> So I get the impression GnuPG is considered obsolete by the security community.
This is news to me, but I'm not in "the Security Community". I can't find anything that corroborates this. Why do you say that?
This is news to me, but I'm not in "the Security Community". I can't find anything that corroborates this. Why do you say that?
I noted that the Snowden leaks said the NSA of all groups hated GPG since it blacked out their collection efforts. They had to send their limited team of hackers to deal with people doing that hitting other parts of their systems. If NSA isn't regularly breaking it, then it should be strong enough to stop all the threats likely to bother me. I push it plus a limited set of commands that make it easy, but annoying, to use. Instead of email, I just tell people to encrypt/sign text and zip files with boring names. That lets us dodge vulnerabilities that come from metadata, email interactions, and so on. Then, send them via whatever mechanism ranging from convenience to full anonymity.
Truth is I rarely use it because other people rarely communicate to me encrypted or request it. They usually send stuff to my Gmail account in plaintext or HTML. It's there if I need something stronger. It's a pain in the butt. I at least know it has a stronger baseline than most tools which are unknowns to me that I assume will get hacked until seeing evidence otherwise.
What makes it ‘obsolete’ is that it lets you do bad things, like encryption without signing, messages can be partially encrypted/signed, etc. There are too many settings/options that amount to “change this to reduce security for no other benefit”.
The current ideal is software that is only capable of being secure no matter how you use it.
This also only applies to the algorithms that are currently considered not weak.
What is the target audience for GPG?
* Some package managers use it to sign binary packages. (Think apt-get)
* I personally use it in shell scripts to avoid storing some secrets in the clear on disk. (Use case similar to ssh-agent)
My own shell scripts are maybe more iffy, as I am not myself an expert, but my personal use doesn't see wide distribution.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that APIs should be as misuse-resistant as possible, and GPG is notoriously intransigent about actually acting as a well-designed API. Additionally, The Update Framework (TUF, https://theupdateframework.github.io/) prevents these issues by design.
Importantly though, it's a big project which in this specific instance meant that someone on earth did end up scrutinizing and publishing exactly the sort of thing you linked.
I uses GPG for encrypting files for the most part. I also use it for some of the situations where you might use ssh -- not because it's a good idea, but rather because I wanted to learn how to do it.
My main use for GPG, though, is for distributed authentication. PGP's web of trust is quite useful if you know how to use it. Very few people use it, because they don't know how -- and also PGP's protocol makes it very difficult to understand how to use it. On top of that, GPG's UI makes it even more difficult to use. But if you can wade through all that, it's fine :-)
The main scenarios where I think WoT is useful is where you have a historical relationship with someone and that relationship is more important that their actual identity. For example, maybe you exchange haikus with some guy that you don't know. They claim to to be Matsuo Basho, which you think is a bit fishy, but you just want to ensure that all of these haikus are from the same person claiming to be Matsuo Basho (and not someone pretending to be the person pretending to be Basho). Now if your Basho pretender wants to introduce you to their painter friend Claude Monet, you don't actually care if it's actually Claude Monet (you'd best be suspicious). However, when someone claiming to be Claude Monet contacts you, you want to be sure it's the same Claude Monet that your friend Basho recommended to you.
These are the kinds of scenarios where PGP implementations (like GPG) are pretty much the only way. You can do it by hand, but using GPG is very slightly easier. A more realistic scenario might be that someone is giving you requirements for some project and they want to delegate some of the specification duties to someone else on their team. You are a remote contractor and have never met any of the people involved. You are satisfied that your original specifier is valid because they keep paying your invoices, but you want to be sure that any other people you interact with are authorised to deal with you.
That means it's not fine. Footguns mean it's a non-starter. Also, you don't get to pick the algorithms when you're the recipient of the message.