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.

ASCII armored exports suitable for plain text copying and pasting and inclusion in other documents and messages seem to be the norm for sharing. Keys are referred to by keyid or email. To the key database, files seem more like an implementation detail.

It provides the tools necessary to implement a simpler workflow.

> 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.

Mind. Blown.

The term E2EE has been subverted. Apps like WhatsApp claiming to be E2EE, but only if you actually enable it, so that people think they are being encrypted when they are not does not help. ProtonMail falls into this as well where allowing email to non-encrypted addresses means there is no encryption. It's obvious to some, but not so for the majority. Very few people read the caveats that WhatsApp and ProtonMail provide.

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.

It's easy to explain. "I use PGP for my personal notes (symmetric) and for e-mailing my security conscious friends (public-key)". That's sufficient and not awkward.

It's still extremely difficult.

If we assume that the threshold of what is "difficult" is for example 1) installing a desktop application, or even running a deskop OS.

2) Running an email provider other than what you are already doing (gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, ...), or switching email providers

3) Copying and pasting text or using files.

This was perhaps a viable thing to do for users in 2005 because if you were on the internet, chances are you at least had a desktop computer, and if you used email chances are you already had to struggle with an email client.

But now? Anything that isn't as easy as installing an app on your device (a device that isn't a full computer) is "difficult".

It's not that it's harder today, it's that everything else is easier (Like telegram/signal and other privacy-minded services), and that there are now 6 billion internet users and most never used a computer and never will.

At least the versions I remember had a really bad UX for marking keys as trusted.

The correct operation for (even locally) marking "this key belongs to person X" is signing the key. Marking it as "trusted" indicates "this key is a CA that can create statements who other keys belong to", but it's easier to find/"understand".

So if you haven't first studied the details of the security model and terminology, you just start increasing the trust level on the key of your communication partner until the warnings go away, not realizing that by doing this, you've made that key a CA and the reason the warnings disappeared is because you now trust the self-signature (in addition to all other signatures the key issued).

I once had a chat with a security professor who had decided to try to get his group to use encrypted email for all of their communications. And they just couldn't get mailing lists working right with encrypted email.

Please, enlighten me on how you used PGP where calling it hard to use is so far from the truth. ProtonMail only works if you send messages to another ProtonMail user. It does not protect you when you email someone else.