4 ms·

GPG is an immense failure from the point of protecting person to person communications. It is largely a success in verifying the identities of the software dev

by zmanian 12y ago

GPG is an immense failure from the point of protecting person to person communications. It is largely a success in verifying the identities of the software developers. The entire Debian ecosystem relies on GPG in largely successful ways. Peter Todd suggests that PGP drop encrypted communications as a goal and focus only on identity and authentication. It appears the PGP just can't be bootstrapped into modernity from a communication point of view. The only major innovation in authentication and identity has been threshold signatures which GPG could support.

chimeracoder 12y ago
> Peter Todd suggests that PGP drop encrypted communications as a goal and focus only on identity and authentication. Identity and authentication are the biggest reason that PGP hasn't caught on with non-technical users - the web-of-trust is necessary to do distributed identity and authentication properly (under the current model), and the importance of out-of-band verification can be hard to explain. Authentication (as opposed to authorization) is hard, even without factoring in state adversaries. The fact that the web-of-trust hasn't succeeded doesn't mean that another model won't, but I don't think it makes sense for PGP to throw out the one goal it already does incredibly well (securing communications) in order to focus on the biggest problem we haven't been able to solve in 20 years.
- pakled_engineer 12y ago
  WoT works well for some things like #bitcoin-otc IRC trading channel but still most users aren't checking sigs. I like how they wanted to completely remove identifying info and similar signature schemes from signify http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/signify http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/signify
- zmanian 12y ago
  It isn't clear that we should want PGP to succeed from a communication point of view. It's clear that PGP has succeeded in protecting communications of a some subset of users for the last 20 years. Because of the lack of forward secrecy, it isn't clear that this would scale and how common key theft is. My opinion is basically GPG for identity and Axolotl for comms.
- tinco 12y ago
  There's no other model than the web-of-trust. And it didn't fail because it's hard to grap (it's really not), it failed because a) almost no one needs it and b) the tech is hard to use. Imagining a world where the web-of-trust was succesful is not hard. It starts with everyone using Outlook instead of gmail. Then imagine Outlook having PGP support builtin. Then imagine in the contacts list, every contact was marked with a color, red, yellow green. Whenever sending an e-mail to a red contact, Outlook would display a small one liner on top of the compose box "There is no identity information about the contact you are sending an e-mail to". (it doesn't matter that no one knows what that means, it's just a small nag that people understand is negative) Whenever sending an e-mail to a yellow contact, Outlook would display the following nag line: "You have not verified the identity of the contact you're sending an e-mail to. Click here to resolve". When the user clicks the line, they'll be asked to call the contact on the phone, or meet with them in person and ask them to compare keys. (Perhaps aided with some fancy tech like NFC or whatever) Will people ignore the nag line? Yes. Will people click through the dialogs to resolve the nag line without actually verifying? Yes. Does that matter? Not as much as crypto-purists would have you believe. There's always that uncle, niece or colleague that's going to be anal about it anyway. And if the web of trust is big enough, and the devices enabling the web are communicating, it will be very easy for the web to self-heal whenever corruption arises. Just imagine if whenever someone who purports to be your aunt sends you an e-mail, and your e-mail client automatically checks the key with everyone elses in your family. The only reason the web-of-trust doesn't work is because it was never adopted and made usable by the important software developers. And that never happened because not enough people cared.
  - rictic 12y ago
    At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of meaningless and annoying to users, causing them to ignore and misuse it Step 2: mumble mumble... self-healing corruption Step 3: the only reason this hasn't succeeded is that people didn't care enough It's exactly those parts in step 2 where I've historically fallen off of the WoT story. What does the UI do when my nontechnical friend has marked my key but his dad has marked it as untrusted? What happens when I lose my phone with my keys on it? How do we not end up in a situation where users see big scary warnings all the time constantly and they just learn to ignore them?
maaku 12y ago
GPG still could be much better for those applications. For example, it is still impossible to do GPG multi-sig (e.g. have the application developer and the distribution release manager sign off on the binaries).
- caf 12y ago
  Can't you just create two detached signatures?
  - maaku 12y ago
    At the expense of lower validation speed and requiring every higher level protocol using the signatures to be aware of whatever signing scheme you are using.

by zmanian 12y ago

chimeracoder 12y ago

> Peter Todd suggests that PGP drop encrypted communications as a goal and focus only on identity and authentication. Identity and authentication are the biggest reason that PGP hasn't caught on with non-technical users - the web-of-trust is necessary to do distributed identity and authentication properly (under the current model), and the importance of out-of-band verification can be hard to explain. Authentication (as opposed to authorization) is hard, even without factoring in state adversaries. The fact that the web-of-trust hasn't succeeded doesn't mean that another model won't, but I don't think it makes sense for PGP to throw out the one goal it already does incredibly well (securing communications) in order to focus on the biggest problem we haven't been able to solve in 20 years.

pakled_engineer 12y ago
WoT works well for some things like #bitcoin-otc IRC trading channel but still most users aren't checking sigs. I like how they wanted to completely remove identifying info and similar signature schemes from signify http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/signify http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/signify
zmanian 12y ago
It isn't clear that we should want PGP to succeed from a communication point of view. It's clear that PGP has succeeded in protecting communications of a some subset of users for the last 20 years. Because of the lack of forward secrecy, it isn't clear that this would scale and how common key theft is. My opinion is basically GPG for identity and Axolotl for comms.
tinco 12y ago
There's no other model than the web-of-trust. And it didn't fail because it's hard to grap (it's really not), it failed because a) almost no one needs it and b) the tech is hard to use. Imagining a world where the web-of-trust was succesful is not hard. It starts with everyone using Outlook instead of gmail. Then imagine Outlook having PGP support builtin. Then imagine in the contacts list, every contact was marked with a color, red, yellow green. Whenever sending an e-mail to a red contact, Outlook would display a small one liner on top of the compose box "There is no identity information about the contact you are sending an e-mail to". (it doesn't matter that no one knows what that means, it's just a small nag that people understand is negative) Whenever sending an e-mail to a yellow contact, Outlook would display the following nag line: "You have not verified the identity of the contact you're sending an e-mail to. Click here to resolve". When the user clicks the line, they'll be asked to call the contact on the phone, or meet with them in person and ask them to compare keys. (Perhaps aided with some fancy tech like NFC or whatever) Will people ignore the nag line? Yes. Will people click through the dialogs to resolve the nag line without actually verifying? Yes. Does that matter? Not as much as crypto-purists would have you believe. There's always that uncle, niece or colleague that's going to be anal about it anyway. And if the web of trust is big enough, and the devices enabling the web are communicating, it will be very easy for the web to self-heal whenever corruption arises. Just imagine if whenever someone who purports to be your aunt sends you an e-mail, and your e-mail client automatically checks the key with everyone elses in your family. The only reason the web-of-trust doesn't work is because it was never adopted and made usable by the important software developers. And that never happened because not enough people cared.
- rictic 12y ago
  At the risk of being inappropriately snarky, to someone who is somewhat skeptical of WoT-based proposals, this reads like: Step 1: the UI will be a mixture of meaningless and annoying to users, causing them to ignore and misuse it Step 2: mumble mumble... self-healing corruption Step 3: the only reason this hasn't succeeded is that people didn't care enough It's exactly those parts in step 2 where I've historically fallen off of the WoT story. What does the UI do when my nontechnical friend has marked my key but his dad has marked it as untrusted? What happens when I lose my phone with my keys on it? How do we not end up in a situation where users see big scary warnings all the time constantly and they just learn to ignore them?

maaku 12y ago

GPG still could be much better for those applications. For example, it is still impossible to do GPG multi-sig (e.g. have the application developer and the distribution release manager sign off on the binaries).

caf 12y ago
Can't you just create two detached signatures?
- maaku 12y ago
  At the expense of lower validation speed and requiring every higher level protocol using the signatures to be aware of whatever signing scheme you are using.