Or:
- he really doesn't use his PGP key all that often, had the same one for 16 years on god knows how many computers, and decided that if he's going to generate a new one, he might as well send a message with it.
- he really doesn't use his PGP key all that often, had the same one for 16 years on god knows how many computers, and decided that if he's going to generate a new one, he might as well send a message with it.
- Snowden et al asked him to create a new keypair with very strict cleanroom practices[0] to be sure as to the sanctity of the private key. It's trivial to bump up the key length when doing so.
[0]: See the August 18 NYT article on Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald for a peek at the "operational security" that Snowden demanded. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
(and to be clear, my intent is not to bait, i'm actually curious)
the other trick is naming thing: why would such a vague name like "Advanced Encryption Standard" designate specifically symmetric cipher?
It's only in a very few cases where there's an advantage in signing a document, and it's usually more in the verifiability of content (so that you can verify that nothing is lost/changed in transit) than in the verification of identity.
Given the lack of adoption of PGP/GnuPG in email clients vs. S/MIME, if I'm signing my emails without encrypting them, chances are the recipient would still be able to read my emails and, knowing my writing style and given the context, be able to suss out that I was in fact the author.
I use the word "paranoia" intentionally because there's a lack of meaningful legal precedent establishing that a gpg-signed message is enough to establish authorship. In a civil case, sure, it looks bad, but you could easily say,"oops, I stored my public key on [vps or cloud service], which was a well-known victim of a hack."
Outside of those few work examples, I don't think I've ever sent or received a PGP encrypted message. In fact, the only signed messages I think I've ever seen were mailing list messages from people who signed all their messages.
(Note: FWIW, the email address in your profile doesn't provide a public key from pgp.mit.edu – I would have added you to my keychain and sent you a "Hi! Isn't it nice to introduce yourself without the NSA listening in!" email…)
I don't think I even have a key for my current email address.
[1] http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x867C6...
If his computers have ever been compromised, his PGP private key would likely be as well. Considering all the news about US gov spending millions on rootkits, it was likely a wise choice to generate a new one in case a previous one was likely to have been compromised.
I'd guess Schiener would be a target of interest by some state (as is anyone working with encryption it seems).
Bruce generally does not sign/encrypt his email because he views email as a low-security communications mechanism anyway.[1]
He generally advises a rational risk assessment when determining how much security to apply to a process. He often uses the example of locking doors on your house, etc.
In re PGP, he's been critical of a number of shortcomings in PGP and GnuPG since the beginning, but by the same token, one of his first hires at Counterpane was Jon Callas.
[1] http://www.esecurityplanet.com/trends/security-tips-from-bru...
I think I've received maybe one message encrypted to me. Everything else I use PGP for is to send signed emails to mailing lists.