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PGP Is 15 Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information."
Congratulations, PGP! Now legal in Bulgaria, France, Monaco, and Thailand.
Oh, and I almost forgot Poland!
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
J 2fve87lMlDlx4Ojn nRvjY8nZL3MPXSZq 6lb46wsvldZ96YAk S8NxbukLeamqVW3
Version: 2.6.2
hIwDY32hYGCE8MkBA/wOu7d45aUxF4Q0RKJprD3v5Z9K1YcR
eW4GDdBfLbJE7VUpp13N19GL8e/AqbyyjHH4aS0YoTk10QQ9
g9VGQxFeGqzykzmykU6A26MSMexR4ApeeON6xzZWfo+0yOqA
AABH78hyX7YX4uT1tNCWEIIBoqqvCeIMpp7UQ2IzBrXg6Gtu
1yt21DYOjuLzcMNe/JNsD9vDVCvOOG3OCi8=
=zzaA
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
That there's still no equivalent to the old PGPphone.
;)
That thing ROCKS
Unfortunately, in the real world, 99% of email users can not or do not want to maintain a web of trust. That is why S/MIME is going to kill the PGP market. PGP/MIME is only big because it was first on the scene.
Hell, even mutt supports S/MIME. Imagine SSL with a web of trust--yuck!. PKI is the way to go...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I used PGP back in the day when it was still illegal due to the 'fact' that it was considered a 'munition'. Thanks, Phil, for giving me the amount of encryption enjoyed by many small governments of the day...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's too bad after 15 years, probably > one percent of internet users have even used it, or any of its OpenPGP standard derivatives (GnuPG) for example. Sort of like the NSA telephone spying fiasco this year in the U.S, you know the various bureacracies are watching all the packets they can. If you want privacy, now is the time to take control of your own. Encrypt your emails and files, IPSEC, SSH, HTTPS wherever possible, and demand it where it is not yet available for you.
does it still need Mom and Dad's permission to travel?
The victory will go to those who are capable of creating disorder without loving it. -Debord
And it has not killed the PGP market or even gotten major traction. What percentage of your legitimate incoming email is S/MIME signed? Even from your bank?
Also, bear in mind that CA-based PKI is a strict subset of web of trust.
The lesson is that crypto goes nowhere in the market unless it's as transparent as TLS.
>can not or do not want to maintain a web of trust
PKI shouldn't be difficult, but from what I've seen it does seem to be beyond human comprehension.
It had very clear full-duplex quality, was simple to set up and use, and was largely platform independent. I was in a long distance relationship in college at the time, and my girlfriend had a mac (I had a PC). PGPfone was the only VOIP solution in 1999 that allowed us to voice chat for free (remember, this is before unlimited minute cell phones). Absolutely amazing as a voice chat program, let alone all its privacy features.
I believe thawte offers a viable and professional alternative to PGP. If you're in the NYC area, please visit my site dedicated to notarizing thawte personal certificates. It's easier than you think, and transparent for most users.
Aaah, 15 years. Time flies when one is having fun. So out of curiosity; does anyone still have the PGP book lying around? If you'll recall the US (land of the free, brave and other bs) didn't allow the export of encryption technology, which included PGP. SO unless you wanted to do something illegal (many people downloaded it anyway since the logic had always been that it wasn't illegal to offer it for download (the downloads were for American people) but the moment you downloaded it while knowing you weren't in the States....) you had to figure out a better way. And people did!
;-)
They printed the entire sourcecode, declared it to be a book about encryption, and then faxed all the pages over to (iirc) Finland. And this wasn't illegal in any way, and so us Europeans could then enjoy your own PGP version. iirc we had pgp 2.6 and pgp 2.6i where the 'i' denoted the International version. I never did understand this (IMO) idiocy from the US goverment.. The moment that the cat was out of the bag so to speak the European version quickly allowed for much larger keys whereas the US version was still limited in functionality because this too had been restricted by the goverment. Even in those days...
No, this isn't a political tyrade about how the land of the free isn't as free as people want you to believe but I think it is something to keep in mind. People tend to forget all too quickly and this, gentlemen, is history. SO, back to my question, anyone ever kept the original book around?
It was offered on several BBS's in the days but only very few would try to dial international and make huge costs for something which might not ever have been available for download. I do have some old versions of pgp 2.6x lying around which I used with my BBS to sign certain special files... aah, perhaps I should try to move those into my VMWare machine to play BBS again
Once upon a time I generated a key, and discovered there was no one around to swap keys with. My best guess is that it has never been common enough or easy enough to get started. It needs to be as easy as hitting send on an email, automatically sign it, and if the recipient is known to have a key then encrypt it to them. I could be bothered to go through some hassle to get this going, but I think most people don't care enough and probably most of their email doesn't matter enough to bother with encrypting or signing. I still wish it was more common though.
Start Running Better Polls
If there's one thing that annoys me it's when a program disappears like that...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
GNAA Claims Responsibility in Loli-Chan Raid
trogg (GNAP) Trolladelphia, PA - Today the world learned what happens when the GNAA takes its focus off of Zionist Forces, and directs it towards an even lower group of sub-humans... Loli-chan.
The Loli-chan movement started innocently enough, a 12 year old girl, a digital camera, and a need for affection. In a few short months it became an enormous corporation of deranged and bizarre internet freaks, shady message board members, pedophiles, and the GNAA's very own "popeye". The movement changed to corporation status and was openly traded. (NYSE:LOLI)
GNAA Operative jax, unperturbed in her recent release from Zionist controlled Xerox Corporation, removed the butt-plug from her festering Hindu ass and finally executed the last stage of her assault on Loli-chan. This involved phone calls to the vice-principal and principal at Loli-chan's private school in Florida. Alerting them to that fact that they were harboring one of the biggest pedophile celebrities on the internet. For more information, see http://www.gnaa.info/girl/.
Upon hearing that their beloved board was about to be raided, all the members of Loli-chan participated in a massive suicide ritual lead none other by "popeye", in which the members ejaculated into each others ass and then sucked it back out through a straw causing semen-fecal overdose.
This was all to the delight of jax who sat back and stroked her cock till climaxing onto popeye's corpse as fellow GNAA operative Jmax licked her scrotum. All the while saying "You have been trolled. You have lost."
About Loli-chan:
Trolled
About GNAA:
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Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is NiggerNET, and you can connect to irc.gnaa.us as our official server. Follow this
Jeez, will this fairy tail never end? Phil NEVER released PGP. Crap, I was there and I remember it. Phil had to be browbeaten and bribed to give up the software (for which he had already been paid to develop).
There were two people who were hauled up in front of the Federal Grand Jury. Phil was one. Kelly Goen was the other. It was Kelly who paid Phil, who researched the law (so that the release could be done legally) and who had been pushing for developing public key cryptography for years before he ever met Phil. And it was Kelly who had the guts to do the actual release. Phil thought he was completely safe at the time (and legally speaking he probably was, not that innocence has ever stopped the Feds before).
If you want to search, you might be able to find the original Jim Warren articles in Microtimes around, who Kelly kept in touch with during the actual release. Jim thought Kelly was paranoid as hell until the FBI showed up on his door, and he wrote at least one article about it.
For your amusement, Kelly went around the San Francisco Bay area with an old acoustic coupler modem to various pay phones and would upload it onto a different server. Then he'd call Jim to tell him where it was at, in case something happened to him. He was under the impression that the single best thing the NSA could do was to knock him off before he put it on those servers. Looking back at it now, he was quite right.
And no, this isn't being posted by Kelly. Just someone else who was there at the time.
So please, get your facts straight and give Kelly some credit while he's still alive. Thanks.
You are just rubbing it an every time you bring up these things that are ~15 years old that were brand new while I was in college.
Doom is 15 years old. Ok.
PGP is 15 years old. Ok I get it.
Linux is 15 years old. Damn.
All the musicians you liked then are 15 years older, and lost their hair (like you).
Ok now shut up!
Hopefully somewhere (prolly MIT) there are statue to these guys. Pioneers. Legends.
Don't forget that ssh, https, et. al., came years after PGP. What PGP did was to break the legal water for everything else. Nobody had ever heard of public key cryptography, let alone the fact that the government was trying to ban it, before PGP came out. Once it was out, suddenly it was an issue.
And after the battles to preserve it were over, the way was quite safe for the networking protocols to hit, and expand, in the mainstream.
So, while I agree with you that it is too bad that it isn't more widespread, PGP has had far greater impact than just being used to encrypt people's files.
and still almost nobody uses it. There's a real trade off between security and convince. How many people do you think would use SSL if they had to download a separate program beyond the web browser and setup certificates to support it? Probably about 10% of the general internet population, and those would be the ones who realized their credit card numbers weren't be passed encrypted. General rule of thumb.. If it's not (relatively) easy for the end user it will never become popular.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem (why should I bother to encrypt *my* email if there is no one to exchange it with?), and the answer is definitely integration. Imagine if gmail integrated PGP - we'd suddenly have a whole bunch of PGP users to exchange messages with.
I know there are sites like hushmail.com but we need to get an existing userbase setup with encryption, and everything has to be automatic.
Unfortunately, I'm in no position to organize such a thing.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Starium fizzled, SpeakFreely was abandoned, STU-III prohibitively overpriced, GSM crypto pathetic, Skype has secret crypto which means nobody savvy will trust it for serious work, and SIP/SRTP: well, a typical comment about that is "Are there any SIP implementations currently supporting SRTP?".
a good thing Larry David was busy on other projects (and isn't a famous cryptographer on the side) otherwise the project may have been dubbed PPPPPPPGP, with the first couple of Ps in italics, probably.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Zimmerman? A person named Zimmermann made PGP?
As in Zimmermann with the same spelling as this Zimmerman who was tied to this event?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
This point isn't original with me. Ian Griggs, and probably others, have been making it for years. (I'm not even sure I agree).
The use case you want is prevented by existing public key systems. They consider it insecure because there wouldn't be any proof that you were really encrypting to your friend's public key, as opposed to a public key belonging to whoever is wiretapping you. Hence the whole need for directory systems, trust systems, signers and "CA"s (signers you don't know but who are supposed to do a good job).
Mr. Griggs and company raise the question: is the problem of phony keys worth solving, at the cost of a staggering loss of usability?
Their idea is to encrypt without trying to build a theoretically sound PKI. The result would be vulnerable to deliberate attack but still, they argue, incomparably better than sending everything in plaintext.
The counterargument is that crypto without PKI could be worse than plaintext because of the risk of giving people a false sense of security.
Aside from the issue of what threat model to address, the UI problems are ghastly, and only partly because public key crypto is such a hard concept to communicate. I have never come up with a meatspace metaphor that captures all the important properties despite years of thinking about wax seals, drop boxes, and matching halves of torn pieces of paper.
"When I find myself in times of trouble, PRZ, he comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, 'PGP, PGP!'"
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I remember watching an English documentary about 5 or so years ago on the history of encryption and cyphers. One thing I remember was how the RSA public and private key encryption wasn't invented by PGP even though they were awarded a patent , it was invented by an english researcher while working for one of the many U.K government secret service shadow projects at the time. The UK security services have been using RSA encryption for many years before PGP ever figured it out but wouldn't admit to this fact because it would assist the Russians efforts to decrypt messages sent by the UK secret service.
So even though PGP got the patent for this technology they were not the first to invent it.
We gave up six months ago in rolling out PGP in our enterprise. The sheer weight of BUGS was not to be believed. Crashes, lost email, key-that-worked-yesterday-cant-encrypt-today. All sorts of things.
As a long time mutt user (where pgp support is classified as a kludgy addon. And yet it works 100%), I couldn't get over it. PGP is *simple*. It *does* work! So why can the parent company actually write a product that actually works!
*tap, tap* - Hello PGP - is anyone home???
I don't know enough to say who's right, but here's Phil Zimmermann's acount of PGP history. Also check out Adam Back's PGP timeline, which he warns is probably inaccurate. Microtimes columnist's recollections of PGP history.
PGP suffers because of remarkably poor nomenclature. The terms "public key" and "key pair" lend less than zero towards understanding the simple concept of how these objects are involved with encrypting and decrypting messages.
I've supported applications that use PGP for almost 9 years, and the number of times I must explain and re-explain how PGP keys work is just sad. In fact, there is one PGP administrator who methodically signs and distributes, every month, his company's latest public key *and* key pair to us. Why, oh why, didn't Phil just call them "encoders" and "decoders"?
That is exactly the issue. Most people have pretty boring lives, and don't need encryption. While many of us could make at least a business case that it would be a good thing to encrypt our mail, at the end of the day, expedient convenience wins out over The Right Thing.
Until strong encryption is seemlessly and effortlessly incorporated for a critical mass of users, it isn't going to happen.
This is where you need someone like Google, or some Mozilla project, or even some anti-spam infrastucture to "cram" encryption down everyone's throats...
However, be careful of what you wish for... if "everyone" encrypted "everything", it could mean the end of "anonymous" speach. (Unless there is a well-known anonymous signature, to prove it was from "anon" :-)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Not easy to setup, granted, but it's free, it does what you want, and it's actually pretty easy to use.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Just a small correction. The Mail client for OS X (aka "Apple Mail" or whatever you want to call it) doesn't have PGP capabilities built in.
It has some S/MIME capabilities built in (and almost totally undocumented, as far as I can tell, and it's a bit of a bear to set up), but to get anything related to PGP, you need to install the excellent set of plugins from Sente, called GPGMail. It is basically an interface between Apple Mail, and the CLI gpg tools.
It relies on some undocumented and unsupported APIs in Mail, so it could (and has, in the past) broken whenever Apple decides to change anything.
I've always thought it was too bad that Apple didn't actually provide some real PGP support in Mail; if they just bought GPGMail and built it in, it would be a nice start, and one less step I'd have to walk my friends through. My suspicion is that it's not built in, because at Apple HQ they use S/MIME and are happy with that, thus there's no motivation to include PGP features. The only reference I've ever seen by Apple to PGP is on their Product Security page, where they publish a public key that they use to sign official security-related documents.
(Incidentally, Apple's iChat also has encryption support. But again, sadly, it's not using the very nice, open source OTR system, it's done using an Apple plugin only good for talking to other iChat users. I think this also was something developed for internal use that they decided to release to the public, and since they have something that works for them internally, there's little chance of them ever implementing OTR.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
how do you expect the average non-geek to figure out how to decrypt and encrypt emails using PGP?
When signing, in fact, the exact opposite happens.
Public and private isn't too bad, it's just that no one ever, EVER bothers to learn them. I mean, come on, if people can learn words like "clutch", "gearshift", "ignition", and so on, why can't they understand that the PUBLIC key is what you send to everyone, and the PRIVATE key is what you don't even share with your lover?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Maybe it should be noted in this context that GnuPG 2 has been released recently. No longer a monolithic application, it includes tools for key and passphrase caching, smart card support, configuration, certificate revocation list and LDAP support and more. Thanks to Werner Koch et al for keeping developing this valuable tool.
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
...would be to say "My e-mail server, my key server". Use SSL certs or whatever to verify that you're talking to a legitimate server, and a way to connect securely to request a key is a must. I presume it's quite feasible to verify that you're talking to a legitimiate @domain.com server when trying to get the public key for a @domain.com address. So if I have a yahoo.com address, you can ask SMTP server "PUBK name@yahoo.com" and get either "no keys, sorry" or "uploaded key follows". Your email client should have some standard way of requesting "try to get the public key corresponding to this e-mail address" functionality for addresses you've never recieved mail from, though I think the normal way should be accepting keys in recieved mail.
How do you upload key? Well, it should be a way to connect securely to your mail server via SSL or whatever. To keep it really really simple, most people should upload self-signed certs through a simple "Encrypt mail" dialog explaining they now need to carry a private key around to access encrypted mail, though nothing stops you from having a proper WoT certs, other CAs to prove a real-world identity etc. Next step: "My e-mail server, my CA". I want yahoo.com to sign that "yes, this key belongs to address name@yahoo.com".
When you send mail, sign and attach the key signed by yahoo (this whole process should be automatic when you go through the "Encrypt mail" dialog). Now you're down to the standard browser model of security, where others can get a nice little lock icon saying "Send encrypted e-mail" because there's a working chain of trust from my address (name@yahoo.com) to server (yahoo.com) to CA/root CA, just like any HTTPS site. I imagine the "try to get public key" method could work similarly where you get a blank message with the public key, that you can reply securely to. Now you can have a local cache and be warned of changes like for SSH connections etc.
Now you're only left with the mismanagement issues. People will forget their password. People will lose their private key (escrow somehow?). People will compromise their private key travelling around or through their rooted box. People will ignore warnings that the keys don't match. In a corporte environment you can do better, but I imagine for most people it'll just be a big hassle. But at least it would be a lot more feasible than today.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Personally, I've given up"
Indeed, it's just too much trouble, which show you and I both agree with the parent to your post. It's one thing being a highly competent email user and setting your own PGP up, but can we really be bothered setting up all our friends, work colleagues and family? I can't. And why don't they set up PGP? Because it's too much work and too difficult for the average user.
As one of the parent posts noted, the same people understand and happily use secure payment methods over the web. So what are the PGP tools missing? why doesn't everybody run PGP or an equivalent? My guess is 1. no media scare stories to get people to investigate encrypted email (a decent reason to change) and 2. an easy installation procedure....
In the early 90s i spent (way too much of) my energy in the marijuana movement. Not wholly surprisingly, i got a little paranoid about marajuana-movement organizations' mailing lists being confiscated in various busts around the country.
..."
So i relentlessly harangued a national organization to distribute a windows/DOS/Mac PGP release to all of their chapters.
I felt pretty good about it until i got a call from someone in another state:
"duuuude. i forgot my passphrase..."
How did you do that?
"we were rilly baked
i've always wondered how much damage i did to the marijuana movement by handing a bunch of stoners a tool that required memorizing a passphrase...
my bad!
I use GPGShell:
http://www.jumaros.de/rsoft/index.html
It requires GnuPG to be installed as well so it's effectively a two part installer, but it works fine and does most of what you ask (it's still not the easiest GUI when it comes to paths but better than WinPT).
HTH
Visceral Psyche Films
Oh, I dunno, it would be really great if someone developed a plugin that could work with a major email client, so you could use just one click to sign or encrypt emails, or import keys from a keyserver, or decrypt emails from others. I'm thinking they could call it something like "Enigmail". I think that name has a nice ring to it, don't you?
Santa's suicide mission go!
I'd love it if Gmail supported S/MIME.
Thunderbird, OS X Mail, Lotus Notes, Exchange and Outlook all support S/MIME out of the box. If we could get webmail users using it, we might have a chance to get other people using it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
My family is perfectly capable of understanding and using PGP. The problem is, like many people, they just don't think it's worth it. On an intellectual level, they understand how risky it is, but they live in a town so small and friendly you hardly have to lock your doors at night. It's that disease of saying "I'm not important enough, don't these kinds of things happen to Other People?"
I'd set it up for them, taking care of #2 -- I wouldn't mind setting up all my friends, work colleagues, and family -- but #1 is difficult.
Oh, and by the way, you're lucky if these people really understand secure payments over the web. Everyone I know just uses them automatically, so in fact, SSL is pretty useless. We only just barely keep it working by complaining loudly when a site doesn't use it for something critical, and most people are very surprised when I tell them a total of about 5 corporations could sieze control of every secure transaction on the Web.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
RSA has(had) the patent on RSA public key encryption. PGP was just the first to popularize it, and make it easy for people to use it. And, in fact, not having the patent (on both RSA PK and also IDEA symmetric) is what caused PGP to later switch to ElGamal and 3DES, so that those are now part of the OpenPGP standard whereas RSA and IDEA are deprecated and fading into disuse, despite the fact that the RSA patent finally expired. (Yet Another Example of math patents doing the exact opposite of promoting the advancement of technology.)
If some "documentary" told you that PGP had a patent on RSA, then you need to watch better documentaries.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If a popular web browser, such as Mozilla, were to implement both x509 certs and PGP certs for encrypted/authenticated connections (using GNU TLS or something like it), that would be a damn good start.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Everyone here is talking about PGP encrypted mail.
I know there's problems with security legislation in the USA, and it's patented/restricted somehow. I would use gnupg for email if I had anyone to use it with. I only come across it in signed software.
Do you think signed/encrypted mail has a part to play in the new email? Email as we have it is WANK, with all the spam and shit. Something needs to be done. Perhaps a system could really on signing email with a unique key from a sender. Then there's an delocalised system of authenticating/rating senders, such that spammers are near immediately blacklisted, and everyone's real email is protected.
What is needed is a worldwide legal effort to prosecute criminal gangs. And campaigns for awareness. Most ppl think some eleven year old geeky kid is sending them spam and trying to hack their computer with viruses, when a organised gang is already *in* their computer, using it to send eveyone else spam.
The problem with webmail, is that encryption will never (can never) be trustworthy, since it needs to be implemented on the server, rather than on the user's trusted, known-uncompromised workstation. No one would ever really be able to rely on gmail's security.
On the other hand, there are some good reasons that they should do it, anyway.
First of all, we have to remember that a lot of users don't really have workstations that they know are safe. Sure Google (or someone who has compromised their servers, either through technical or judicial means) would be able to intercept your plaintext, but the very fact that companies like Symantec and McAfee are in business, suggest that millions of users can't even trust a computer inside their own house to not be compromised. So, does allowing a theoretical weakness into an already-known weak system, really invalidate it? You might as well do it anyway.
Secondly, even if the webmail server is a point of weakness, it becomes the one point of weakness, instead of one of many points of weakness. So, again, it's not reliable, but it's "more reliable" instead of worse.
Thirdly, I think that as long as a system can be MitM-resistant, it's ok if 99% of the implementations fail to actually be MitM-resistant for users who don't take precautions. Suppose gmail were to transparently (with no user interaction beyond a mere "I want to sign and encrypt" checkbox) create keypairs for its users, with the private key stored on their server, without any sort of passphrase encrypting it. The public half gets uploaded to the keyserver network . Nobody ever certifies (signs) these "lame" keys, nobody trusts them; but they still get used because even untrustworthy encryption is better than plaintext. Rot13 is better than plaintext!
What would happen, if someone wanted to advantage of this weakness? Well, in order to read someone's mail, instead of passively listening, they would have to actually implement the MitM attack. The thing is, they would actually be able to, but even so, it's an active measure. It would cost them. They would actually have to compromise the keyserver and make it give out a middleman's keys. And while naive users would never discover that this is happening, somebody would, especially if it were done on a wide scale. When I meet someone through Biglumber and get their hardcopy fingerprint, and I use that compromised server and it gives me a middleman's key instead of one matching the fingerprint that I got from a human, I'm not just merely going to refrain from signing the key: I'm going to tell someone. Word will get out, and even naive users will eventually hear "someone is MitM attacking your email; this is not a paranoid crackpot theoretical risk that only geeks think about anymore; it's something that is happening."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.