hours later i give up, i cannot figure out how to extract the stubs from a yubikey onto a new machine so i can pgp sign things. every command on the internet does not work.
@Moon@animeirl Which is such an OpenPGP moment…
Like GnuPG is so good at screwing itself that I would have lost the keys so many times if it weren't for me having a copy of the pubkeys on my website + using a smartcard.
(In fact if my smartcard dies so does my keys because it fucked it's files…)
@lanodan@Moon@animeirl Agreed, fuck GPG. Surprised that I have yet to actually upload my public key to the site, must be because it's such a pain to use subkeys properly and I don't even get opportunities to use encrypted e-mail anyway.
@parappanon@Moon@animeirl Yeah subkeys should basically be set once and never touched ever again because you'll just end up with things encrypted for the wrong subkey, specially given the last few years of keyservers being in limbo.
@lanodan@Moon@animeirl Yeah, that's true. I thankfully don't use any keyservers myself but I have indeed encrypted stuff that I should have done with a subkey with my main key instead.
I'm considering to just switch from PGP to something like AGE instead for many reasons, and what you've said about the keyservers being in limbo now is about to fully convince me to move on from PGP.
@lanodan@Moon@animeirl Seems about right. What alternatives to PGP would you recommend, then? I've heard of AGE, but I don't think it's that popular plus it doesn't have a website of it's own, just a GitHub repo which makes me a bit afraid since I dislike GitHub and how it's taken over the open source space despite not even being open source itself.
To send messages with encryption I would probably use XMPP+OMEMO, because integration of things other than S/MIME with x509 (costy) is non-existent in email clients and Matrix for me is just anything but reliable (ie. messages dropped silently and many failures to sync).
@lanodan@parappanon@Moon@animeirl tbh the problem with OpenPGP isn't that it tries to do too many things (unified cryptographic identity is good actually), it's that it didn't/couldn't evolve with how people use their computers and is stuck in the 90's. I have written in length about this somewhere, but can't find it now :(
@ignaloidas@Moon@animeirl@parappanon GnuPG has a lot of problems, I'm not even sure if any of it actually could be considered to be working well, not as in "Works For Me" which is a mostly useless baseline that it still wonderfully fails at but as in correctness like explained in https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/
That said cryptographic identities makes me want to run away because they typically have unusable or non-existent key rotation in place, specially in the clients that people actually use ~daily. Which is why for me cryptography is best used to enhance good protocols that can be relied upon for things like identity management (and that's not email, there's no identity with email, only addresses to throw things at).
@lanodan@Moon@animeirl@parappanon
OpenPGP had this one great property that it was essentially universal, instead of how it works these days - it wasn't "Here's my identity I will sign things with, here's my identity for encrypting content, here's my identity for secure communication" - instead it was "Here's my identity" and that's it. But because it got stuck in the 90's, that it no longer applies.
"Cryptographic identity" is any kind of identity that has cryptographic key(s) associated with it. In the case of most cryptosystems, that identity is the key (fediverse is kiiinda in this group). In OpenPGP, it's a bit more - it's a (essentially static) collection of keys, with some metadata. In my opinion, so far the best implementation of cryptographic identity is Keybase's - it's a chain of key management operations - even if centrally stored. I have a bunch of ideas on how to build an open cryptographic identity that doesn't suck, but I just can't bring myself to start doing it (ADHD things 😢).
@ignaloidas@Moon@animeirl@parappanon Fediverse outside of Friendica and maybe derived doesn't have cryptographic identities.
For example, on fedi I am https://queer.hacktivis.me/users/lanodan that's the identity and the only keys are server-owned and not authoritative, they're just an internet ressource like an avatar (and only used for signed-fetches).
Which leaves a lot of problems and brittle/complex things out:
Key rotation doesn't involves cryptography
Account migration doesn't involves cryptography, only double-links between old and new accounts
Having the key being leaked or lost doesn't means identity loss
Pretty much no need for key revocation, only the current linked key is seen as valid
Basically no need for stuff like TOFU, x509, Web-of-Trust, separated PKI, …
@r000t don't bother. I'll just generate new keys at some point, it's just a pain because I'm using the key right now as an SSH key. also macos is a joke, I have experienced so many problems that indicate a deep failure to understand developer workflow
@Moon Apple marketing material expressing "productivity" always shows goofy high-school tier projects/notes or video/photo editing. Maybe SketchUp if they're feeling super boring. Apple products are not tools, they are toys. They are some of the most secure toys you can buy, but at the end of the day they are toys.
My missing Yubikey served all of these roles (FIDO, SSH, OpenPGP) at the same time, the OpenPGP was simply used by the SSH agent.
The gpg --card-edit every time the device is inserted is a real thing tho, btw. At least on Windows. Linux I believe needs udev rules and I got no idea what BSD/MacOS wants.
@Moon
Yeah that's why they invented Docker. On every OS that's not Linux, Docker runs inside a Linux VM. This makes everything Just Work, but it also makes a great place to hide malware.
> I've found three separate package managers for OS X: Fink, MacPorts & Homebrew.
most people use homebrew now, but it's still an addon that you can't assume anybody has and the official installation method on os x is still install every dependency along with the app in its directory.
@MischievousuTomatosu@orekix@r000t also you can get numerous good IDEs on MacOS now so you don't have to use TextMate. I use Visual Studio Code, which works great except the ssh integration doesn't work right with my yubikey ssh agent because, again, the OS is a joke and can't handle it right.
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