Stop Using Encrypted Email

RFC 822/2822/5322 e-mail, on top of RFC 5321 SMTP and RFC 3501 IMAP, can't be secure. (And more RFCs I'm probably forgetting).

To most people in the target audience (LARPers, technologist, and others), "email" isn't necessarily that. It's whatever Google/Outlook/... does for them. It isn't a concete set of protocols. But a _type_ of messaging. A particular set of ergonomics.

When framing it from that perspective, people (programmers?) will go "well duh". Then we can move on from the unproductive discussion about semantics and move on to defining new standards, clarifying threat models, and building a real replacement people and companies will adopt. It'll take a lot of coordination and cooperation that can't happen until we've convinced enough people what the real problem is. And as long as we're using vague, subjective terms like "email", I don't think we can.

PGP is a good way to communicate under the right circumstances. Say I'm writing to someone I trust and have verified their key fingerprint via a secure channel (in person, over the phone, etc). If I were sending them login credentials for a shared site, or bank info for setting up a payment, or even just wanted to block general corporate snooping then what's wrong with PGP? It's "pretty good privacy."

It's nice that I can apply the cryptography on a local machine and then send the result over email. I don't need to sign up for the paranoid chat app du jour.

( In fact PGP is useful for more than signing/encrypting mail, see https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-11-05-advanced-intro-gnupg.h... )

No, Signal is not an acceptable answer; it replicates text messaging, not email. In more detail:

1. Email is potentially long-form. I sit down and type it from my computer. Text-messaging is always short, although possibly it's a series of short messages. A series of short emails, by contrast, is an annoyance; it's something you try to avoid sending (even though you inevitably do when it turns out you got something wrong). Similarly, you don't typically hold rapid-fire conversations over email.

2. On that point, email says, you don't need to read this immediately. I expect a text message will be probably be read in a few minutes, and probably replied to later that day (if there's no particular urgency). I expect an email will be probably read in a few hours, and probably replied to in a few days (if there's no particular urgency).

3. It's OK to cold-email people. To text someone you need their phone number; it's for people you know. By contrast, email addresses are things that people frequently make public specifically so that strangers can contact them.

So what am I supposed to do for secure messaging that replicates that? The best answer I've gotten for this so far -- other than PGP which is apparently bad -- is "install Signal on your computer in addition to your phone and just use it as if it's email". That's... not really a satisfactory answer. Like, I expect a multi-page Signal message talking about everything I've been up to for the past month to annoy its recipient, who is likely reading it on their phone, not their computer. And I can't send someone a Signal message about a paper they wrote that I have some comments on, not unless they're going to put their fricking phone number on their website.

So what do I do here? The secure email replacement just doesn't seem to be here yet.

(I'm guessing in case (3), the authors would suggest just using unencrypted email, but what about problems (1) and (2)?)

The problem with these arguments is that they have nothing to do with security. There's simply no case that can be made that encrypted email is as secure as a modern secure messenger. People tolerate shoddy encryption in email because ergonomics are more important to them than security.

The problem here is that there are real people who depend on the security of their messages who would be taking unreasonable risks in trying to get an encrypted email workflow going. Rather than telling these people to read a GPG tutorial or install Enigmail or whatever, we should be telling them either to use a secure messenger, or not to put themselves at risk at all.

I understand that this article is for the secure human-to-human messaging use case. That's fine; I have no argument with this. But outside that context, it makes no sense, yet generic claims like "encrypted email is bad" are being made. This is too broad.

I understand that the majority of perceived demand* for encryption may be for secure messaging. On that basis, maybe you think it's OK to disparage encrypted email because a win in getting universal secure personal messaging with the modern desired properties would be worth the cost. But isn't this a strawman? Who exactly is a proponent of encrypted email for secure personal messaging anyway? Who is using PGP for personal encrypted communications today who is being harmed?

* Because most people don't care; it's only a minority of advocates who, rightly or wrongly, believe that everyone should.

"Stop using that thing that mostly works as intended and is integrated into lots of email clients and systems, and has a number of independent implementations, and has the decentralized properties that match email."

"What should we use instead?"

"shrug You can send encrypted stickers in Signal, isn't that neat?"

If you're going to advocate for everyone to stop using something that they rely on, make sure there's a viable alternative for them to switch to first (or throw your weight behind making/enhancing one). Otherwise you're just telling people to stop using plastic straws and giving them shitty paper straws in exchange. People know they're bad but the alternatives are worse to them so they stick with the bad thing.

(Note: This is an "everything sucks" type of comment but it's solely based on my opinion and my experiences. I'm not trying to devalue the work of the people who made the respective solutions and I'm not trying to frame this as general truths. I'm sure a lot of what's listed here just comes down to my specific circumstances.)

- Signal: Afaik it requires a smartphone (Android or iOS) and a phone number which are two things I don't wanna be bound to. Additionally, last time I tried it, messages got noticably delayed and I didn't recieve any notifications. I assume this is because I don't have the Google Services Framework installed even though I checked and Signal should (?) work without it.

- WhatsApp: Metadata falls rights into Facebook's hands so no thanks.

- Matrix+Riot: Message delivery was kinda wonky and slow when I tried it. Also it looks incredibly complex which means someone I communicate with will inevitably screw up just as described in the article.

- XMPP+Conversations: This actually looked like it works for a while. What drove me away from it in the end was that file transfer didn't work for some reason in my environment as well as push notifications for some people I talked to. Presumably they ran a version of Android that mandates Firebase Cloud Messaging and Conversations doesn't use that. We did not want to delve into debugging this further.

- other (mostly "decentralized web") solutions: Message delivery was either unreliable, slow or it straight up didn't work. (No hate on the dweb though.)

Email is kinda bad but so is everything else. What kind of solutions do y'all use and why? Is there some "promised land" I've missed?

I get the point the author is making re: LARPing, but this kind of attitude and tone is bordering (or, bluntly: is) condescending to anyone who doesn't know as much as you. It's a huge shame because the general discussions surrounding privacy/security are absolutely rampant with paranoid bullshit, and stuff like this just doesn't help. The people you consider to be LARPing might honestly just be new to the idea of security/privacy/encryption/(insert your label here) and would be better served by a tone where you're not talking down to them, especially if you're an established authority.

Personally speaking, I use encrypted email for my personal account - but I'm under no big illusions about it, and at this point it's partly out of laziness as I find moving email providers to be a useless exercise in wasting time. My original use case was my wife and I wanting to send documents back and forth easily, have it encrypted and retained somewhere that's (relatively) easily searchable, and isn't one of the bigger email services. Email is a workflow that goes back decades, and I'm not particularly interested in changing that mental mapping in my brain (a feeling I suspect many would echo).

It's email. It's not encrypted or 100% private if I email my buddy who's using Gmail/etc. It does jack all for my bills, newsletters, and so on. I'm not worried about the metadata not being encrypted because if I needed that level of security, I'd use Signal or some other tool.

You're probably right that it can't be "fixed", but there's also nothing wrong with attempting marginal improvements until an eventual replacement comes along. It remains a convenient "it just fucking works" and until something replaces that, and interoperates with the rest of the way the world actually works, it's probably not changing.

My 2c, at least.

This is a pretty typical example from the article of the sort of important sounding but ultimately bogus argument presented in such articles:

>So, for example, it recently turned out to be possible for eavesdroppers to decrypt messages without a key, simply by tampering with encrypted messages.

By failing to actually specify the actual attack the writer hopes to prevent a rebuttal. I am pretty sure they are talking about EFAIL. EFAIL was itself a weird slander of the idea of encrypted email but ultimately did not show any weakness of either PGP or S/MIME. It was instead a cautionary tale about the use of HTML for email.

The article attempts to promote Signal as superior to PGP email. That is unlikely as Signal initially trusts the phone system for identity. It is also quite a lot more complex than PGP so the odds of an exploit are not in Signal's favour.

But I still think that PGP can and should be used in certain scenarios: think of how Snowden interacted initially with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

That particular scenario was about anonimity (I don't want to reveal the sender persona just yet) and temporary "validity" of the messages: if down the line, one or two years later, the message gets decrypted, no harm is done.

Potentially, Snowden could have used a burner phone, install signal and get hold of the journalists phone number - more difficult that email, but not impossible. In Europe it's not so simple to get a sim card in a complete anon way: not impossible, but if one need several sim cards it may get cumbersome and expensive.

The most that can be done at this point is to build a new closed "email v2" which cannot interoperate with any existing client out there, but because of that it will inevitably be dead at launch.

For me this is a good compromise and a great alternative to messengers like Whatsapp and Telegram. This is a first step towards decentralization while relying on the existing email infrastructure.

I'm more optimistic than this blog post allows for. I see email's trajectory over my lifetime and it looks like incremental improvements really do work, they just aren't fast. And I think just as Signal lacks an "Encrypt" button because that's the wrong UX (everything is always encrypted, no need for a button) that's email's future too. You aren't going to install "Really good privacy" and have encrypted email. Just one day perhaps many years from now you'll be debugging a weird problem and you'll discover that without ever noticing it your email is actually encrypted end-to-end and you're not actually sure when then started happening or how.

Can we design a system such that sending a message from alice@foo.com to bob@bar.com is reasonably secure and private? How does Signal/NOISE solve this? Why can those not be applied to non-messaging systems (or, at least more traditionally structured messaging systems - which is itself a questionable definition since email threads are a hack, its mostly just independent blobs)?

I guess I'm off to read the whitepapers for NOISE and Signal tonight to see how the models differs.

[0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop

[2]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

No idea why many recent secure messenger thing using the phone number for anything is a good idea. You don't need the phone number to have locally stored contacts.

Also how trustable your local Google/Samsung/... provided address book is is another question (I'm not saying Google/... is hacking you but they probably would love to collect statistics about your contact book and sell them, at least if you, maybe accidentally, allow syncing of your contacts with your Google account. Does anyone here know if their terms of service would allow that?)

LARP here is a link to Google and from the results I can only assume that it expands to "Live Action Role-Playing (Game)". I don't get how that's related. What is "Live Action Role-Playing Security"?

> most people who encrypt emails are LARPing

They're role-playing what?

For tampering, PGP-signed email is helpful.

For protecting secret communication contents, PGP-encrypted email can be helpful to some degree.

For preventing a surveillance from knowing who you talk to, when, from where and what type of content you likely exchange, email cannot become secure.

I suspect it is the combination of the three the author has in mind.

It's kind of like the ideal way of securing a computer - encase it in concrete and drop it in the marianas trench. A volcano would probably work too in a pinch.

The issue that some security folk, such as the author, don't comprehend is that people want to actually _use_ their tools and maybe, just possibly, have a decent experience in doing so.

Sure, encrypted email isn't perfect. It's probably a step better than letting Google scan _every_ email and instead only let them scan the ones that hit a gmail account. Likewise, two people are capable of having a reasonably secure conversation over encrypted email.

Calling people who move towards being more secure, even imperfectly, as LARPers is rather insulting. If anything, the author is LARPing as a security professional.

A phone number is far more identifying than 10+ years' worth of email metadata. Anonymous email is still possible (if difficult); anonymous phone numbers largely are not. And if your adversaries are state-level then your phone number gives them not only your name and address, but also a direct and easy way to track your location in realtime.

OpenPGP's key rotation remains the closest thing to a practical approach that actually exists. No supposedly "secure" messenger has managed to do better: either your contacts' keys sometimes change for reasons that you don't understand and you occasionally get told to "press OK to continue", or they don't change at all. That is not a sustainable approach for real security.

As the article points out, snake-oil encryption products are everywhere. How can you be sure you're not using one? Because tptacek posted saying this one is secure? At a minimum the product needs to be an open-source implementation of a published, established, reviewed standard with multiple independent implementations. Especially any random number generator it uses needs to be open-source, as that is the easiest way to backdoor an encryption product. And the way its cryptosystem provides security - the algorithms that it uses, the assumptions they rely on, the model and reasoning that turns those into guarantees - need to be simple enough that you can understand them, not rely on vague handwaves like "the proprietary intermediary server can't do anything except during the initial handshake, or if the client ends up redoing the initial handshake, but don't worry about what circumstances might cause that to happen".

Signal is unsafe and cannot be made safe. Stop using Signal.

(If you want something more constructive, work on better UI to make OpenPGP key rotation easier (using subkeys, they're right there in the protocol), better implementations of OpenPGP (i.e. more usable libraries), or non-email OpenPGP messengers to avoid the metadata issues)

1. Federate it.

2. Don't tie it to phones/phone numbers.

Yes, PGP is weak, metadata is exposed, email wasn't designed for any of this, and people will fuck it up.

It tickles me that plaintext replies are submitted as an argument against encrypted email. The reply being in plaintext is an example of UNencrypted email. If you oppose a thing, let it be because of what it is, not its opposite. You don't sell your failed useless car because of that one time it broke down and you had to take the bus. Hopefully in my view, you sell it because of what it does when it works - it burns money, stinks, is loud, and kills people. (Car hater here, so I personally know the difference with this particular analogy.)

Actually to me "encrypted email" isn't even a thing. There's encryption and then there's email. If you have a secret, you encrypt it, and if you're OK with sending it publicly (i.e. via email) then you attach this encrypted secret thing to the email. And get the key to the person somehow privately. I dunno what the big deal is. No matter how earnestly and ferociously you declare yourself the mom and dad of the world, they all still keep messing up, murdering each other etc. and nobody cares, so take a vacation.

One point. The encrypted systems are many and not inter-operable. That's a problem for me and many others.

1. Me deciding to send a given message

2. Me deciding to use email for that message

... I should send it over an unencrypted email rather than encrypted one.

I see arguments for using other systems like Signal. I see arguments for a false sense of security — i.e. if I didn't assume the email was secure, I'd write a different message.

But, again, for a given message being sent over an email, I just don't see any reason not to encrypt it if it provides at least some protection (and saying it doesn't would probably be too much hyperbole even for latacora). The authors sort of just declare out of nowhere:

> But email cannot promise security, and so shouldn’t pretend to offer it.

And if "pretending" meant rot13, I would agree. But even despite all its flaws, there's a sea of difference between rot13 and PGP. If I can publish the encrypted contents of my email publicly, and not even tptacek can decrypt it, then it's not pretending.

So, what is the downside of encrypting an email compared to not encrypting it? I can't think of any, and apparently the authors can't either, despite trying very hard.

Granted the metadata and backlog issuss are themselves serious issues for the format.

It is more a "stop using email even if encrypted" than "stop encrypting email".

I don't buy that argument. There's definitely ways to fix this, and the best example right now is Signal.

I use Signal as my SMS app as well. This gives me a single interface for all my messages: For contacts without Signal, messages get exchanged as SMS. But for contacts with Signal, the conversations become end-to-end encrypted automatically. There are UI hints (Signal conversations have padlocks beside messages and a blue send button, vs a grey one) but overall it's seamless and transparent.

This is totally possible with email too: look up if the receiving end has a PGP key published (PKA[1], SKS[2]) and auto-encrypt if they do. It'd be nice if we had an email client that did this.

[1] https://keyserver.mattrude.com/guides/public-key-association...

[2] https://sks-keyservers.net/

Point of order: Can we go back to using adult words like "performative" or "artificial" or "mimicry" etc, instead of accusing everyone of being a LARPer? It really just smacks of an immature 4chan insult.

While I assume they are talking about things like Protonmail here, there is a case where PGP is better than nothing here. Mailbox.org allows you to provide a PGP public key which they will encrypt all incoming messages to. I have Mutt configured to auto-encrypt emails saved in my sent folder.

Now, obviously this doesn't help if Mailbox.org becomes malicious or gets attacked. But it does protect my personal email archive. If someone managed to access my email account, they couldn't read any old emails (but they could disable it for new emails).

Maybe I'm LARPing and I don't know it, but I think it's a neat feature which is worth more than nothing. But I do agree with the rest of the points the article makes -- though I think Matrix is a better secure messaging replacement than Signal because it's federated -- especially now that it has E2EE by default.

PGP aligning with how email actually works and the author not liking the effects is a pity, but by comparison it's a whole other dichotomy from something like a mediated end-to-end crypto scheme. Those kind of systems have the exact oppose set of problems from PGP conceptually, and note this ignores the geriatric architecture of PGP to some extent.

Assuming PGP were re-invented right now, I'd still like it to mostly stay the same. That is to say, I'd like to be able to have private/public keys stored in something conceptually similar. I'd like to see slight ease-of-use improvement in signing objects, encrypting objects, etc... but the basic functionally be the same. Finally I'd like to see integration with other transports made more modular and around an API versioning system that moves forward. That is to say, If I sign my emails, I'd like to be able to communicate that the other end should be on an API above some level, or similar setup.

Finally, there would bee some more thought put into people who want to advertise their keys on public directories. The aforementioned API versioning and modular remarks head into this direction. People want to communicate their keys, and it should be easy for social networks, or whatever directory lookup providers that would be created can be accommodated. This is key

People like things like the signal protocol, but they want to manage all the stuff in the middle themselves, or whatever that entails. Some people may want to fly bellow the radar, and not have anything to do with an automated system, or run sneaker-nets like some old school cloak-and-dagger stuff from KGB or CIA.

Anyways, email is terrible. But to conflate the problems of email over to PGP is a bit weird, but it's nice to recognize the real issue of using both.

https://github.com/zachaysan/toolies/blob/master/wallet.dat....

That's my original wallet from 2011 that I uploaded to GitHub a couple years later when the amount of money it had in it became non-trivial. GPG works great[0]. I emptied the wallet near the top of the last Bitcoin run up, but honestly even if I still had money in there I wouldn't worry about commenting about how it's public.

As for the rest of it, he's right about metadata and right about human failures like following up with plaintext responses. But on the other hand if your email box leaks then at least most actors are not going to be able to break encrypted messages, which are arguably the most important.

[0] And yes I know the difference between symmetric / asymmetric encryption, but I'd trust it if I'd done it with keys too.

Because e2ee doesn't really makes sense without proper authentication (we're talking about protecting against malicious server, right? So what happens if a server add a fake device or change fingerprint).

Conversations use Blind Trust Before Verification, that means that until a first fingerprint is checked, everything is accepted, so e2ee only protect against server archive/passive attacks, but not again an actually malicious server.

note: I'm a XMPP dev and I'm wondering how it's done in other apps as a point of comparison.

It's true that email as a protocol has inherent insecurities ; and it's also true that dedicated, rich spies are probably able to exploit many of them even with encrypted message bodies.

But most of us are facing the problem of MASS SURVEILLANCE, which statistically is more serious.

So:

1. Stop using spied-upon email servers:

1.1 Drop your Gmail, Yahoo mail, Microsoft etc. mail accounts, in favor of non-US and/or non-huge-corporation mail service providers.

1.2 Try to get your friends and family to drop theirs. Yes, I know this is extremely hard...

1.3 Try to get your workplace / NGOs you volunteer in to drop use of those servers (and also of Google Apps, Office 365, Skype etc. which have strong tie-ins with the email services).

2. Use mail clients which auto-encrypt messages to recipients with known keys - like EnigMail for Thunderbird.

The more of that is normalized, the harder

Great can be the enemy of good. Another example is Signal which gets some criticism for being centralized. Signal is good. ProtonMail to ProtonMail mail exchange is good.

Maybe I'm aware that some entity, probably tied to a powerful player like a nation state, can read my encrypted mails somehow.

But the more people are using encrypted mail the more difficult and expensive this will be for this entity.

I'm not sure whether to tag this under 'non sequitur' or ' throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

P.S. Does Signal still require a phone number?

If you run your own mailserver and also if you send email to people on that same mailserver, your email never traverses a network.

This use-case is not mentioned in the article, but should be. It is uncommon, currently, but much less cumbersome and rife with pitfalls then trying (and failing) to implement some kind of GPG regime, etc.

We do this at rsync.net - everyone uses the same mailserver, which we connect to over either SSH or HTTPS, and when we send mail to each other it is simply a local copy operation.

My team is assigned to think how to send "secure emails" to customers. The thing is that those emails contain documents as attachments which can contain names and social security numbers. Use case is that customer buy these documents from our website and they can be delivered to email.

We already told that email is insecure by design to do things like that, but now I am thinking about other possibilities. Best I can come up with is encrypted attachment, but that's way too difficult for average customer to open it with public key.

How have you handled situations like this?

Disappering/Nonstored is only a good thing in some contexts. There are several type of communication that I want to be secure but also archived for later reference or documentation.

> Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status signal or show of solidarity.

Where is the data supporting this statement?

Where can I read an quantitative analysis on how many emails on the Internet are encrypted, and - out of those - the motivation for having them encrypted, all by percentage? Really, I am willing to pay for it.

Or is the author basing it on personal anectodes, by looking at the few mails in his personal mailbox?

Because at that point also my experience in the corporate world is as good as theirs, and it actually proves the opposite on most points.

Over multiple years, I have seen PGP being used to secure all email exchanges about product security with customers, suppliers, partners, security researchers, and even competitors.

Not a single day passes without a PGP email being sent or received.

As far as I can tell, 100% of the emails contain information for objectively sensitive topics (like security flaws, trade secrets, material under NDA, etc).

Even though emails are exchanged with professionals that are skilled and trained in IT security more than your average Joe, new contacts consistently have PGP keys already and they know how to correctly use PGP.

Any suggestion to use Signal or wormholes won't make you look very good(for good reasons), even though it is clear they are great security products.

Security is good enough: we know that because we do objective risk assessments, where sensationalist articles on the Internet don't play a big role.

I can't recall the last time people replied in the clear - though yes, it happened in the past some times. It also happened that people copy & paste & share paragraphs from sensitive emails though, which is as bad.

The main problem I see is not email encryption per se, but the first key exchange. PGP keyservers are bad and avoided.

The second problem is usability, and it is appalling that nobody is able to tackle this for PGP. It is not really rocket science and certainly people are willing to pay for it.

>> Email is end-to-end unencrypted [1] by default.

>> Serious secure messengers foreclose on this possibility. Secure messengers are encrypted by default

TCP is unencrypted by default too; actually and, you know what, it doesn't even support encryption! You use TLS on top of it (in a hop-by-hop way unfortunately).

Same thing for email. The fact that the underlying message is unsecured, does not mean you need to throw it away.

>> Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it.

This depends on your threat model. In ours, metadata largely doesn't matter.

>> Secure messaging systems make arrangements for “disappearing messages”.

You do understand that this is a big no-no for corporate right?

You must be able to set retention and escrow policies.

You must use data formats that are very likely to be around or re-implementable in the years to come, not hipster apps that will disappear from circulation next year. We love public standards or industry standards.

Sometimes retention rate is "never delete": that's necessary and it is OK.

But arguably that also applies to any encrypted messaging system. Not just email. So I'm not sure exactly what the point is.

About metadata: You can just anonymize it away. Maybe most people can't do that. But then maybe most people will screw up in some other way.

Or rather, one could just build in anonymity.

Fundamentally, encryption isn't all that useful without ~anonymity. Because if adversaries can find you, they can do whatever it takes to get what they want. Or at least, to make your life Hell until you give it up.

And with adequate anonymity, those aren't issues.

> Messages can be material to a civil case and subject to discovery. They can be subpoenaed in a law enforcement action. They safeguard life-altering financial transactions. They protect confidential sources. They coordinate resistance to oppressive regimes.

Anonymity fixes most of those problems.

About Signal, until it gives up the phone number requirement, it's hopelessly not anonymous. And encryption without anonymity is pointless.

Edit: Maybe I'm still ranting, but less personally.

> If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext.

This is not an inherent problem with e-mail and can be solved with client software. You can still have unencrypted communication while giving a big red warning if a user sends an unencrypted reply to an encrypted conversation and strip away quotes by default.

> Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it.

This is true, but can I do think that this can theoretically be solved be a new generation of server architecture while keeping the federated nature.

> Every archived message will eventually leak.

The problems here are a matter of implementation and what software is used.

> Every long term secret will eventually leak.

This is the one inherent problem with PGP e-mail in the entire post as I see it. It is an issue.

All the issues the author bring up certainly hold true today but most of them are not inherent to e-mail and I think with enough coordinated effort they can be fixed while keeping decent compatibility.

I do think that apart from the metadata issue (not saying that this is to be disocunted!), we could keep using the exact same servers as today in a perfectly secure and private way if we have a new generation of e-mail clients and e-mail cryptography.

As for the metadata part: I've been toying with the idea of a messaging system using e-mail for transport but having an encrypted protocol on top of that which solves these issues.

It would also require some way of distributing encrypted messages around (maybe in a gossip-like protocol akin to SSB) and broadcasting gateway servers that relay these messages on behalf of large amount of users.

Finally, there's something to be said with that PGP was ever only meant to solve the secrecy, non-reputability and integrity of messages, which is only part of a security and privacy story. It doesn't mean that PGP is broken, only that it is incomplete depending on your threat model.

Does anyone know the background behind this?

Although pretty offensive, at least the term clearly signals that the intent is valid, as much as the methods aren't.

We've recently seen recordings of meeting with Trump and associates. No one is safe.

You must assume your every tap on a smartphone, you every keystroke and interaction with a computer is being logged in some way. You interact with computers by proxy - people entering information on your behalf, perhaps other devices are listening to you, or logging your movements/interactions within the world, perhaps taking videos and pictures of yourself. Profiling who you are, who you talk to, what your financial situation is like, who you care most about, who you align with, your network; colleagues, close and distant friends, those you once interacted with but not so much. A brain capable of recording every minute detail that you may want to forget. Details can be recalled within seconds and just a few keystrokes, a second by second recording in ultra high quality and the density of information being stored is unmatched to any other time in history.

If somebody wants to get your information, they will get it, one way or another. This much has been proven true again and again.

So sure, use your fancy tools and gadgets, but be clear, one day, it's highly likely what you wanted to keep private may become public.

When, not if.

As far as I know, in pretty much any country where you can send e-mail, you can also send an PGP encrypted e-mail.

So, Signal is not a universal solution.

Do the alternatives have anything similar? I don't think so. Signal and WhatsApp basically rely on a GSM identity (a telephone number), which is verified by checking a six-digits code by SMS. There are hundreds of ways to screw this up. Any random street pickpocket would be able to get your phone, read the code and put it back in your pocket without you even noticing, not mentioning attack on the actual GSM protocol of which I do not know much (but have heard of its insecurity more than once). It's true that there is Perfect Forward Secrecy and your peers will get a little notice saying that your security code has changed (and will most probably ignore it), but if it is so easy to take over one's identity, I don't think I can put much trust if the system as a whole. (also, OP complains that GPG is a complex and obscure implementation; what are they going to say about GSM stacks?)

Ironically, the thing that would make this system secure would be that people actually checked security codes, which would basically amount to what PGP users do when they exchange fingerprints (and I am sure OP would consider that the LARPmost possible thing in the universe). Not even with the advantage of having a proper Web of Trust, though.

Even TLS, although it is not mentioned by OP, has quite a few problems. Most TLS certificates are Domain Validating, and the validation procedure essentially consists in recovering a secret file by mean of an HTTP request to that domain (surely that's true for Let's Encrypt, but I believe that most commercial DV operators work in the same way, except that you have to pay for it). So as soon as you're able to MITM the domain validation (and there are a lot of actors who are able to) you can grab the certificate, which would in theory protect from those who are able to MITM your server. This mechanism still protects your from MITMs positioned close to the client, that's true and it's better than nothing. But you still have all the holes you want. And bad examples of TLS CAs are nothing near missing.

So, bottom line: I am very happy if you give me modern and advanced tools for encrypting stuff, but please do not ignore the problem of giving names to keys, a problem that as far as I know only PGP is currently able to tackle.

We are literally living in an age where the NSA is spoofing cell towers to intercept and save unencrypted (and probably encrypted) traffic to a database that will probably be around as long as the NSA exists. This is naive and everyone should be taking precautions against the kind of power that a true authoritarian government would literally kill for.

I'm also personally insulted to be accused of LARPing for taking steps to preserve my privacy. Even if something like protonmail isn't perfect, assuming it isn't compromised it's orders of magnitude better than outlook, Google, et al who are literally scanning your messages.

Edit: let me clarify my point, because people seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. The fact that encrypted email is partially broken does not mean that it doesn't currently reduce the leak surface. If I send 5 emails from a service like protonmail to @outlook.com and 5 emails to @gmail.com, that's two fractured datasets vs sending 10 from a Gmail account where they're all scanned into one database. Locks are trivially picked but that doesn't mean I'm LARPing to everytime I leave my house and lock my doors.

Security on computers is performative. Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, Apple, Google, deep state, and God only knows who else can crack these pieces of garbage like an egg.

Whoever wrote this is also a LARPer.

It integrates GPG really nicely.

I find it hard to believe that an app that runs in electron and falls for basic web security 101 XSS exploits[1] is a more secure solution than using an encryption layer on top of a federated protocol.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17050754

Most people don't use it this way, but to say it's impossible to secure e-mail is arrogant and not true

However, I think it’s possible to have a system completely in the open and still be secure. Bitcoin comes to mind. I don’t think the problem is with email, but with the lax encryption models and the lack of support by email clients and servers alike. Wouldn’t you agree?

1. The message I received is from person possessing private key (signing).

2. The message I received is not available to Google or any other 3-rd party.

GPG is good old dumb tool that deals with crypto. I can save e-mail into text file and use it with GPG. I can even copy that text file to an offline computer if I don't want to risk exposing key.

Signal is just yet another whatsapp competitor? I don't want to publish my phone number. I don't want to trust some random application from AppStore. I don't want my correspondence to go through some untrusted servers (and I trust Google servers much more than Signal servers). Especially servers controlled by the same person who wrote an application. I have no idea how to be sure that message I got corresponds to a public key that person gave me when we met last time. How do I extract message source from Signal? What's are console tools to deal with it? How do I deal with new key issuance if person reinstalled his application?

GPG have answers for those questions. Signal does not. Basically GPG is encryption for nerds, Signal is encryption for ordinary people. It's important, but not particularly interesting for me and it's not a replacement. Especially given the fact that Whatsapp and Telegram provide E2E and they are much more widely used.

Basically GPG is good enough and we don't need nothing more than that. And that GPG critique is just manipulation of facts. When my Debian distribution will use Signal to verify packages, I'll consider using it.