Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively: https://github.com/str4d/rage

Getting downvoted but that looks like a cool tool, and I didn't know about it, so thanks.

One of the options, "encrypt to an ssh key" is an interesting convenience. Since most of us already have ssh keys deployed.

Kind of lacks any sort of OpenPGP compatibility...

Thats the point. PGP isn’t a good standard.

Age/Rage is not a standard at all. It is just a program. It definitely has nothing to do with a project intended to implement a particular standard. It is a non-sequitor here.

PGP is a giant blob of byzantine implementation details and layers of accrued crust that people call a standard by convention and out of inertia.

Being a giant blob of byzantine implementation details and layers of accrued crust doesn't take away from PGP being a standard. Take a look at BMP or Postscript/PDF or even Email and tell me they're not the same.

Parent's point still stands: PGP is a standard (with widespread adoption, mind you) whereas Age is not. Whether it is a good standard or not depends on how you're using it.

The parent's point was that age is 'just a program' and thus not a standard, with no mention of adoption. But PGP is arguably less of a standard than age, by that metric. As to adoption, PGP has very little adoption for actually securing anything (rather than performative use) and for those uses it's trivially replaceable because it's not actually good at them - that's pretty much the motivation behind things like 'age'.

I think it's an excellent standard and its widespread adoption demonstrates this.

Can you explain why you think it isn't?

It has virtually no adoption. Every modern secure messenger application sends encrypts more messages, and between more pairs of people, than OpenPGP has in its entire lifetime.

https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html

> It has virtually no adoption.

The sheer volume of gpg-signed apt/rpm/tar packages downloaded and verified everyday cast doubt on your claim.

I bet the number of packages downloaded for CI alone would invalidate this claim.

They would not; you're either drastically underestimating the number of messages modern secure messengers handle, or overestimating the number of packages verified every day. But PGP is also an archaic way to sign packages, and there is no network effect to package signature schemes; all of them can, and should, be replaced with modern schemes like minisign/signify.

Our disagreement here is on your claim that PGP has virtually no adoption. I brought up the monstrous amount of packages that get verified by CI/containers/OSs as an example where PGP is widely adopted. No one is claiming that dedicated tools can't do the job better.

People use PGP because it is standard, widely-adopted, and does what people need it to do. From where I'm standing, people who argue against these three facts are underestimating PGP or overestimating their own favored solutions.

No, people use PGP because at the times these systems were designed, there weren't better options; in some cases, there literally wasn't materially better cryptography, and in others, the better cryptography wasn't suitably enabled by good libraries. None of that is true anymore, nobody should be using the archaic PGP format for anything new, and, in most cases, people should be investigating how to replace PGP with modern alternatives.

This discussion was about your false assertion that PGP "has virtually no adoption".

If you want to change our discussion to be about replacing PGP instead, then I completely agree that people should replace PGP with modern properly-standardized alternatives if such exist.

Fundamentally, the discussion is about your (and others') claims that PGP is some key part of security infrastructure and that its wide adoption and importance in such infrastructure shows that. It probably got a little stuck on broad terms like 'adoption' and 'standard' instead of looking more specifically at the type of use you're holding up as an example.

Here's what happens in the super-common, basic case of 'installing a third party (i.e. not from the distro repos) package on some debiansy Linux':

You access the the developer's webpage (via a browser and https) and read the installation instructions. They tell you to curl in (over https) some pgp key and some (https) endpoints for finding and downloading the package.

You apt-whatever and the package is installed.

The PGP part of this can be replaced with NOPs and this is no less secure. All the heavy lifting here is done elsewhere using infrastructure that actually has wide adoption and standardization and does useful things.

If a modern alternative existed, it would have been invented.

Email is hard to secure for obvious reasons. The PGP itself is fine, even though it could be updated.

That article was actually the motivation behind my serious of PGP fan articles. I wondered what the opposite would look like, completely partisan, rabidly pro-PGP:

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:index

It turned out that PGP is not all that bad...

It's impressive as a character study of 'PGP Fan', it's not much of a technical rebuttal of critiques of PGP.

Messaging and email are different applications. People use messaging apps because of the rise of the mobile devices, not because these messaging apps use forward secrecy or ECC. Don’t try to link that adoption to crypto protocols!

Also, very few of these users actually use secure versions such as signal or wire. They all happily post on Facebook‘s messenger and WhatsApp and don’t care about crypto.

Messaging applications use protocols derived from Signal Protocol rather than PGP because they had the opportunity to do something better than PGP. The first secure messengers did use PGP; designing a new messenger based on PGP would be malpractice.

WhatsApp uses Signal Protocol, and protects many order of magnitude more messages every day --- or, if you like, bytes of plaintext --- than PGP ever has or will.

Email not being a messaging protocol is... a take.

Is there a reason you linked the Rust implementation instead of the reference Go implementation?

See thread topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com