#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
oct-git focuses exclusively on ergonomic use with OpenPGP card-based signing keys
It is designed to be easy to set up, standalone (no long running processes), and entirely hands-off to use (no repeated PIN entry required, by default). It comes with desktop notifications for touch confirmation (if required)
I just released version 0.3.1 of https://crates.io/crates/rsop, a stateless #OpenPGP ("sop") card tool based on #rPGP.
rsop natively supports OpenPGP card (hardware cryptography) devices
rsop is featured in the "OpenPGP interoperability test suite" at https://tests.sequoia-pgp.org/ (under "rpgpie", which is rsop's high level OpenPGP library).
This release adds the "oct admin signing-pin-validity" subcommand, to configure if a card requires User PIN presentation for each signature operation, or if User PIN presentation is valid for the full duration of a connection to the card.
Sequoia PGP's paid development is financed by @sovtechfund (❤️ ). In addition to writing code, they also support our standardization work, and community outreach. In this blog post, I discuss some of our community engagement (presentations and collaborations with sett, @securedrop, and @fedora) that have happened over the past few months.
Proton Mail automatically encrypts/decrypts messages between Proton Mail accounts via OpenPGP/PGP.
Proton Mail supports automatically encrypting/decrypting messages between Proton Mail accounts and external email accounts that support OpenPGP/PGP or GnuPG/GPG.
I moved to a Thinkpad w541 with coreboot so I needed to set up my email encryption on Thunderbird again.
It took me more time to reconfigure it again - as usual - so I decided to take notes this time and create a blog post about it. As this might be useful for somebody else … or me in the future :-)
Considering to change my #backup solution from #duplicity to #restic (Not sure yet, I like having #pgp keys for encryption, but it's not like a long password stored in #PasswordStore wouldn't cut it). Since restic supports Windows I might try moving a couple relatives onto it; Makes helping them easier if I know the software. For them however, a #GUI is likely a MUST, but what I've found so far is not too encouraging: restatic (dead), npbackup ("metrics" and other assorted niggles), resticguigx (Electron), backrest (browser-based, which makes my skin crawl for security tooling)... Does anyone know other options I missed? Or has some compelling arguments for those I mentioned?
Last year, the @sovtechfund fund invited us, the Sequoia PGP Project, to join their new Bug Resilience Program.
Today, I'm pleased to announce that we are publicly launching our bug bounty program with rewards of up to €10,000 for novel, security-relevant issues in Sequoia applications, libraries, or specifications. #pgp
We're trying to polish sq, Sequoia #PGP's CLI, in preparation for our 1.0 release this summer. One place we could use some help is with the CLI's UX: are the subcommands and options sane, and consistent? Also, we want to provide guidance so that user's don't need to memorize workflows, but are nudged along. See for instance: https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/sequoia-sq/-/issues/221 If you are interested in helping, please reach out!
This version comes with substantial updates to the openpgp-card-state dependency (which handles User PIN storage for OpenPGP card devices, see https://codeberg.org/openpgp-card/state).
It now supports selecting different PIN storage backends, including one to store the User PIN directly in the config file.
PIN verification error cases are now handled more defensively
Everyone should learn how to self-verify with their own cryptographic keys.
Why rely on a third party to verify, where you have to upload your own ID?
Verifying accounts with a central authority is laying trust in that authority, and taking risk, trusting them they can protect your identity and not abuse that position.
The proof is in the history of identity and activity of the key.
It is best to start learning now and build up an identity. #pgp#linux#foss
Did someone say encryption? Encryption helps protect the privacy of people you communicate with, and makes life difficult for bulk surveillance systems. Learn more with our Email Self Defense guide: https://u.fsf.org/1df#GPG#PGP#E2E#encryption
Relatedly, I also released rpgpie 🦀️🔐🥧 v0.0.1 (https://crates.io/crates/rpgpie), an experimental high level OpenPGP API based on rpgp (rsop is built on top of rpgpie).
This crate paves the way for convenient handling of #OpenPGP card User PINs, for users whose threat model allows persisting the PIN locally on the host computer.
If a User PIN is stored, applications can obtain it via this crate, and perform cryptographic operations without prompting the user for PIN entry.
Currently org.freedesktop.Secret is supported for storage.
Did someone say encryption? Encryption helps protect the privacy of people you communicate with, and makes life difficult for bulk surveillance systems. Learn more with our Email Self Defense guide: https://u.fsf.org/1df#GPG#PGP#E2E#encryption
#K9Mail integration with #OpenKeychain#pgp stuff is kinda broken after an update to the former. The app crashes everytime I write an email, because I have draft encryption enabled
Having decidedly too much fun playing with ancient #PGP artifacts.
Note the two version 2 public keys from 1992. They were created just over a year after Phil Zimmermann first released PGP (on 6 June 1991), deep in the crypto war era.
These keys predate the #OpenPGP name by around half a decade.
At over 31 years old, nation-state actors can definitely factor John Gilmore's RSA 1024 key today.
However, I believe the cost still exceeds a hobbyist budget even now.