What do you recommend as a replacement for PGP? (I'm looking for stand-alone software I can use to encrypt files on storage media, not an encrypted e-mail service.)
For package signing: use something in the signify/minisign family.
To encrypt a network transport, use WireGuard.
To protect a web transaction on the wire, TLS 1.3.
For transferring files: use Magic Wormhole.
For backups: use something like Tarsnap or restic.
For messaging: use something that does Signal Protocol.
To protect files at rest, use encrypted DMGs (or your OS's equivalent, like encrypted loop mounts).
To encrypt individual files --- a niche ask --- use Filippo's ungooglable "age".
OpenPGP has excellent recovery properties out of the box BTW...
Yes, this is an excellent example of where this behaviour is suboptimal. We should not cargo cult authenticated encryption. It has its place but this isn't it.
> Any error you accept is malleability conceded to an attacker.
Sure, but malleability that has a close to zero chance of being a problem. We are talking about static encryption here. You only get one chance at malleability and the user immediately knows something has gone wrong:
gpg: WARNING: encrypted message has been manipulated!
Merely pointing out that for the most common use case age is objectively worse than GPG.
The logic you're applying here about how GPG can warn you if it has employed "recovery properties" to correct "single bit errors" was embraced enthusiastically by the Ruhr team to perform data recovery on other people's PGP-encrypted email messages.
https://tonyarcieri.com/all-the-crypto-code-youve-ever-writt...
This isn't even a controversy among cryptographers or cryptography engineers.
Contrast the Efail situation with that of TLS. TLS allows almost unlimited secret trials against its cryptography by an attacker. There have been multiple practical attacks based on such oracles in TLS.
>This isn't even a controversy among cryptographers or cryptography engineers.
I would like to think that there were such people out there that understood that different techniques are applicable to different problems.
You probably know how that worked out for the Enigma.
Plain text attacks come in distinct categories. The block ciphers used in OpenPGP are generally considered to be immune to the sort of plain text attacks used against Enigma.
As described in Efail, they don’t need to guess; they know the first 11 bytes with very, very high probability.
I doubt me being able to read a third of your encrypted emails is remotely acceptable to you.
> The recipient […] would see the attack message and would immediately know there was something going on.
That solace is fleeting when it is already too late. The attacker has your decrypted message.
At any rate, none of this is something that anyone would accept from any modern cryptosystem, and the fact that PGP has you so backfooted that you'd feel the need to defend PGP's behavior here is a telling indication. "PGP: it's fine, as long as you don't use it to encrypt password reset emails. But for other emails it's fine, as long as the first 11 bytes of the email aren't guessable." Ok. Good note!
Maybe we should just put 128-bit nonces at the tops of all our emails. That just seems like common sense good engineering practice.
The paper did not provide any example of an email client where this would work. I have as of yet not been able to reproduce this. Since there would be no practical reason for such behaviour the assertion requires some sort of proof.
If I run a file through age, and then run that through a Reed-Solomon encoder, I now have a file that can be decoded even with single bit errors. But I think I also still have authenticated encryption. The cost is that my file takes a bit of extra space.
Am I missing something?
What's crazy about this is that you can get error correction without using insecure 1990s cryptography, simply by forward error correcting your ciphertext. I'm really having a hard time even getting my head around the argument you've managed to devise here.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4880#section-13.9
[2] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:agevspgp#encrypted...
I see that `age`, which I hadn't actually heard of before, supports ssh keys and identities which always seemed like a fairly natural baseline to me. Would be nice if more of the command line variety did as well (even if only rsa and/or ed25519 keys).
It would also potentially mean easier to use with hardware tokens, if you could just expect to be able to use something like gpg-agent or ssh-agent or something in between to work with various things.
There are ways to work around this [1], but I'm not happy with any of them.
https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/commit/d164fef036a2d19280...
It will be in the next release candidate.
There is an illusion in the world of IT that we can solve everything with technology.
Maybe the reason why people don’t want or like PGP is because it needs strong human processes to work properly and keep its integrity, and that breaks the illusion that you can easily solve everything with tech.
Happy birthday PGP!
What you've got here is pretty much the mirror of the argument you've dismissed a paragraph earlier. Now you're desperate to rely on humans instead.
This makes me think about Snowpiercer, for two reasons. One is that Snowpiercer has this ludicrous conceit about replacing unavailable engine components with humans but the other is that we've really been here with the actual railway trains in the nineteenth century.
There was a pattern. One of these new-fangled railway trains crashes, often killing many people, the company directs public blame toward the driver, who will be portrayed as incompetent, drunk or worse and so fully responsible for the accident. Nothing changes, rinse, repeat. How was this cycle broken?
We did not find some species of super-human train driver, instead we invented technology such as the Absolute Block system, Interlocking railway signals, the Dead Man's Handle. Even apparently trivial technologies like the Driver's Reminder Appliance (it's just a switch!) are still technology.
PGP isn't very good technology. Like one of those early mechanical signals that might seem to indicate "clear" but it's actually just weighed down by snow and frozen in place so that it can't indicate "danger" instead, the way forward isn't "We need to rely on super-humans to compensate for the short-comings of the technology" but "We need a technology that sucks less so the humans don't need to be super-human to succeed".
What part of PGP precisely? I've read a lot of criticism of PGP but they were either focused on a specific (catastrophic) implementation such as GNUPG, or were really skeptical of usage by non-technical humans.
I know quite a few people doing PGP email with Thunderbird and they're pretty happy with it. It's also very convenient that their GNOME-based Tails operating system has PGP sig verification enabled as context menu entry in the file manager, same for encryption/decryption.
Basically, once you know what public/private keys are, you've got all you need for secure communications. Is that a bad thing? My only HUGE criticism of PGP is with the key servers. It's getting better now with WKD, OpenPGPCA, etc.. I'm really excited about the Sequoia project. From their blog/docs it appears all my criticisms of PGP are being addressed.
But then in some cases what we became quite sure about is that PGP's principles/ assumptions are themselves wrong. For example, PGP is pretty sure a message ought to have a digital signature from the sender so you know who it's from. But that's wrong, now you're helping the recipient prove to everybody else what you sent them. That doesn't sound like "pretty good privacy" at all. If instead we do message integrity correctly we can assure the recipient that you wrote it, but since they could have forged that assurance they don't have proof you wrote it which they could show to anybody else. They could tell others what it says, but they could just as well make up any rumours they want.
The worst of these problems is the Web of Trust. The Web of Trust can't work. It might work if everybody you know is a cryptographer and everybody they know is a cryptographer and so on. But it can't work in real life, and often in describing it people make revealing mistakes.
Let me quote somebody else making such a mistake (not on HN) and then I'll reproduce part of my response to their mistake in answer:
"How much do you trust guy #53 of 120 you met at FOSDEM? Do you remember how well you checked his ID?"
I am 100% certain my mother is my mother, but I wouldn't trust her as far as I can throw her. And this is where the WoT breaks down. Your trust metric must reflect your confidence that these people will do their part correctly in the WoT, but even conscientious users often don't understand how to do their part correctly, so realistically almost everybody's "trust" indication for almost everybody should be zero. At which point it's not a "web" it's just a bunch of unconnected points.