On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Is it just me, or is PGP broken? I don't mean any particular version
> of PGP -- I mean the fact that there are multiple versions of PGP
> which generate incompatible cryptography.
I'd say that's an accurate assesment.
> Presuming that I'm right, is anyone attempting to fix PGP?
Not that I've heard of.
> Not to mention anything about PGP keyservers, or the utter and
> complete absence of anybody doing point-source PGP signing.
Yeah, the whole system looks none too scaleable.
What we really need is a system which just stops passive attacks. The best
idea I've come up with so far is for all outgoing messages to have a
public key attached, and if you have the public key of an email address
you're sending to you use it. If you receive a different public key than
one you saw before, you overwrite the old one.
This doesn't stop active attacks at all, but would be very easy to use.
The worst that could really happen is that I lose my key info, construct
new stuff, and next time Russ sends me mail I respond 'sorry, but I lost
my old private key, please send that last message again'. The only real
gotcha is that the first message is unencrypted, and that's not a big
deal, especially when you know about it and always send a 'checking to
make sure I got your address right' message to start things off.
-Bram Cohen
