Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999) (philzimmermann.com)
73 points by GaryBluto 2 days ago
BeetleB 3 hours ago
> In 2013, an article on "Zimmermann's Law" quoted Phil Zimmermann as saying "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier"
adastra22 3 hours ago
A well-intentioned ideal from a bygone era.
Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago
Good ideas demand to be free. =3
tptacek 2 hours ago
There's a good idea in PGP, and a very bad one. The good idea --- and PGP genuinely deserves credit here --- is end-user, consumer-facing strong cryptography tools. That's now universally accepted and has been for decades. The bad idea is a tool with PGP's design, of "cryptographic jack-of-all-trades". PGP's design has aged like milk, and PGP itself is a security liability in almost every system that hosts it.
47282847 42 minutes ago
voooduuuuu 2 hours ago
m348e912 2 hours ago
dylan604 2 hours ago
The biggest issue of using PGP was using PGP. You were pretty nerdy to be on the internet back then, but even then using PGP was beyond what the majority of people wanted to do. Exchanging keys was problematic. Writing text in one app, encrypting in another app, copying encrypted back to an email was just tiresome.
I'm still glad that it existed as its mere existence seems to have pushed things in the right direction as far as protecting everyone's ability to use encryption if they chose. It just never became the panacea it was envisioned to be.
upofadown an hour ago
One big usability issue these days is that PGP identities come in the form of a file. Lots of people don't have the concept of that anymore.
Dunno that things have gotten much better over the years. End to end encryption is still fairly unusable to most. I think that rather than spending so much time on the cryptography we should instead work on a E2EE usability standard. Having everyone doing their own thing with respect to usability is not working out.
__MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago
There were (are? it's been a while) many PGP users on the various darkweb markets. It was great fun teaching people to use it and actually having a community to use it with.
It was pretty awkward to later emerge as the PGP expert at work. I was at that time a bit shy about explaining how I got so comfortable with it.
serbuvlad an hour ago
The fundamental idea of technology such as PGP is that the percentage of stuff worth finding for the authorities needs to be really low. Ie. an incredible amount of "legitimate" innocent traffic needs to be flowing through the technology.
Otherwise, anyone who is using it at all will get court ordered and then, with our current system, you just lose.
Tor solves this by making traffic entirely homogenous such that any "it could be anyone" and by making nodes extraordinarily easy to host (such that any nerd can just leave one running 24/7). Even so there are way too few nodes.
But PGP-over-email is way too metadata leaky, and if you're doing anything that actually has a threat model, you need PGP-over-email to be itself common.
oger an hour ago
To be honest: I keep hearing that PGP was / is difficult to use. That couldn‘t be further from the truth - but somehow it has become an urban myth. From the very first versions that I used on my first Mac up to GPG Mail or Proton Mail I never encountered any significant difficulties and could successfully exchange messages with my peers - both in business and private contexts.
jcranmer an hour ago
I once had a chat with a security professor who had decided to try to get his group to use encrypted email for all of their communications. And they just couldn't get mailing lists working right with encrypted email.