Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

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The question makes no sense in this context. The identity verification problem is orthogonal to the encryption scheme.

This problem exists regardless of PGP. If someone's Slack is compromised:

With PGP: attacker gets credentials encrypted to their key

Without PGP: attacker gets plaintext credentials

But both fail at the same point: verifying who you're talking to. That's not a PGP problem, it's a "doing password resets over unauthenticated Slack" problem.

PGP does provide multiple identity verification mechanisms, e.g. web of trust, key signing, fingerprint verification, in-person key exchange, and Keybase-style social proofs linking keys to verified accounts.

The workflow described just doesn't use them. Identity verification is required for ANY secure credential exchange system; you either verify keys properly (signed by trusted parties, verified fingerprints, pre-enrolled, social proofs) or you have the same problem with passwords, TOFU SSH keys, or anything else.

Are you criticizing PGP for not solving a problem that the workflow simply didn't implement a solution for?

I’m saying asking somebody for a public key in the example scenario is pure security theater, no matter if it’s PGP or some other scheme.

That's only true if the key's authenticity isn't verified. If you just accept any key a person gives you, then yes, it's meaningless. But if you independently confirm the key's fingerprint through a trusted channel, it becomes a real security measure that prevents impersonation and ensures confidentiality.

The workflow as described (no verification step) is theater. But that's true for any credential exchange without identity verification, PGP or otherwise. The issue isn't PGP, it's skipping the verification step. PGP provides the tools (fingerprint verification, web of trust, key signing), but you have to actually use them.

I didn’t say the issue with this example scenario is PGP.

The scenario is theater (if you have an out of band lookup for verification, just use that. Don’t bother asking for pub keys).

Also in parallel PGP is trash.

The out-of-band verification is for initial key enrollment, not every credential exchange. You verify the fingerprint once through a trusted channel, then use that verified key indefinitely without needing the trusted channel again. That's the entire value proposition: establish trust once, communicate securely many times.

Without this, you'd need out-of-band verification for every single credential exchange, which doesn't scale.

As for "PGP is trash"... That's a different argument entirely, and you've provided zero technical justification for it. If you have specific criticisms of PGP's cryptographic primitives, key management model, or implementation security, make them.

No thanks, I think we’ve gotten all we’re going to get out of this thread.

I agree.

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