<story><title>I&apos;m giving up on PGP</title><url>https://blog.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psiconaut</author><text>I find very interesting the point about the split between what WoT was supposed to be, in theory, and what little it represents, in practice, in terms of practices about key verification.&lt;p&gt;It has been said many times that the lack of adoption of pgp in  mail was due to the average user not being able to grasp the concepts behind the proper operation for key management, but the article points to common practices among &amp;quot;power users&amp;quot; that will drop the theoretical best practices and switch to fallback, unsecure modes, given the effort needed to properly verify a key binding. If the community that cares about encryption and privacy is not able to routinely verify keys, the whole system definitely has a weak link.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if pgp is fundamentally flawed, or we have a deep conceptual usability issue here.&lt;p&gt;And to me, assuming that the most usable thing we can use instead is something that relies on mobile phone identifiers, more often than not tied to a phisical world identity, is really something to worry about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dom0</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder if pgp is fundamentally flawed, or we have a deep conceptual usability issue here.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think the &amp;quot;WoT&amp;quot; is conceptually flawed, and frankly, the argument that &amp;quot;people of average intelligence&amp;quot; can&amp;#x27;t grasp the concept comes from a very high horse and is also untrue. It&amp;#x27;s simply that any and all software for PGP utterly fails in the UX and functionality department when it comes to key management.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Web of Trust&lt;/i&gt; implies such a glaringly obvious visual metaphor that I am truly in awe that not a single program works that way.&lt;p&gt;Tabulations of keys are not a WoT, period.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t verify keys one-by-one, that&amp;#x27;s bullshit. I get one good key that&amp;#x27;s part of a WoT, and then go from there, and can easily see &lt;i&gt;from the web structure&lt;/i&gt; that other keys are good and what their relations are. None of that is accomplished by &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; PGP frontend.&lt;p&gt;Instead I get stupid and unhelpful error messages (&amp;quot;no key available&amp;quot; - I just downloaded it!) and some of the most terrible crypto UI I&amp;#x27;ve seen (&amp;quot;How much do you trust this key? [ ] Not at all [ ] A bit [ ] Fully [ ] Totally&amp;quot; - w-t-f).&lt;p&gt;A technical criticism of PGP&amp;#x2F;GPG is of course also possible. The whole thing is a museum of early 1990s crypto, with default ciphers like CAST5 and messages not being authenticated - and even if the message is authenticated most parts of the PGP protocol are not, meaning that you got that big bunch of C code maintained by that one German guy over there that parses unauthenticated bytes that you shipped through half the internet with a big neon-red sticker on it saying &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;M PGP PLEASE TAMPER WITH ME&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>I&apos;m giving up on PGP</title><url>https://blog.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psiconaut</author><text>I find very interesting the point about the split between what WoT was supposed to be, in theory, and what little it represents, in practice, in terms of practices about key verification.&lt;p&gt;It has been said many times that the lack of adoption of pgp in  mail was due to the average user not being able to grasp the concepts behind the proper operation for key management, but the article points to common practices among &amp;quot;power users&amp;quot; that will drop the theoretical best practices and switch to fallback, unsecure modes, given the effort needed to properly verify a key binding. If the community that cares about encryption and privacy is not able to routinely verify keys, the whole system definitely has a weak link.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if pgp is fundamentally flawed, or we have a deep conceptual usability issue here.&lt;p&gt;And to me, assuming that the most usable thing we can use instead is something that relies on mobile phone identifiers, more often than not tied to a phisical world identity, is really something to worry about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JulianMorrison</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going with fundamentally flawed. Or perhaps more exactly, a solution for a non-problem.&lt;p&gt;Things PGP can do:&lt;p&gt;- Hide the contents of a message. But not the fact of a message nor who it&amp;#x27;s to. And it&amp;#x27;s only as hidden as a key that your recipient has to keep secret indefinitely.&lt;p&gt;- Permanently be incriminating, since the message can be as easily opened a decade from now.&lt;p&gt;- Prove you&amp;#x27;re you. Which is great for incriminating you. Also the proof is only good if your secret key is still secret, which probably isn&amp;#x27;t the case if you&amp;#x27;ve been arrested. At that point, it&amp;#x27;s good for convincing people it&amp;#x27;s you when it&amp;#x27;s really the FBI.&lt;p&gt;- Authenticate keys through a trust mechanism so sparsely populated that unless you&amp;#x27;re actually in a spy cell, the chances of having a valid trust path from A to B is astronomically small.&lt;p&gt;- Distribute keys through what is really only slightly more sophisticated than a world-writable Dropbox.</text></comment>