Finally, Debian has ditched OpenPGP for repository signing in favor of Ed25519 with SHA512. This is a step ahead for privacy and security. You can see the article here.

As @anon123@lemmy.ml pointed out, the following issues about PGP are not specifically related to Debian article I linked.

  • No authenticated encryption.
  • Receiving a signed message means nothing about who sent it to you
  • Usability issues with GnuPG
  • Discoverability of public keys issue.
  • Bad integration with emails.
  • No forward secrecy.

There’s usuful documentation about it:

    • @Lunacy@lemmy.mlOP
      6•3 years ago

      There is no doubt. Along with Whonix many cryptography experts pointed out the weaknesses of PGP, for example:

      About email encryption:

      Email is insecure. Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else (we don’t know a PGP email user who hasn’t seen this happen). PGP email is forward-insecure. Email metadata, including the subject (which is literally message content), are always plaintext. If you needed another reason, read the Efail paper. The GnuPG community, which mishandled the Efail disclosure, talks this research down a lot, but it was accepted at Usenix Security (one of the top academic software security venues) and at Black Hat USA (the top industry software security venue), was one of the best cryptographic attacks of the last 5 years, and is a pretty devastating indictment of the PGP ecosystem. As you’ll see from the paper, S/MIME isn’t better. This isn’t going to get fixed. To make actually-secure email, you’d have to tunnel another protocol over email (you’d still be conceding traffic analysis attacks). At that point, why bother pretending? Encrypting email is asking for a calamity. Recommending email encryption to at-risk users is malpractice. Anyone who tells you it’s secure to communicate over PGP-encrypted email is putting their weird preferences ahead of your safety.

      Source.

      • @anon123@lemmy.ml
        7•3 years ago

        including the subject (which is literally message content)

        All email clients with OpenPGP support that I am aware of encrypt the subject and have been doing so for years.

        PGP email is forward-insecure

        Forward secrecy is not a panacea.

        The GnuPG community, which mishandled the Efail disclosure

        This is misinformation. Rather it was only the GPG and the Kmail developers that handled the situation appropriately. (It was also not a vulnerability in GPG)

        Recommending email encryption to at-risk users is malpractice

        Yet he instead suggests signal which also leaks metadata and puts users in a much worse risk.

        • @Lunacy@lemmy.mlOP
          1•3 years ago

          Hi, thank for your response. I understand your point; the issues I linked about PGP are not specifically related tod Debian article, I should have been more clear about it. Nonetheless, the weaknesses about PGP still remain.

          Forward secrecy is not a panacea.

          The weakness about PGP still remains. Forward secrecy it’s not a panacea, but it’s a useful feature. The approach Is way better than PGP.

          All email clients with OpenPGP support that I am aware of encrypt the subject and have been doing so for years.

          Even with OpenPGP support the subject of emails are not encrypted.

          Yet he instead suggests signal which also leaks metadata and puts users in a much worse risk.

          Can you elaborate please, maybe with source? As far as I understand signal minimize metadata

          • @anon123@lemmy.ml
            2•3 years ago

            Forward secrecy it’s not a panacea, but it’s a useful feature

            With a lot of drawbacks (using it with multiple devices sucks) for too little gain and you can’t use it in non-interactive protocols such as OpenPGP. Or rather, you can if you do it manually, but it requires interaction.

            Even with OpenPGP support the subject of emails are not encrypted.

            Because Protonmail sucks. It works fine in Thunderbird.

            Can you elaborate please, maybe with source? As far as I understand signal minimize metadata

            I admit that it has been a while since I checked the signal protocol so I might be wrong. The page that you linked seems fine.

            • @Lunacy@lemmy.mlOP
              1•3 years ago

              Because Protonmail sucks. It works fine in Thunderbird.

              Even if protonMail sucks, email will always leaks meatada.

              When using end-to-end encryption (E2EE) technology like OpenPGP, email will still have some metadata that is not encrypted in the header of the email, including; To, From, Cc, Date, Subject.

              Email metadata is crucial to the most basic functionality of email (where it came from, and where it has to go). E2EE was not built into the email protocols originally and is also optional, therefore, only the message content is protected.

              When emails travel between email providers an encrypted connection is negotiated using Opportunistic TLS. This protects the metadata from outside observers, but as it is not E2EE, server administrators can snoop on the metadata of an email.

              Source

              With a lot of drawbacks (using it with multiple devices sucks) for too little gain and you can’t use it in non-interactive protocols such as OpenPGP. Or rather, you can if you do it manually, but it requires interaction.

              Acutally, forward secrecy it’s very useful.

              OpenPGP also does not support Forward secrecy, which means if either your or the recipient’s private key is ever stolen, all previous messages encrypted with it will be exposed. How do I protect my private keys?

              Source

          • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlM
            2•3 years ago

            Forward secrecy is a panacea for emails. Emails do not work like instant messenger protocols.

            ProtonMail is not an ideal example of encrypted email. If you could explain it with an email that allows custom PGP encryption, it would be a valid example.

            Signal is most likely a government op, considering it has its servers exclusively in USA, which are governed by US CLOUD Act, and Elon Musk nd Snowden promoted Signal. Similar actions happened with Wire Messenger, which was in Switzerland before, but later moved to USA. Wire was also promoted by Snowden and others in the same fashion.

            • @Lunacy@lemmy.mlOP
              1•3 years ago

              Forward secrecy is a panacea for emails. Emails do not work like instant messenger protocols.

              I understand your point. However, that’s why email are not recommended as secure way to send/receive messages. Email, even when encrypted leaks metadata and lacks security features like forward secrecy. Email was not created with security in mind.

              ProtonMail is not an ideal example of encrypted email. If you could explain it with an email that allows custom PGP encryption, it would be a valid example.

              As far as I know, ProtonMail is considered the gold standard. Even then, encrypt subject in email it’s not possible even with custom PGP encryption. However, maybe I’m wrong here. Glad to be corrected.

              Signal is most likely a government op, considering it has its servers exclusively in USA, which are governed by US CLOUD Act, and Elon Musk nd Snowden promoted Signal. Similar actions happened with Wire Messenger, which was in Switzerland before, but later moved to USA. Wire was also promoted by Snowden and others in the same fashion

              I’m sorry but this statement doesn’t prove anything. Just because it’s plausible and common sense ( I don’t think this is the case to be honest) it doesn’t mean its also the truth. Signal has a good end to end encryption protocol with minimization of metadata. There are no evidence of backdoors.

              • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlM
                1•3 years ago

                email was not created with security in mind

                This is true, and I do say it often. But emails have a culture around them, see mailing list culture. XMPP is email 2.0 to me, and to people who understand these protocols.

                ProtonMail is not a gold standard of anything except marketing. I am a R!seUp Collective member.

                Signal does not necessarily have backdoors, but metadata issues. And metadata going through US servers is an issue if you start talking to strangers. Moxie says it is not an app made for anonymity, and this was said during the blocking of USA software in Iran.

                • @Lunacy@lemmy.mlOP
                  1•3 years ago

                  ProtonMail is not a gold standard of anything except marketing. I am a R!seUp Collective member.

                  I searched for both ProtonMail and RiseUp features, I not found relevant differences. However, I never used RiseUp, maybe I’ll try.

                  Signal does not necessarily have backdoors, but metadata issues. And metadata going through US servers is an issue if you start talking to strangers. Moxie says it is not an app made for anonymity, and this was said during the blocking of USA software in Iran.

                  Nonetheless, Signal minimize the metadata. You can see here they received a subpoena from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California. However, they only provided two type of data:

                  • last connection date
                  • account created

                  The entropy of data collected is very minimal.

                  it’s not made for anonymity, but it’s still a private application.

                  In my opinion (just my opinion, so you can skip this part) signal it’s safe to use for 99% of users.