Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Look, if defending "message history consistency" is a reason you're choosing some other secure messenger rather than Signal, then I don't think this argument is very productive; use some other secure messenger then. But if "message history consistency" is a reason you're endorsing encrypted email over Signal, you're committing malpractice.

The point is that whatever secure messenger you use, it must plausibly be secure. Email cannot plausibly be made secure. Whatever other benefits you might get from using it --- federation, open source, UX improvements, universality --- come at the cost of grave security flaws.

Most people who use encrypted email are doing so in part because it does not matter if any of their messages are decrypted. They simply aren't interesting or valuable. But in endorsing a secure messenger of any sort, you're influencing the decisions of people whose messages are extremely sensitive, even life-or-death sensitive. For those people, federation or cross-platform support can't trump security, and as practitioners we are obligated to be clear about that.

I’m definitely not “commiting malpractice” on account of not being a security practicioner. I’m talking from a perspective of a user.

It’s important to me — as a user — that a communication tool doesn’t lose my data, and Signal already did. Actual practicioners keep recommending Signal and sure, I believe that in a weird scenario where my encryption keys are somehow compromised without also compromising my local message history, Signal’s double-ratchet will do wonders — but it doesn’t actually work as a serious communication tool.

It’s also kinda curious that while the “email cannot be made secure” mantra is constantly repeated online, basically every organization that needs secure communication uses email. Openwall are certainly practicioners, and they use PGP-over-email: are they commiting malpractice?

Very few organizations need security from state level or similar threats and the infrastructure provider. Most organizations that want secure email don't use any kind of e2ee at all, they just trust Google or Microsoft or whomever.

The few jobs that actually care about this stuff, like journalists, do use signal.

Openwall doesn't get security via pgp, it gets a spam filter.

> but it doesn’t actually work as a serious communication tool.

Say more. Plenty of people use Signal as a serious communication tool.

> Openwall are certainly practicioners, and they use PGP-over-email: are they commiting malpractice?

They, and other communities that use GPG-encrypted emails are LARPing, and it’s only fine because their emails don’t actually matter enough for anybody to care about compromising them.

It’s not malpractice to LARP: plenty of people love getting out their physical or digital toys and playing pretend. But if you’re telling other people that your foam shield can protect them from real threats, you are lying.

> Say more. Plenty of people use Signal as a serious communication tool.

I did say more already. Maybe you believe in serious communication tools that can’t synchronize searchable history between devices, but I don’t.

> They, and other communities that use GPG-encrypted emails are LARPing, and it’s only fine because their emails don’t actually matter enough for anybody to care about compromising them.

Are we talking about the same Openwall? Are you aware what Openwall’s oss-security mailing list is? Please, do elaborate how nobody cares about getting access to an unlimited stream of zerodays for basically every Unix-like system.

At this point you're just repeating the argument you made upthread without responding to any of its rebuttals. That's fine; I too am comfortable with the arguments on this thread as they stand. Let's save each other some time and call it here.

I’m very familiar with oss-security, a public mailing list that doesn’t really have anything to do with GPG-encrypted emails. Encrypting emails to a public mailing list, with GPG or otherwise, wouldn’t really make sense.

Okay, sorry, not oss-security mailing list, oss-security _distros_ mailing list.

https://oss-security.openwall.org/wiki/mailing-lists/distros

> Only use these lists to report security issues that are not yet public

> To report a non-public medium or high severity 2) security issue to one of these lists, send e-mail to distros [at] vs [dot] openwall [dot] org or linux [dash] distros [at] vs [dot] openwall [dot] org (choose one of these lists depending on who you want to inform), preferably PGP-encrypted to the key below.

Yes, that would be an example of LARPing security. The obviously indicator is that encrypting your message is entirely optional, per their own instructions. The less obvious bit is that even if you encrypt your message, anyone without GPG configured who replies has stripped any attempt at encryption from the contents.

Yes.

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