2 factor auth somehow), but that's like the deus ex machina of computer security (and still not at all automatable at large scale as far as I can see, especially due to 2FA).
- jmillikin 14y ago
  If the user's browser runs in the same account as the user's mail client, then any browser exploit will be able to access the user's key. The keylogger would be to take the user's key password. To my knowledge, there is no way to hook up 2FA for accessing a GPG(,etc) key.
  - napoleond 14y ago
    I think you're making some assumptions which don't apply to the system I'm working on. We're getting pretty far to the right margin in this thread, but I would love to continue this discussion out of band (and it's entirely possible that I really have missed something, in which case I would like to know it sooner rather than later). My email is in my profile :)