Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

This is my reaction as well.

This seems bad, but... what should I do? What's the alternative?

I've seen multiple people say that PGP in general is kind of bad and it would be easy for the tech industry to write a secure alternative if it really wanted to. Cool, but that's not useful right now to ordinary people like me who aren't crypto experts who are trying to decide how we should sign/encrypt messages.

I have no idea what I would use as an alternative to PGP.

View on HN

To send messages, use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire. Don't use PGP.

Okay, and to sign commits or emails?

To encrypt files?

Don't encrypt and sign emails.

This is not a realistic solution.

SMS-sized messages are the least hard part of this for me. What I want is to be able to point at a file or folder on my computer and say, "sign that with a public key so I can prove I wrote it" or "encrypt that with someone else's public key so only they can read it". At that point, I don't necessary care all that much about how the file gets sent over the network.

It doesn't need to be integrated into email, but it does need to be a low-level enough operation that I can use it on an arbitrary block of text, file, or folder of any size. Is there a replacement that does that?

I use Signal, and it's great. But Signal is not a replacement for PGP, it's a replacement for one, very specific use-case for PGP.

I haven't used it for this, but I think Keybase might be a good system for filling the role of keyservers. If you just want encrypted messaging, it has it. But you can also store your PGP key in there and people can trust it if they trust Keybase's other proofs (which are not necessarily a leap of faith, you can go to the source and verify them).

You asked (among other things) how to send messages securely without PGP. Don't use PGP to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire.

Someone else asked how to email securely without PGP. Email isn't secure with PGP. Don't use PGP to send encrypt emails, and don't use email to send secure messages; use a secure messenger, like Signal or Wire.

I acknowledge there are use cases not well covered by secure messengers. The current state of file encryption, which is practically the "hello world" of encryption problems, is a travesty. If you're simply looking to sign something, and later verify that it was you who signed it, use minisign. But that's a very narrow use case.

I am not disagreeing with any particular technical point here, but I am struck reading the thread that there are two sides of a debate - one that is "Gosh GPG has had a fundamental problem for a decade and its terrible we as the internet have not solved it and now the bill comes due" and the other side is "Where the hell did that come from"

I am on the WTF side - GPG is synonymous in my mind with Public / Private keypairs and now this needs re-evaluating.

Tl;dr I need more context before I can understand the blast radius before I can evaluate the solutions

Some of us have a lot of running to do to catch up

> The current state of file encryption, which is practically the "hello world" of encryption problems, is a travesty.

Do you know of any projects that are aiming to solve this? It feels like all that is needed is a halfway decent standard file format, and some tools to bootstrap it. That seems to be how we got TLS and SSH, which are the two successes of encryption.

I suppose those two protocols have the advantage of interactive negotiation. Whereas software encrypting a file does not get to negotiate any parameters with the software that will later be decrypting it.

Moreover, those protocols had some decent weight behind it. Secure data transport is a problem that matters to essentially everyone these days. Whereas secure and portable file encryption really does not. E-mail is a significant use-case, but only tangentially, and optimal E-mail solutions are not really optimal portable file solutions.

My money is on `age` right now. https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1128865803938480128

[matrix] and Riot.im are alternatives to Signal and Wire.

Unfortunately these have strong privacy implications as they all phone home an awful lot.

Do you have more info about this? As far as I understand if you use e2e encryption with riot/matrix you should be quite safe.

I imagine the GP is talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178267. We've spent the last few weeks going through fixing the issues which this highlighted; there'll be a blog post later today (or tomorrow) giving an update on how we've addressed the points in question.

right: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/30/tightening-up-privacy-in-...

Yeah I wrote this before I saw that blog post which appears to have hit most of the implications.

sorry no. riot and matrix are both NOT e2e. I wish people would stop repeating as facts what is somewhere on the roadmap

Riot and Matrix have had E2EE since 2016. You have to manually enable it when you want it, but that's shortly going to change as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315096.

Without more context, saying that matrix is not e2e encrypted is just as much of a lie as saying it is.

To be clear, I'm not saying that anyone who criticizes PGP needs an easy solution. I agree with all the stuff I'm seeing in this thread, and I get that the current answer might be, "well, the ecosystem is kind of bad right now." But what I'm getting at is that it's one thing to understand that the ecosystem is bad, but that on its own is not information I (or most people) are equipped to act on.

Minisign could solve some of that, but going back to the point that I don't trust myself to audit cryptography software, Minisign also appears to be a one person project, and I can't find very many people online talking about it, using it, or looking for vulnerabilities. It's not that I don't trust you, I see you on HN a lot, but I'd feel more comfortable with Minisign if I could find more security people recommending it.

I can drop PGP for anything where I find a different tool that supports that specific use-case that's trustworthy. I'm not thrilled about that, because part of my security process is trying to make it hard for me to make mistakes as a user, and multiple tools hurt that effort. But I can deal.

BUT, I can't just stop encrypting files. I can start using a lot of tiny, individual tools for some of my use-cases, but occasionally, I'm going to be in a situation where I need to do the "hello world" stuff.

To kind of rephrase what I'm asking, regardless of whether or not PGP is good, is it currently the best solution for handling public/private key encryption in the general use case (particularly if I'm not personally using SKS for anything)? Because I can't just decide not to encrypt files any more; even if the current solution is bad I still need to use something. The Minisign main dev is also recommending Encpipe, which could solve some of my use cases, but doesn't support public keys and, again, looks like it's a hobby project that practically nobody in the security world is talking about or auditing. I guess age[0] also looks promising?

In theory, Age and Minisign could meet the majority of my hard requirements by themselves if I could verify that they're trustworthy. But realizing that PGP has been run essentially as a hobby project, it feels a little weird to move to another piece of software with only one serious maintainer.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11yHom20CrsuX8KQJXBBw04s8...

minisign is a few hundred lines of code most of which are setup for calls into libsodium.

If you need to encrypt files (symmetrically) then use a tool that does this well like Veracrypt.

To sign or encrypt emails you could use S/MIME. It is much more widely supported than PGP for signing and encrypting emails as well.

S/MIME is even worse than PGP. Don't use it.

Proprietary messengers are never secure.

Both Signal and Wire are FOSS though.

@tptacek

I have seen various endorsements of Signal from you, Bruce Schneier, Edward Snowden and so on.

I am honestly curious about how this aligns with the fact that Signal

* has no tests [1],

* has no CI [2].

How can the security of a software like Signal be asserted so thoroughly when on the engineering side, basic best practices are not followed and there is no automation that ensures that the important code paths work as expected?

Many Signal features like voice calls, video calls, reliable message delivery, or running-wihtout-crash, break regularly in daily use and with new updates. They have bugs.

What gives us (or you) confidence that the safety-critical aspects of Signal are magically exempt from such frequent bugs?

This is a serious question that concerns me.

Thanks!

(8-years Signal user with upstreamed patches.)

[1] There is a "test" directory, but it is negligible: 900 lines of actual test code in Signal-Android, vs >100k lines Java app source code.

[2] At least I could not find any; tests on `master` did not even compile; see https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7458#issu...

How do you use Signal without a phone number?

I mean:

> Requirements

> Signal uses your existing phone number.

> The number must be able to receive an SMS or phone call.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318691-Re...

You can't use one of those shared SMS services. So what, lease a SIM from some SIM farm in wherever, and hope that they're honest?

No privacy-conscious system would require phone numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com