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The first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email

The first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare. (And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)

etherael 13y ago
That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings, but as you say most end users will prefer to work through a third party that will handle the complexities of key management for them. The trick is though that there can be an infinite amount of third parties all engaged in competition with each other and the end users just participate in that market like they would any other. OP's suggestion may well work the same way, certain end users could choose to handle their own key management, and there could be third parties that handle it for those that prefer not to. As long as the space for those third parties is infinite and end users can opt to handle key management themselves, it's still a decentralised solution.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter. When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily stay up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network. Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because everyone uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.
  - etherael 13y ago
    A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, and they never will. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply do not care about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are directly impacted. If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.
      - etherael 13y ago
        > The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it. That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it is a problem, why would those ordinary people not do their shopping based on censorship resistance? > If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools. This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor. Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.
drdaeman 13y ago
> Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare. I think you're wrong. Basic key management is nearly trivial, even for complete non-techies. My dad didn't knew a thing about modern crypto but learned to sign his amateur radio callbook records in no time. Just showed him "here's your keypair, keep this one absolutely private, and this is public key, here we ask them to sign the public part, yada yada" (the whole explanation took about 15 minutes) and he got it. Maybe that's because he was personally interested in learning. Now, while he would probably get confused and fail when faced with any remotely advanced things, he's able to use very basic crypto well enough. And, yes, he had backed keys up and had moved them between computers. It wasn't that hard. The primary reason for rarity is complete UI/UX awkwardness. Key management (if present) is hidden beneath dozen of clicks deep into some obscure settings area - this prevents users from learning there's one. Then UI is plain horrible (pretty much raw view of keystore contents, with all that X.50x-based weirdness exposed naked right to ASN.1 OIDs), which prevents use by those who found it. And software vendors, even though they're bragging about their "security for our users" efforts, don't give a damn about that, as key management UIs remained mostly the same for decades.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Your dad is probably exactly the kind of person Zimmerman was thinking about in 1991. Somebody with one PC that they do everything on. He also has a specific motivation for learning about and putting up with public key crypto. I don't know what UIs you've used, but the ones I've used dating back to the early 90s are nothing like what you're describing. Typical public key crypto UIs are very clear and unambiguous, and I've had no trouble teaching intelligent people how to use them. The problem is twofold: First, half the population is necessarily below average. Second, even getting the intelligent people to keep using it is a completely different matter. I've had an engineer-CEO mandate PGP usage for the company. Later, when sending him encrypted documents, he couldn't read them. Why? Because he'd gotten a new laptop. Where were his keys? Who knows. Ditto one of the best and most security-minded engineers I know. Tried to send an encrypted file to him, "I haven't really used PGP in years, I'm not sure where my keys are". I've kept a keychain[0] intact for the better part of a decade. I don't personally know a single other person who has, including the person who originally asked me to generate a public key. [0] In fact, one of my still-used SSH keys is also about that old, as is my known_hosts file. These are, again, singular accomplishments in my professional and social circles.

etherael 13y ago

That doesn't necessarily mean you've lost, take cryptocurrencies for example. Yes you can manage your own keys as an end user for your cryptocurrency holdings, but as you say most end users will prefer to work through a third party that will handle the complexities of key management for them. The trick is though that there can be an infinite amount of third parties all engaged in competition with each other and the end users just participate in that market like they would any other. OP's suggestion may well work the same way, certain end users could choose to handle their own key management, and there could be third parties that handle it for those that prefer not to. As long as the space for those third parties is infinite and end users can opt to handle key management themselves, it's still a decentralised solution.

nknighthb 13y ago
This is not a technical problem. It is a human problem, and humans don't act like you want them to. There would emerge a handful of large, popular, simple, easy-to-use central sites. A rogue regime can block them just as easily as it just blocked Twitter. When it takes hours, days, or weeks for new moles to pop up, and they necessarily stay up, Whack-A-Mole is easy. And as sites keep getting whacked, people will lose the motivation to move on to yet another new site, learn its quirks, and rebuild their network. Twitter is a powerful tool of dissent precisely because everyone uses it. It's not limited to the technically sophisticated and/or motivated activists. Activists need access to regular people, and they won't have it on a network that's painful and annoying to use.
- etherael 13y ago
  A competitive market of third party providers on a peer to peer based social media platform can be both easy to use and impossible to censor. Censorship resistance becomes just another thing on the shopping list for third party providers, those that can do it best get the largest amount of users. The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Ordinary people do not do their "shopping" based on censorship resistance, and they never will. You're thinking like an activist, you need to think like an apathetic layman, because that's what the vast majority of human beings are. They simply do not care about the same things you do, and you can't force them to until their lives are directly impacted. If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools.
    - etherael 13y ago
      > The more censorship becomes a problem, the more value there is in services that resist it. That is, normal people can be negatively affected by state actions and censorship too, at the point that it is a problem, why would those ordinary people not do their shopping based on censorship resistance? > If you want to help ordinary people get around censorship, go help the Tor project. It actually works, because it's compatible with human nature. It provides a simple, largely transparent tool that people can insert into their existing, normal habits, and it provides a basis on which the technically sophisticated can build even better tools in the form of hidden services that users can interact with exactly as they interact with their existing, non-resistant tools. This is decent advice, but just serves to make my point all the more; Censorship resistance is becoming a problem in Turkey, people start using Tor. If the aforementioned peer to peer based social media platform actually existed, they would start using whatever service best evaded the censorship they're railing against now via Tor. Since we have Tor already, why bother with such a platform? Because despite Tor, the platform itself could be hijacked and Tor would not assist in censorship resistance in this scenario. Twitter might be happy to tell Turkey to get lost when they start making demands, but what if you're trying to evade censorship from the US government or entity with similar level of power? This will likely become an issue in future, having platforms that are immune to hijacking is a good way to address it.

drdaeman 13y ago

> Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare. I think you're wrong. Basic key management is nearly trivial, even for complete non-techies. My dad didn't knew a thing about modern crypto but learned to sign his amateur radio callbook records in no time. Just showed him "here's your keypair, keep this one absolutely private, and this is public key, here we ask them to sign the public part, yada yada" (the whole explanation took about 15 minutes) and he got it. Maybe that's because he was personally interested in learning. Now, while he would probably get confused and fail when faced with any remotely advanced things, he's able to use very basic crypto well enough. And, yes, he had backed keys up and had moved them between computers. It wasn't that hard. The primary reason for rarity is complete UI/UX awkwardness. Key management (if present) is hidden beneath dozen of clicks deep into some obscure settings area - this prevents users from learning there's one. Then UI is plain horrible (pretty much raw view of keystore contents, with all that X.50x-based weirdness exposed naked right to ASN.1 OIDs), which prevents use by those who found it. And software vendors, even though they're bragging about their "security for our users" efforts, don't give a damn about that, as key management UIs remained mostly the same for decades.

nknighthb 13y ago
Your dad is probably exactly the kind of person Zimmerman was thinking about in 1991. Somebody with one PC that they do everything on. He also has a specific motivation for learning about and putting up with public key crypto. I don't know what UIs you've used, but the ones I've used dating back to the early 90s are nothing like what you're describing. Typical public key crypto UIs are very clear and unambiguous, and I've had no trouble teaching intelligent people how to use them. The problem is twofold: First, half the population is necessarily below average. Second, even getting the intelligent people to keep using it is a completely different matter. I've had an engineer-CEO mandate PGP usage for the company. Later, when sending him encrypted documents, he couldn't read them. Why? Because he'd gotten a new laptop. Where were his keys? Who knows. Ditto one of the best and most security-minded engineers I know. Tried to send an encrypted file to him, "I haven't really used PGP in years, I'm not sure where my keys are". I've kept a keychain[0] intact for the better part of a decade. I don't personally know a single other person who has, including the person who originally asked me to generate a public key. [0] In fact, one of my still-used SSH keys is also about that old, as is my known_hosts file. These are, again, singular accomplishments in my professional and social circles.