YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)

59 points GaryBluto 1 day ago 18 comments

adastra22 1 hour ago | parent

A well-intentioned ideal from a bygone era.

Joel_Mckay 1 hour ago | parent

Good ideas demand to be free. =3

tptacek 1 hour ago | parent

There's a good idea in PGP, and a very bad one. The good idea --- and PGP genuinely deserves credit here --- is end-user, consumer-facing strong cryptography tools. That's now universally accepted and has been for decades. The bad idea is a tool with PGP's design, of "cryptographic jack-of-all-trades". PGP's design has aged like milk, and PGP itself is a security liability in almost every system that hosts it.

m348e912 1 hour ago | parent

>PGP itself is a security liability in almost every system that hosts it.

Elaborate

some_furry 1 hour ago | parent

https://gpg.fail/

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem

Recommendations: https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/

We don't need to keep elaborating or re-litigating the same discussion. The PGP idea of "one tool to rule them all" is a terrible cryptography design, and the world is better off the sooner we stop trying to make it work.

upofadown 10 minutes ago | parent

Obligatory response to "The PGP Problem":

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

By what I saw, there wasn't really anything anyone would care about in https://gpg.fail/ . The GnuPG problem actually declined to respond to some of them.

some_furry 10 minutes ago | parent

Your response is stupid and I hate seeing you around.

riedel 43 minutes ago | parent

I guess the code base has really become a bit messy over time with all that parsing and different crypto algorithms. But the attack surface can be significantly reduced by using sq or even better stateless sqop.

voooduuuuu 47 minutes ago | parent

Another thing is also that email itself was not designed with encryption in mind and because it is decentralized and backwards-compatible it is hard to enforce new rules (everyone should use PGP).

But PGP is useful if both sender and receiver agree to use PGP.

woodruffw 29 minutes ago | parent

> But PGP is useful if both sender and receiver agree to use PGP.

Anecdotally: this works until you add a third person who responds to the thread in plain text, with everything threaded beneath. Or when you do that by accident.

Applied cryptographers will tell you to use Signal or any other E2EE chat.

user3939382 21 minutes ago | parent

Signal isn’t owned by the users and independent of third parties the way PGP/GPG is so regardless of who will or won’t suggest a substitute it’s not.

gatlin 8 minutes ago | parent

XMPP + omemo

BeetleB 1 hour ago | parent

> In 2013, an article on "Zimmermann's Law" quoted Phil Zimmermann as saying "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier"

dylan604 55 minutes ago | parent

The biggest issue of using PGP was using PGP. You were pretty nerdy to be on the internet back then, but even then using PGP was beyond what the majority of people wanted to do. Exchanging keys was problematic. Writing text in one app, encrypting in another app, copying encrypted back to an email was just tiresome.

I'm still glad that it existed as its mere existence seems to have pushed things in the right direction as far as protecting everyone's ability to use encryption if they chose. It just never became the panacea it was envisioned to be.

__MatrixMan__ 27 minutes ago | parent

There were (are? it's been a while) many PGP users on the various darkweb markets. It was great fun teaching people to use it and actually having a community to use it with.

It was pretty awkward to later emerge as the PGP expert at work. I was at that time a bit shy about explaining how I got so comfortable with it.

serbuvlad 10 minutes ago | parent

The fundamental idea of technology such as PGP is that the percentage of stuff worth finding for the authorities needs to be really low. Ie. an incredible amount of "legitimate" innocent traffic needs to be flowing through the technology.

Otherwise, anyone who is using it at all will get court ordered and then, with our current system, you just lose.

Tor solves this by making traffic entirely homogenous such that any "it could be anyone" and by making nodes extraordinarily easy to host (such that any nerd can just leave one running 24/7). Even so there are way too few nodes.

But PGP-over-email is way too metadata leaky, and if you're doing anything that actually has a threat model, you need PGP-over-email to be itself common.

upofadown 6 minutes ago | parent

One big usability issue these days is that PGP identities come in the form of a file. Lots of people don't have the concept of that anymore.

Dunno that things have gotten much better over the years. End to end encryption is still fairly unusable to most. I think that rather than spending so much time on the cryptography we should instead work on a E2EE usability standard. Having everyone doing their own thing with respect to usability is not working out.

oger 3 minutes ago | parent

To be honest: I keep hearing that PGP was / is difficult to use. That couldn‘t be further from the truth - but somehow it has become an urban myth. From the very first versions that I used on my first Mac up to GPG Mail or Proton Mail I never encountered any significant difficulties and could successfully exchange messages with my peers - both in business and private contexts.