Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html

by numlocked • 13 years ago

257 108 13 years ago

krmboya• 13 years ago

This particular version doesn't seem to be from 1991 as the current title suggests since it speaks of 1994 in the past tense.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Yes. It claims to be updated in 1999.

sidcool• 13 years ago

It's scary how this all snooping thing started way back when the internet was nascent.

mhurron• 13 years ago

It started before that. This has been a function of the NSA from it's beginning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK

DanBC• 13 years ago

British Special Branch said they wanted an informant on every street.

The BBC had political vetting. http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/mi5.bbc.page9...

Special Branch spied on an elected member of parliament http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2378459.stm

Unions in the 70s had extensive networks of police informants and undercover officers and agents provocateurs. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/12/spie-d10.html

That union scrutiny activity turned into black listing, meaning many workers were denied jobs. A secret McCarthy-esque activity. This black listing was so severe it lead to laws being brought in around data protection. Those laws originally only covered computer systems. Because the black lists were run on index cards the laws were changed to cover more forms of data retention. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02xcn7d

Abuses of surveillance are common, and long lasting.

pconf• 13 years ago

It actually started with the British whose spooks taught it to the US' Herbert Hoover before WWII. Read "Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner" <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/30/enemies-fbi-his... for the definitive historical overview of how domestic spying and its abuse got started.

George Orwell foresaw the potential for abuse long before 1948 when he wrote "1984" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four>.

noonespecial3• 13 years ago

Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut? Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their email?

What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

I'm seriously thinking of having this printed up on business cards (1st paragraph on the front, 2nd on the back) so I can just whip them out and hand them to people. By the time they've gotten done saying, "Well, if you have nothing to hide..." it'll be in their hands.

swinnipeg• 13 years ago

My go to is something along the lines of:

You disapprove of mandatory cavity searches before air travel or entering a school? Sounds you are a drug dealer.

noonespecial3• 13 years ago

I've found that this doesn't work quite as well because modesty (the desire not to be seen 'naked') tangles up with privacy and creates a "that's different..." that seems difficult to quickly dismiss.

jsaxton86• 13 years ago

I don't think you understand why people approve of what the NSA is doing, which is why that's usually going to be an ineffective argument. The NSA promises a safer country, and all we have to is let them do a little bit of surveillance behind the scenes. We won't even notice -- it's not intrusive in the same way that a cavity search is. An NSA supporter once asked me if I would have given up the metadata on my phone if it would have prevented 9/11 and saved ~3000 lives. I wouldn't, for reasons that have been discussed on HN repeatedly, but I think it's still a fair question.

The real issue here is the power imbalance combined with the lack of oversight and accountability. When I talk to NSA supporters, that's what I try to emphasize.

anotheraccount73• 13 years ago

I think the postcards example hurts his argument.

People send postcards all the time precisely because for the most part they don't care about privacy in their mail. In my personal life I can't think of a single example where I sent mail that I wanted to keep private (outside of maybe mail that had my SS#). I think most people are rather indifferent.

"If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut" The main function of the envelope is to tied a bunch of papers together so they don't get separated in the mail.

daveid3• 13 years ago

I think there's a misunderstanding. The author doesn't mean actual postcards – like holiday greetings and the like – those are actually sent in the public and nobody cares. The author means sending letters without envelopes.

noonespecial3• 13 years ago

So it would be OK if your bank statements came rubberbanded together (or in transparent plastic "patriot envelopes") with your balances showing (for your convenience)? How about credit card statements showing what you owe? The results of that HIV test maybe?

dreamfactory• 13 years ago

How about asking people how they would feel if curtains were made illegal?

hipaulshi5• 13 years ago

Wow.. the whole article seems so relevant to today

eplanit• 13 years ago

It was never irrelevant. The problem has simply scaled up over time.

hipaulshi5• 13 years ago

So.. Anyone wants to do a PGP key signing party in San Francisco? I asked on HN before but no one seems to be interested back then. I hope some meetup organizer can pick this up.

numlocked• 13 years ago

No better way than to do it yourself! Create the meet up and submit it here. I'd be up for it.

frewsxcv• 13 years ago

Yes, I would definitely be interested

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

I am very interested.

willvarfar3• 13 years ago

I'm curious, how would you verify an attendee's identity?

hipaulshi5• 13 years ago

government id/picture id checking against pgp keyserver, to make sure you are who say you are. So you have to be physically present at the party with your key and id. that's how the trust network is built.

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

See "The Keysigning Party HOWTO":

http://www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/keysigning_party/en/keysi...

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

"Hello! I'm Fish!"

"Hi. I'm Jesus!"

"Wow, Jesus? Nice to meet you, can I have your public key?"

I don't trust any of you :)

nhaehnle2• 13 years ago

This highlights a huge problem of the PGP/GPG web of trust: It mostly solves the wrong problem.

I don't care whether a Linux kernel release is signed by a guy who has government-issued ID that says "Linus Torvalds" on it. I care whether it is signed by the guy who started the whole thing more than 20 years ago.

There would be value in a modified web of trust where, when you receive an e-mail from hipaulshi, you can be certain that it's the same person you replied to on HN. Who cares what her (or his) real name is? In a sense, what you really want for most internet-centric communication is something like certificate pinning.

Of course things are different when you're talking about people who you know in person. But for those you don't have to organize key signing parties.

And even for people I know in the real world, I would be happy with a solution that just pins the very first public key it sees as long as nothing obviously suspicious is happening. This suffices for 99.9% of use cases. [0]

[0] No, this is not sufficient if you know that a government is out to get you. But if it helps to move us into an encryption-by-default setting, it is still a win for the overall ecosystem.

hipaulshi5• 13 years ago

Here's the survey to see if people are interested in the meetup. Please register if you are interested.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/19p-OY-Q5VKtVD2BVt8QVHMCcBO9...

hipaulshi5• 13 years ago

Unfortunately only 2 guys actually signed up so far. So I am pretty sure now PGP is not as popular as it seems in terms of verification purpose. :/

downer945• 13 years ago

So, no one ever dares to ask this, but I'm going to because I never see mention of it crop up in these sorts of discussions.

Where do you draw the line between an individual's assertion of privacy over confidential information, and contrast it with the premise of intellectual property and the use of encryption to achieve goals traditionally perceived as less noble, such as DRM?

Where does the distinction emerge, that my social security number and HIV status deserve protection, but an episode of Game of Thrones does not?

I'm not asking this question because I don't understand the distinction. I'm asking this question because it's not often discussed.

If information wants to be free, then what is our objective measure, to define the reason why we might choose to confine some, all or none of our information, especially when employing encryption?

genwin• 13 years ago

The 4th Amendment implies that conversations about anything including the bits to Game of Thrones should be free from snooping, if only when those conversations are encrypted. Law enforcement can get a warrant when they have sufficient evidence of illegal activity.

downer945• 13 years ago

Yeah, Phil Zimmerman's article mostly addresses intercepting vulnerable transmissions over a wire or through the air waves.

Not so much about breaking encryption, and attacking a static target.

I think Phil Zimmerman's assumption (at least, withing the context of this article) is that if you're attacking an sample of encrypted information, that act alone comes with the implicit understanding that you're probably acting against the interests of the person who locked the information away in the first place. Whether that person or group of people are worthy of the attack is its own judgement call.

grahamburger• 13 years ago

DRM and encryption aren't the same thing. I don't think anyone would complain that Game of Thrones is stored in an encrypted format on it's servers, or transmitted using encryption to broadcasting stations. Conversely, I doubt you would want your social security number or HIV status stored under DRM - you might lose access to that information in the future.

downer945• 13 years ago

I know that DRM isn't explicitly defined as encryption, but encryption is usually the apparatus that achieves the goal of DRM. In most modern situations DRM schemes involve carefully implemented encryption.

But ultimately, the content is being defended with encryption.

If there's a dossier in an office somewhere, because I visited a doctor, I would want the clerks charged with handling that dossier to exert control over it. If they're saving it to disk on a server in a basement IT closet, I'd want it encrypted.

Meanwhile, if I was an employee at a production company, producing a television episode, I'd probably be expected to exert the same degree of control over the fragments of unfinished content, as they trickle in from the soundstage and are finished up in post production, but then, they undergo a different type of encryption, when locked up in DRM for release to paying subscribers.

The question is more an ethical one, not a technical one.

If we have encryption as a tool we might use, when is its use respectable, and when is its defeat admirable, and why? Why is it cool when we crack DVDCSS, but awful when the NSA breaks into Google and bypasses their SSL firewall? Are we just hypocrites who want to have their cake and eat it too, or is there an appreciable measure of difference between the two?

eps• 13 years ago

Apples to oranges. Game of Thrones series are inherently meant for distribution, while my emails and your HIV report are not.

downer945• 13 years ago

Both are intended for controlled distribution.

I expect my doctor and the testing center to control the dissemination of my protected healthcare information.

The production company and the TV station expect its viewers to contol the dissemination of their artistic works.

Is one expectation less reasonable than the other?

gibybo• 13 years ago

I draw the line between things that are intended to be private, and things that are intended to be publicly available.

If HBO intended to only share Game of Thrones with their friends and not the public, then it's their right to encrypt it and only make it available to those people. If their intention is to share it with me because I paid for it, it's a little bit ridiculous to give me access to the decryption key (perhaps embedded in a blu-ray player I own) and then tell me how and when I'm allowed to use it under penalty of law.

acrucker• 13 years ago

The real question here is not one of information freedom, but one of trust.

If I were to send you a GPG-encrypted email, it's a relationship of mutual trust: I know that you have full access to the information, and can do with it what you want. However, the ISP/NSA/GCHQ/KGB do not have access, because they are naturally not trusted.

DRM is different: if I distribute content to you using DRM, I am saying that I do not trust you to have the unencrypted content. Furthermore, DRM implies control over the hardware and software used to play content.

r0s3• 13 years ago

Personally I feel trading a single copy of any IP with a friend or individual should be covered under fair use.

Broadcasting, or reselling should be covered by legal protections against.

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

That seems so right, but it gets fuzzy so fast as to be impractical.

Does that mean you can only give one copy to one person? If not, then can you give one copy to as many people as you like? If that's true, what's wrong with using bittorrent to do all of that quickly and more easily?

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

If HBO want to encrypt stuff on a system they own, or transmit it encrypted, that's their business. However, a computer system should always serve the owner. And the only way you can do effective DRM; leaving it viewable to me but only under your conditions; is through subverting my computer from my control - otherwise I'll just be able to read the key.

DRM constitutes an attack on the loyal functioning of someone else's machine, in a way that the owner of that machine is not meant to counteract. Which is distinct from just having an encrypted file, which represents no such compromise to the loyalty expected of the computer it happens to be on at any particular time, (indeed encryption sort of assumes that it'll end up on an unfriendly machine in some form or another, else there'd be no point.)

downer945• 13 years ago

I agree. In that scenario, I feel absolutely no need for restraint in attacking someone else's encrypted information. Namely, when that someone else is an uninvited eavesdropper.

I refuse to tolerate the idea of placing a high-powered machine in my living room, if that machine won't tell me what it's doing or who it's talking to. In that moment I feel completely justified in my attempts to break encryption, read the information collected about me, and reverse engineer or destroy the device.

This is an aspect that OP's article doesn't cover: Consumer products bundled with mandated encryption that operates against the interest of the end user, with designs to eavesdrop on the user simply to capture their ambient behavior as a rule, and disinform the user of the information collected about them, whether it be accelerometer information, GPS information, or channel changing habits.

This is the inverse of Phil Zimmerman's goal. Pervasive, continuous observation and telemetry, especially that which occurs without the consent or awareness of the observed.

anoncow• 13 years ago

Advances in technology will not permit the maintenance of the status quo, as far as privacy is concerned. The status quo is unstable. If we do nothing, new technologies will give the government new automatic surveillance capabilities that Stalin could never have dreamed of. The only way to hold the line on privacy in the information age is strong cryptography

joering2• 13 years ago

To all the people and law enforcement officials that live by the "if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't worry about your privacy", I say that's your very own and primitive explanation. I hide/encrypt/lock my stuff because I DO NOT TRUST you in handling my private info and therefore my life. Most government org cannot keep their own stuff private, not to mention my personal info. Same applies to a lock on my house: I do not lock my door because I sit at home and build an atomic bomb and do not wont officials to know about it; I lock my door because you (LE) do a pathetic job at keeping my house safe from burglars.

As I keep repeating, next 911 will not come in form of six people stealing our planes, on our airports hitting our buildings; it will come from Chinese/other government hackers stealing our own data, neatly stored and organized in our NSA's locker-rooms. And that's why its a horror idea for anyone to have all information on entire nation, within one database (I know its bit more complicated than that).

As the nation and most others based its order on organized information, you can imagine entire country on a full economical lockdown, once all your credit card, all your social security info and all your data leaks out to third parties/pirates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

MWil3• 13 years ago

I just started experimenting with PGP this week and I was amazed at how easy it was. This page was all I needed to get started http://serverfault.com/questions/489140/what-is-a-good-solut...

jng• 13 years ago

Isn't that gpg?

MWil3• 13 years ago

GPG, as I understand it, is a fork of PGP and still part of the OpenPGP Alliance

pan69• 13 years ago

As far as I'm aware, GPG is an implementation of OpenPGP.

abemassry• 13 years ago

Yeah, the command line tool was really easy when I used it as part of my project https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-gpg

jamesgeck03• 13 years ago

It's easy for a developer, sure. We need to make it Dropbox-easy for the general population, though.

MWil3• 13 years ago

I'm not a developer. I just learned HTML/CSS so I'm a wannabe but there's nothing that I know less about than command-line interfaces.

nathanallen• 13 years ago

One of the best stories from the PGP saga is that Zimmerman worked with MIT Press to have the entire PGP source code published, in machine readable print. This allowed him to make the argument that his scary-dangerous-cryptosystem was in fact protected under the First Amendment as free speech.

furyg3• 13 years ago

It gets better, they not only printed it out but also scanned it!

http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/

Cryptography software was subject to export-control at the time... so they printed it out, and scanned it in Europe to create a 'clean' version of the software for use abroad (PGPi ). They continued to do this for new releases of PGP until the export controls were released.

Must have made for a nasty devops relationship...

jmtame• 13 years ago

Wow, that's one scenario I didn't even consider: the government making it illegal to use encryption. Blows my mind that you could some day be considered a criminal for using PGP.

jrvarela56• 13 years ago

Could there be an encryption mechanism that outputs valid sentences? If anyone tries to ban encryption they'd have to argue your text is encrypted because it doesn't make much sense to them.

rcxdude• 13 years ago

Such steganography is sort of possible, though it's hard to make it not look like the output of a markov babbler.

jdiez17• 13 years ago

Yes, there even was such a tool posted on HN some time ago. I can't remember its name, but basically it got its corpus from twitter data. Maybe someone else can post a link?

handsomeransoms• 13 years ago

One example is Bananaphone [0], which is designed to help Tor traffic look more like normal traffic to evade DPI.

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November...

cookiecaper4• 13 years ago

Computer-based steganography is destined to failure in the same way DRM is destined to failure. If a computer program can interpret the data, someone else can reverse engineer the formats until the solution is found. It might slow something down slightly, but is not likely to be effective alone.

The reason computers and networks are useful to us is because they can instantaneously create perfect copies of long strings of numbers, which programs interpret to have specific meanings. If we have a use case where perfect, rapid proliferation may be problematic, computational digitization should be considered a suspect mechanism for the implementation of that use case.

tl;dr: implement [at least most of] your steganography the old-fashioned way.

rakoo• 13 years ago

Actually, usage of cryptography with computers was illegal at a point. Here in France, the strength of SSH was capped by law.

Even today, the distribution of cryptography is not totally open. Oh, and even if you used cryptography, you have to decrypt your data at the request of the justice, so it's more or less pointless against your own state.

cookiecaper4• 13 years ago

For the record, mandatory decryption is an unsettled issue in the U.S. and conflicting rulings have been issued. It's entirely possible that a judge in a given encryption case will rule that the accused's right not to self-incriminate as defined in the Fifth Amendment precludes mandatory decryption.

Regardless of the state's ability to compel decryption, you should still encrypt everything because it gives you at least partial control. Your options are much, much better if the government can't build their case without your cooperation, even if a judge compels decryption, because your lawyer can try to get the order rescinded before you comply, or at worst, he can at least stall for a while, you can claim you forgot your password and take the risk of an obstruction charge if the risk of said charge is lesser than the risk of charges that would be made after prosecutors gained access to your decrypted content, etc.

If you leave everything plaintext, you have no possibility of option or control; the government gets access to the whole kit and caboodle instantly.

FedRegister• 13 years ago

Chaffing and winnowing[1], as proposed by Rivest, can handle this. It'd be interesting to use this as a trunking mechanism to bundle many conversations together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing

jwr• 13 years ago

…and yet so many of us (yes, even the tech geeks) do not use it.

There's always a reason: it's too bothersome, we find the password prompts annoying, our friends don't use it, "it's not worth it for the unimportant stuff", "they'll get me anyway if they really want to". We complain about the NSA snooping, but we can't be bothered to properly encrypt our E-mail, even though the tools are right there, in front of us. For free.

If you're on a Mac, use https://gpgtools.org — there is really no excuse, it's so simple and straightforward to use. I'm sure there are even easier solutions on Windows and Linux.

kingnight• 13 years ago

gpgtools is great. It integrates very nicely with Mail.app.

Any suggestions for what to do on an mobile device to pair with desktop mail?

ak86• 13 years ago

I was just starting out with PGP today - and found iPGMail to be useful on iOS.

bad_user• 13 years ago

For Linux there's Seahorse, the Gnome app for managing PGP and SSH Keys. It comes installed by default on Ubuntu. Generating a key and synchronizing it with a key server couldn't be more painless.

For email clients, you can use Thunderbird or Evolution, both of which can handle PGP. There's also a new Chrome/Firefox extension that brings PGP to Webmail interfaces, such as GMail: http://www.mailvelope.com/ ... because of a Firefox limitation, it's kind of slow on Firefox right now, but should get fixed in 27 and it also lacks advanced features (e.g. PGP Mime, or syncing with key servers), but those features are coming.

Linux in general have the best security related tools. Ubuntu's graphical installer for example gives you the option to encrypt either your $HOME directory or your entire hard-drive (with dmcrypt). When formatting an USB Drive, you also have the option to encrypt it. And if you synchronize your files on DropBox or Google Drive, you can quickly create an encrypted folder by means of Encfs / gnome-encfs. And personally, I went full on with encryption. My hard-drive, my USB drives, my Dropbox, my Google Drive storage, all encrypted. I also link to my PGP public key in my email signature, which is cool, as my personal website serves links only through HTTPS.

Innocuous• 13 years ago

Yeah it looks good in theory, until you start really using gpg and promote it amongst friends and contacts...

I actually don't really understand the differences between PGP/INLINE and PGP/MIME but it has given me headaches, because some clients don't support both.

Evolution's devs refused to support anything other than PGP/MIME for a long time (seems to be fixed now):

http://mozdev.org/pipermail/enigmail/2010-July/012617.html

K9 cannot read PGP/MIME https://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=5864

cookiecaper4• 13 years ago

I use it wherever I can, but encryption is something that requires the participation of all communicants. The only option for an unwilling or unable participant is to be excluded from the mail completely and contacted in a separate channel (preferably Real Life). This, combined with the fact that encryption requires effort, makes it very, very hard to propagate.

Encryption for mail will remain practically zero until someone implements an extremely simple, integrated user experience. It's one of those things no normal person will acquire unless you ship it with Windows and make it totally transparent.

jamesgeck03• 13 years ago

The Thunderbird-with-PGP experience on Windows is atrocious, absolutely disgraceful.

Here's what I blogged after trying it a few months ago:

I suspect the way most people on Windows will use PGP is by downloading GPG4Win and Enigmail. The fact that this is two separate things to install is a showstopper for a lot of people. Installation of Engimail requires right clicking on a link to save it, then locating the file in Windows Explorer and dragging it into an open Thunderbird window. I can do that and you can do that, but it's arcane wizardry for a significant portion of the population.

Also, the GPG installer appears to randomly crash under certain circumstances on Windows 8.

That's just installation. Then you have to get people to generate a key using a password that's different from the one they use to login to their email server. I suspect most users would have a difficult time using the GPG interface; it's very reminiscent of desktop Linux applications a decade ago.

There's more, but it's too long for here: http://jamesgecko.com/everyone-should-use-pgp-but-its-kinda-...

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

My heartfelt thanks, Phil, if you happen to be/visit here. Not just for the software, but for the accompanying philosophy and enlightenment, and dedication to same. The impact upon me, personally, has been significant. It is something I in turn attempt to share with those who matter to me, personally and professionally.

Regards

diasp• 13 years ago

PGP isn't trivial but thanks to https://encrypt.to/ now everybody can send encrypted PGP messages.

Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

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