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Why the fuck would you ever insert a government-provided USB key into any computer you actually cared about, much less actually use any government-provided key? The national government is the prime adversary. I mean, seriously, Alice and Bob want to communicate, and your solution is that they should use Eve as a courier!??

FWIW: your point--and it's a good one--is better made without the yelling.

And to answer you, though I don't speak for the person you were relying to: the U.S. government isn't even in my threat model. If the Eye of Sauron points my way, I lose. And so, given that as a prior, a universally trustable third party is not a bad idea. The implementation might totally suck (and I think it's a better practice to have a wide set of vendors and making the acquisition of such a key subsidized, rather than directly provided, by the .gov), but the central point of trust doesn't, and it isn't inherently a problem for it to be state-operated.

James Mickens has an awesome point roughly along these lines. It is one of my all time favorite lines about security up there with some Gene Spafford stuff.

""" If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they're going to hold a press conference and say "It wasn't us" as they wear t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY US," and then they're going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. """

I take your point - though I was not intending to yell, but to represent my state of alarm and bafflement, as the original poster's worldview is both alien and frightening. It's as though someone were circulating one of those "modest proposals" to improve automobile security by installing a sharp metal spike on the center of every steering wheel, without realizing that these things are supposed to be jokes.

A universally trustable third party key provider might not be a bad idea in itself, but a national government - any national government, I was not specifically referring to the US government - seems about as non-trustworthy as any third party gets. To my way of thinking, the whole point of cryptography is to allow the weak to protect themselves from the powerful, and giving the organization which is at least nominally the most powerful agent operating in one's area the opportunity to poison your crypto before you even begin seems... counterproductive.

There's a power curve though, yeah? That most powerful agent can just drag you off and apply rubber-hose cryptography. Or just drone your ass. At some point, worrying about what else they can do is kind of a whateverburger.

Sure, so the point is to avoid their notice. That's harder to do when they can snoop on your communications.

They can do that, but it'snot cheap for them. Giving the government total, automated access to your communications - and that's what we're talking about here IMO - lets them (and you, admittedly) avoid the whole beating scene. In real terms, it would drastically change the balance of power.

> Giving the government total, automated access to your communications

Hello no. Absolutely not.

We're talking here about a state distributing USB keyz with a certificate to each citizen. The certificate is 'vouched' by the CA, it confirms the name of the citizen and it can be used to sign stuff thanks to private key cryptography.

One usage could be to access public websites, and use that USB key to log in and confirm your identity.

You're correct, I was distracted by some posts in this chain that seemed to be talking about using the key for encryption, not identification.

So the primary threat would be impersonation by the trusted party, which would erode the trust pretty quickly. I'm still a bit wary of this approach - do you think we'd manage to keep the keys from also being used for message encryption?

Where I live, there's actually a system somewhat like this in place - banks etc. can provide identity verification to websites upon request. You log in to the bank's system with your account and one-time pad they provide, and the bank tells you what information it will pass on to the requester. It seems pretty decent, and might actually be better than the USB key approach.

Certificates use asymmetric keys, they allow to exchange encrypted messages, among other things.

Now, that doesn't mean that we have to encrypt stuff. It could be used for the authentication/identification only if that's all one wants to do.

> It seems pretty decent, and might actually be better than the USB key approach.

Same thing. Look at RSA SecurID keys, they do certificate + OTP generators. I've had those at a previous organization, it was well integrated and nice to use.

The certificates provide the identity. A private key or an OTP allows for authentication.

There are multiple ways to handle the identity and the authentication with 2 factors. Exactly what to distribute and who will distribute it is an implementation details.

I wonder if there's a niche for a USB firewall dongle that you can plug anything in with and it will guarantee it's only treated as a file system or something else benign.

The device could be something like a modified USB condom, but with more processing power. It would have to have all drivers locked unless a sensor verified that nothing was plugged into the suspicious end, and use a fundamentally limited set of drivers. On connection, it looks for any filesystems on the suspicious device, mounts them, and offers them up by proxy as filesystems to the host machine. Nice idea.

Not everyone is using encryption to stand up to the man... the national government isn't everyones prime adversary...

> Just get the national government to distribute RSA USB keys to every citizen.

I lived in a country that did exactly that. And it was a disaster. The keys were trivially easy to steal, even by accident (personal experience here), and you still have the same trust problem as before, except that with a central authority now you do not have as much control.

I have also used the electronic-signature-comes-with-your-ID-card thing, and it was a similar disaster, with dodgy drivers and half-arsed crypto implementations in common software. E.g., try using the same token in Firefox and Thunderbird (or anything else) at the same time.

PGP is fine. It's just that proper security is not easy. And the same applies in the physical world as much as in computing.

It's 2FA, it's doesn't rely ONLY on the key for authentication and a token can be revoked easy if stolen.

The implementation and the technology has some challenges to be executed. Just like everyone tech projects, that doesn't have GooMicroZon people. Nothing special ^^

>The keys were trivially easy to steal, even by accident

So distribute keys on smart cards that don't allow you to export the key. This is what Estonia does, and - concerns about their election infosec aside - it seems to work pretty well.

> So distribute keys on smart cards that don't allow you to export the key

That's what I covered in the second paragraph. :-)

The thing is, both those implementations were a disaster from either a technological or a security point of view. We're not even getting into whether a central source of trust is a good idea or not (you will look at the state of HTTPS and make up your own mind on that). So, to repeat, proper security is hard.

Interesting.

If you don't mind me asking, what country?

> I lived in a country that did exactly that.

Which country?

The first half of what you said, everything about PGP usability, is on point.

The second half--the federal government as centralized national PKI, generating everyone's private keys for them--is hilariously terrible.

I can almost hear Moxie, Matt Green, Trevor Perrin, and every infosec researcher and crypto engineer and privacy advocate facepalming in unison.

Guys. It doesn't have to be state controlled okay? It can be a SV startup if you prefer :D

The government is just an example because they already handle ID for everyone, and they need it to provide their services. It makes sense for them to go digital at some point and to guarantee the ID.

I didn't know that Americans were so anti-American ^^

Being distrustful of your government is completely "American." Having the U.S. federal government issuing an ID that is mandatory would make many in the U.S. raise a huge stink.

Good thing that social security number thing never took off I suppose.

It's a bit of a Continental European view that "they [the national government] already handle ID for everyone". Universal government ID isn't historically the case in countries descended from the UK.

Go read up on the whole Number-Of-The-Beast thing and mix that with a heavily Christian-influenced view of politics (which is there, even in the politics of not-particularly Christian people). We are talking about a country where some people view having a Social Security Number as a Very Bad Thing. Don't even get me started on the Hillbama-gunna-take-er-gerns crowd. They'll be blaming Obama for whatever well into the next decade.

We are a majorly paranoid society, for no particular good specific reason that I can see.

Really? Which national government? Why wouldn't they backdoor it?

Any government who wants to bring 2FA to its citizens.

Shipping a national backdoor is an entirely different topic. Please focus on the use case at hands.

I think that issue is central. You're describing a scheme with a central, trusted authority distributing keys. The question is, what's a central authority we can all trust? I think many people wouldn't trust any government. At that point, the design crumbles.

Well. You trust your government to issue national ID card and e-passports already.

I'm guessing you are from Europe because the idea of distrusting your government appears to be really foreign to you. According to Wikipedia, "The passport possession rate of the U.S. was approximately 39% of the population in 2015."

> distrusting your government appears to be really foreign to you.

That "U.S. Government" collecting, indexing and analyzing all data of any citizen must be an entirely different entity from the "United States Government" after all.

Yeah I am.

I guess that makes sense. People in the UK don't have any "national ID card". Must be a culture thing.

I guess that makes sense. That's why I have to go through fucking stupid private background check agencies for everything in the UK.

Do you think only 39% of Americans because the other 61% are all terrified of their government? Or might it be because international travel is a luxury not everyone can afford?

The US has strange hangups about national IDs.

Just because I have and use such passport does not mean I think its a good idea or trust it completly.

Those are identification. Carrying a passport doesn't let anyone listen in on my inane banter with my friends.

Brazil is heading in that direction.

Every single corporation here and even freelance service workers are required by law to have a key/certificate pair to be able to do file taxes.

Pretty much every single commercial transaction is signed with a certificate.

It is not yet required for every individual citizen to have one, but everything points to that happening at some time in the future.

> Just get the national government to distribute RSA USB keys to every citizen. Then they can use them on public government websites (taxes & jobs stuff) to confirm poeple's identities, just plug in the key. Quick and simple. (And that's not incompatible with ALSO asking for a password that was send in a different paper letter. 2FA-style.).

Estonia does provide S/MIME certificates for every citizen, although I've been told that they're not particularly heavily used.

Between Estonia and the DoD, there's a few million users of S/MIME. Whereas PGP has a few tens of thousands of users. It's clear which product won out in the marketplace.