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perching_aix 19 hours ago

What are those better tools? I've been broadly looking into this space, but never ventured too deep.

ameliaquining 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th... lists a bunch of them.

p2detar 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> Encrypting email

> Don't.

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

I’m not sure I completely agree here. For private use, this seems fine. However, this isn’t how email encryption is typically implemented in an enterprise environment. It’s usually handled at the mail gateway rather than on a per-user basis. Enterprises also ensure that the receiving side supports email encryption as well.

edit: formatting

jcranmer 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's like one or two use cases where encrypting email could work. The best case I've come across--Bugzilla has the ability to let the user upload a public key to encrypt emails for updates to non-public bugs. It's not a big use case--pretty much the intersection of "must use email" and "can establish identity out of band," which does not describe most communication that uses email. (As tptacek notes in a sibling comment, you pretty much have to limit this to one-and-done stuff too, not anything that's going to be in an ongoing discussion, because leaks via unencrypted replies are basically guaranteed).

tptacek 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't. A private emailing circle doesn't change that. If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies, I'll just say I ran just such a private circle at Matasano, where we used encrypted mail to communicate about security assessment projects, and unencrypted replies happened.

p2detar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Your mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't.

It is, GPG take care of that.

> If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies

That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s an enterprise - you cannot send non-encrypted emails from your work mail account, the gateway takes care of it. It has many rules, including such based on the sender and recipient.

Surely, someone can print the mail and carry it out of the company’s premises, but at this point it’s intentional and the cat’s already out of the bag.

kuschku 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even my doctor's office and local government agencies support PGP encrypted emails, and refuse to send personal data via unencrypted email, but tech nerds still claim no one can use it?

LtWorf 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In general the userbase here is startuppers, they hate distributed solutions and love centralisation.

johnisgood 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

s/tech nerds/Arm-chair self-proclaimed cryptographers here on HN/

singpolyma3 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sequoia for example has been doing a great job and implements the latest version of the standard which brings a lot of cryptography up to date

perching_aix 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm yet to finish watching the talk, but it starts with them confirming the demo fraudulent .iso with sequoia also (they call it out by name), so this really makes me think. :)

tptacek 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Sequioa hasn't fixed the attack from the beginning of the talk, the one where they convert between cleartext and full signature formats and inject unsigned bytes into the output because of the confusion.

akerl_ 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The latest version of a bad standard is still bad.

This page is a pretty direct indicator that GPG's foundation is fundamentally broken: you're not going to get to a good outcome trying to renovate the 2nd story.

singpolyma3 17 hours ago | parent [-]

That's just not true. Nothing in this page is a problem with the standard and everything in this page is the outdated parts of the old standard.

akerl_ 17 hours ago | parent [-]

So then why do a bunch of these affect Sequoia as well?

arccy 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ssh or minisign for signing age for file encryption

johnisgood 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are people who use GPG for more than that. Those that are fine with just those two features, sure. Heck, you can encrypt with "openssh", no need for age. :D I have a bash function for encryption and decryption!

cpach 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Those people should perhaps ponder if it’s a reasonable thing to insist on using this broken standard/tool in 2025.

johnisgood 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, well, I wish I could convince people to use 2-4 different tools when one does it "just fine".

akerl_ 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I thought the whole unix philosophy was to have a bunch of tools that each do one thing well, and to compose them into the workflow you want.

johnisgood 12 hours ago | parent [-]

And I thought most projects would be licensed as GNU by now but alas.

pabs3 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The gpg.fail page mentions minisign vulns too.