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Comment by IAmLiterallyAB | Hacker News Reader

There is some misleading stuff in that article. To save time I made an article to provide my commentary:

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

Don't you think it's time to update it, given you start by saying that "If someone, while trying to sell you some high security mechanical system, told you that the system had remained unbreached for the last 20 years you would take that as a compelling argument"?

Because you're clearly presenting it as a defense of PGP on a thread from a presentation clearly delineating breaks in it using exactly the kind of complexity that the article you're responding to predicts would cause it to break.

The mechanical analogy is particularly interesting here because at least one of the claimed vulnerabilities involves tricking the victim into decrypting an encrypted message for the attacker and then sending it to them. If someone can be tricked into opening a safe to let the burgler rummage around inside then few would consider that a failure of the safe technology. I mean there is still a problem there but it is a different one.

I think this supports my contention that we spend much too much time quibbling about cryptographic trivialities when it comes to end to end encrypted messaging. We should spend more time on the usability of such systems.

The constraint that you have implicitly applied to cryptosystems forecloses on using GPG as a base layer in other computing systems; in your view, GPG is a "safe", which can only be opened by the owner of the contents to retrieve and remove those contents.

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