3 ms·

Does the reason for that ever come up in a conversation? I thought that everyone working in security used PGP a lot.

betterunix 13y ago
In fact, it is unusual to see people even sign emails in the (academic) cryptography community, let alone encrypt messages (at least in my experience). It is surprisingly rare to see academic crypto researchers actually use the systems they design, even for basic things like signing and encryption.
- Torgo 13y ago
  Strategically, you are probably better off not signing a message unless you want the message to be verifiable.
  - reeses 13y ago
    There's also the paranoia of non-repudiability with signed messages. In general, there is minimal benefit just signing a document. I don't care if someone I work with is spoofed because it will become obvious very quickly. It's only in a very few cases where there's an advantage in signing a document, and it's usually more in the verifiability of content (so that you can verify that nothing is lost/changed in transit) than in the verification of identity. Given the lack of adoption of PGP/GnuPG in email clients vs. S/MIME, if I'm signing my emails without encrypting them, chances are the recipient would still be able to read my emails and, knowing my writing style and given the context, be able to suss out that I was in fact the author. I use the word "paranoia" intentionally because there's a lack of meaningful legal precedent establishing that a gpg-signed message is enough to establish authorship. In a civil case, sure, it looks bad, but you could easily say,"oops, I stored my public key on [vps or cloud service], which was a well-known victim of a hack."
m0nastic 13y ago
In a dozen years, I think I've had a grand total of 4 clients (out of several hundred) that ever used PGP (despite recommending it specifically on project kickoff calls, particularly for communicating discovered vulnerabilities). I only had one who already had a key. Outside of those few work examples, I don't think I've ever sent or received a PGP encrypted message. In fact, the only signed messages I think I've ever seen were mailing list messages from people who signed all their messages.
- bigiain 13y ago
  Since 1997, I've collected public keys from a grand total of 17 friends/colleagues/business-contacts. (Note: FWIW, the email address in your profile doesn't provide a public key from pgp.mit.edu – I would have added you to my keychain and sent you a "Hi! Isn't it nice to introduce yourself without the NSA listening in!" email…)
  - m0nastic 13y ago
    I just searched pgp.mit.edu and it looks like the first key I have on there is from 1998[1] (with several others from previous jobs, although I don't know why I had two keys when I worked at BBN). I don't think I even have a key for my current email address. [1] http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x867C69B495193A2A http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x867C6...

In fact, it is unusual to see people even sign emails in the (academic) cryptography community, let alone encrypt messages (at least in my experience). It is surprisingly rare to see academic crypto researchers actually use the systems they design, even for basic things like signing and encryption.

Torgo 13y ago
Strategically, you are probably better off not signing a message unless you want the message to be verifiable.
- reeses 13y ago
  There's also the paranoia of non-repudiability with signed messages. In general, there is minimal benefit just signing a document. I don't care if someone I work with is spoofed because it will become obvious very quickly. It's only in a very few cases where there's an advantage in signing a document, and it's usually more in the verifiability of content (so that you can verify that nothing is lost/changed in transit) than in the verification of identity. Given the lack of adoption of PGP/GnuPG in email clients vs. S/MIME, if I'm signing my emails without encrypting them, chances are the recipient would still be able to read my emails and, knowing my writing style and given the context, be able to suss out that I was in fact the author. I use the word "paranoia" intentionally because there's a lack of meaningful legal precedent establishing that a gpg-signed message is enough to establish authorship. In a civil case, sure, it looks bad, but you could easily say,"oops, I stored my public key on [vps or cloud service], which was a well-known victim of a hack."

m0nastic 13y ago

In a dozen years, I think I've had a grand total of 4 clients (out of several hundred) that ever used PGP (despite recommending it specifically on project kickoff calls, particularly for communicating discovered vulnerabilities). I only had one who already had a key. Outside of those few work examples, I don't think I've ever sent or received a PGP encrypted message. In fact, the only signed messages I think I've ever seen were mailing list messages from people who signed all their messages.

bigiain 13y ago
Since 1997, I've collected public keys from a grand total of 17 friends/colleagues/business-contacts. (Note: FWIW, the email address in your profile doesn't provide a public key from pgp.mit.edu – I would have added you to my keychain and sent you a "Hi! Isn't it nice to introduce yourself without the NSA listening in!" email…)
- m0nastic 13y ago
  I just searched pgp.mit.edu and it looks like the first key I have on there is from 1998[1] (with several others from previous jobs, although I don't know why I had two keys when I worked at BBN). I don't think I even have a key for my current email address. [1] http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x867C69B495193A2A http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x867C6...