GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy

http://blog.gnupg.org/20131220-gnupg-turned-0x10.html

by e1ven • 13 years ago

140 48 13 years ago

blog.gnupg.org

nwalfield3• 13 years ago

This blog post is partially about the crowd funding campaign, but the author didn't include a link to the campaign!

http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructur...

Trufa• 13 years ago

For a more readable format: https://www.readability.com/articles/jzsno986

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

I don't see any discernible difference.

grandinj• 13 years ago

Except that the tool itself is so painful to use, and has such a shallow integration with things like email clients, that using it requires a considerable degree of self-discipline.

I think I installed it once, and then when my machine required rebuilding, I just couldn't bring myself to install it again.

I wish it weren't so, but a new website is not something that is going to speed the adoption of GnuPG.

nwalfield3• 13 years ago

This page explains what the money is going towards:

  http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructure/needs

They are looking for funding to:

- Release GnuPG 2.1 - Create a new web site

According to the descriptions, the new web site is not only about a new theme, but also about creating and collecting content that explains how to use GnuPG and encryption, in general.

nodata• 13 years ago

Integration and ease of use is what the GP is looking for, not another website.

tptacek3• 13 years ago

If you use Mail.app on OS X, GPGmail comes as close as anything to providing transparently usable email encryption. Admittedly, "as close as anything" does not mean "within a mile of it", but if you're deliberate about keeping your mail secure, GPGmail is usable.

Kerrick• 13 years ago

I find it trivial to use for email, because I use OS X, Apple Mail, and GPGTools' GPGMail plugin [0].

[0] https://gpgtools.org/

UweSchmidt2• 13 years ago

So do you actually use it? What is the rate of adoption among your friends and colleagues? How pleasant do you find introducing and explaining the whole process to a nontechnical person?

UweSchmidt2• 13 years ago

Same experience here. It's just barely good enough to claim the space of 'technically correct OS crypto implementation', thereby discouraging alternative efforts.

jagermo• 13 years ago

Agreed. Its simply not easy enough to use so I could recommend it to my friends with lesser it knowledge. However I have hopes for projects like MailPile (https://www.mailpile.is/)

dublinben• 13 years ago

If you haven't used Enigmail with Thunderbird, then you wouldn't know how easy it is to use GPG.

mkesper3• 13 years ago

Although Enigmail still has some rough edges to be honest!

technomancy2• 13 years ago

I started using GPG seriously once the "easypg" integration landed in Emacs 23. When you open a .gpg file it prompts for your passphrase and decrypts transparently, and when saving a new .gpg file it prompts you with a list from which you can select recipients to encrypt to.

The integration with Emacs mail clients is fantastic too; just M-x mml-secure-sign or M-x mml-secure-encrypt when composing, and incoming messages with signatures are typically checked for you.

This totally changed the way I used GPG. (from "not at all" to "every day")

stinkytaco2• 13 years ago

I'm working through the irony of your finding GPG easier to use once it landed in emacs. I mean... Emacs for God's sake.

In all honesty, however, part of the "difficulty" of GPG is really by design. You need to be deliberate about signing and encrypting because security should be a careful and deliberate act. If you're hoping for the program to take care of it transparently, you're probably not being safe enough. At least Emacs requires you to go through an explicit process. As you have to do with everything in Emacs.

codex• 13 years ago

Changes to Gmail made by a couple of engineers would so more to protect privacy than GNU ever could.

Joeboy• 13 years ago

How?

RamiK• 13 years ago

Client side encryption\decryption(can be done in javascript) with Gmail storing and passing nothing but encrypted data they themselves have no means of reading.

Of course, that would mean Google has no means of directing ads based on content so they would have no incentive to run Gmail in the first place...

technomancy2• 13 years ago

Right, as if Gmail would even exist without GNU.

clarry• 13 years ago

What does Gmail require GNU for?

mkesper3• 13 years ago

What? Gmail and privacy in one sentence? How does that fit?

tptacek3• 13 years ago

So many people seem enamored of the idea of building software to protect users from NSA, and respond by designing new cryptosystems. These efforts invariably fail, because crypto is very hard, and professional crypto requires 10x verification (particularly at the design stage) as it does implementation.

It baffles me that nobody has instead picked up the challenge of taking the PGP/GPG cryptosystem and making it more usable. That seems like an incredibly valuable project that also makes great use of the skills of the sorts of people that tend to want to work on privacy software.

Paradoxically, the more you know about crypto, the less inclined you usually are to build new crypto.

e1ven3• 13 years ago

I've been working on using GPG behind-the-scenes, so I can speak to a few reasons why it might not be used more frequently.

1) GPG is -terrible- to use as a library.

There are a lot of wrappers for various languages. Almost most all of them call the gpg executable, and scrape it's input. This is crazy-town loony-toons.

In theory, gpgme is supposed to be the solution.. But gpgme ends up calling the binary itself in many cases!

2) GPG assumes you want to use the whole ecosystem.

GPG is sort of a mega-framework. It assumes you want to do everything the GPG way - Use gpg subkeys, keyservers, WOT, Import keys to a central keychain, etc.

I've been able to go through with options flags and disable things I don't want, but it's all opt-out, not opt-in.

3) Because of 1 and 2, you can't run GPG entirely in memory. It writes a lot of files to the filesystem.. I've been bypassing this by running in ramdisks with ephemeral directories, but it's a PITA.

4) 2.1 has been in the works.. FOREVER.

The first betas of gpg 2.1 were in 2010.. I understand they want to get this right, but that's a really really really log dev-cycle. I donated to the crowdfunding, and I hope it helps get gpg out sooner.

GPG 2.1 is the first stable gpg release that includes ECC support (specifically, DJB's 25519). This is a really really big feature, that a lot of people have been waiting for.

In any event, I like GPG, and I'm using GPG because it's been hardened, and I'm not smart enough to do my own crypto.

But GPG doesn't make itself easy to integrate.

pyre2• 13 years ago

There are a lot of wrappers for various languages. Almost most all of them call the gpg executable, and scrape it's input. This is crazy-town loony-toons.
In theory, gpgme is supposed to be the solution.. But gpgme ends up calling the binary itself in many cases!

I've heard of this many times, but is there a good reason behind this? Are there extra security considerations behind making this a shared library? Is it just "not the focus of development" much in the same way that changing the GIMP UI was always "off the table" for the longest time because the devs didn't want to do it?

nwalfield3• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, there are a couple of misunderstandings here.

It is true that libraries call the gpg binary. This is a feature, not a bug. This architecture makes bugs in the applications less likely to affect the gpg code / data. For instance, it's a lot harder to dump the variable containing the secret key if it is in another process.

The wrappers don't scrape the output. There is a well-defined protocol for interacting with the binary.

eugenejen4• 13 years ago

i am in fact working on a system trying to simplify gpg ui.

Semiapies2• 13 years ago

Please keep us apprised! This is valuable work.

salient• 13 years ago

You mean something like this?

http://cipherbit.org/

malandrew• 13 years ago

Completely agree on making existing key-based crypto more usable. A few weeks/months ago when someone started a thread on OpenPGP best practices, I asked why lots of key based tooling wasn't already baked into operating systems like linux. More details in the original thread [0]. It seems like this is really low hanging fruit; much lower than creating a new crypto system.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660162

abemassry• 13 years ago

I wrote this command line tool to use gpg, I would like to work with someone that's interesting in making it available to non command line users.

https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-gpg

Check it out and contact me

miga• 13 years ago

2^2^2 years protecting privacy, that is!

iso-8859-1• 13 years ago

From now on it will never again not matter if you evaluate that expression from left to right or right to left :)

GnuPG - 16 Years of protecting privacy

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