Hacker News Reader

Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

The only thing PGP did correctly, and very well, is the concept of persistent identity. Keybase recognized this and uses PGP as the toehold, then from there, created a secure auditable chain of NACL keys. The PGP 'web of trust' and non-repudiability nature of PGP messages each failed for good reason.

View on HN

This PGP-style concept of persistent identity is almost always the opposite of what you want from a secure messenger, where meta-information about who's exchanging messages with whom is often just as valuable as the message content itself. When the NSA identified Reality Winner communicating with The Intercept, they didn't so much care about what was in those messages; once the link was established, they had better ways of extracting the rest of the information they wanted than trying to defeat a cryptosystem.

> When the NSA identified Reality Winner communicating with The Intercept, they didn't so much care about what was in those messages; once the link was established, they had better ways of extracting the rest of the information they wanted than trying to defeat a cryptosystem.

Which is surely a strong argument for having keys that are standalone and portable across different communication media, rather than having them be coupled to accounts on particular services (or, worse, to personal information like an SSN or phone number).

Consider, for the age and minisign/signify use-case: https://gossamer.tools

I haven't heard of this before. How does it compare to Sigstore?

(Also, the use case here is clearly much, much narrower than for age and minisign. Which is good, assuming the problem it solves is the problem you have, but should still be noted.)

Whoa, sigstore maintainer here. I've never seen or heard of Gossamer before. It seems very similar in design!

Gossamer is a 2017 design of an idea that was first published in 2015. However, it was exclusively focused on the PHP community from its inception, so it's unsurprising that nobody's heard of it.

What ecosystems are out there where I can flick a switch and say 1. "automatically install signed releases" or 2. "automatically install releases signed by multiple identities"?

Are any of the big language-specific ecosystems capable of that? (npm, crates.io, composer, PyPI, CPAN, Maven, rubygems, etc.)

Nothing really yet. Containers got relatively close with Notary V1, I'm focused on fixing that here in sigstore right now. I think Python, Ruby, and NPM would be great targets to go after next!

It's not quite flick a switch, but with maven you can specify which keys you trust to sign which of your dependencies (anything published to maven central is required to be signed). E.g. here's one of my libraries: https://github.com/m50d/tierney/blob/master/free/keys.proper...

Is there a straightforward way to use attestations to gate automatic updates?

For example, it would be nice to delay automatic updates of WordPress plugins and themes until after there is more than just the uploader's identity as a single point of failure guaranteeing that the update is genuine.

(Obviously the perfect way to do things given enough developer resources is to review all code yourself before installing manually, but it would be nice to improve situations where those resources are not available.)

Yes: https://github.com/paragonie/libgossamer/blob/master/docs/tu...

The intention was to allow security vendors to offer code reviews of open source dependencies, and you can choose which you trust. This mechanizes Linus's Law and ensures there's an audit trail with "many eyeballs".

This seems like critical prerequisite infrastructure, which is fantastic — although not yet what I was asking for. As far as I can tell there is not yet a way for individual WordPress installations to actually benefit. However, it seems that work is underway: https://gossamer.tools/project/wordpress

> The intention was to allow security vendors to offer code reviews of open source dependencies

What I care most about is just quorum publishing where multiple independent identities sign a release, so that an attacker has to compromise multiple trusted identities to execute a supply chain attack. I'm not too excited about reviews beyond that. The main thing is to upgrade collective ecosystem security by hardening automatic updates.

Solving the problem you care about requires doing what I just said. :)

And, yes, there is a lot of work necessary to get WordPress to use Gossamer. I can't guarantee a deadline right now, but 2022 looks hopeful.

Gossamer looks similar to Google's Trillian which is written in Go.

https://transparency.dev https://github.com/google/trillian

More specifically, Trillian is analogous to Chronicle, which is what Gossamer uses as its underlying ledger. But yeah, there's a lot of similarities. You're on the right track. :)

I'm a bit confused; if we assume that web-of-trust isn't viable, what exactly is good about how PGP does identity?

> non-repudiability nature of PGP messages

Huh? Unless you're signing it (in which case of course it's not deniable, it's a signature) it has no such nature.

Do you care to elaborate on those good reasons that the web of trust "failed"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com