On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 10:13:59AM +0300, Teemu Likonen via Gnupg-users wrote: > Philipp Klaus Krause [2019-10-08T15:34:28+02] wrote: > > > It would be really nice, if Thunderbird could add an option to use the > > gpg key storage instead of its own, [...] > > I agree with that even though I have never really used Thunderbird. > > But using a custom key storage and implementation (or do they use > Sequoia PGP library?) is an interesting choice in the world of Unix-like > systems. It's pretty much the normal way elsewhere, though. > > PGP and GnuPG and the related communities have tried really hard to > build a system based on person's long-term identity keys. All that web > of trust thing relies on keys that are used relatively long time. But as > we know this doesn't work for most people. People are really bad at > maintaining long-term identity keys. I think this is the most important > reason why other software just auto-generate "device keys" or > "application keys" and exchange them. They just forget about the > identity part and keys' usage in the long term. Change your phone or > just reinstall the application and you'll have new keys. Keys come and > go and it's perfectly normal.
That would be one of the reasons why I tend to avoid "other software". My primary use-case is identity, not secrecy. I am not alone: quite a few employers are at last discovering crypto signatures in their efforts to combat spear-phishing, and spending quite a bit of money and effort to deploy them. (I accept that most of them are using S/MIME rather than OpenPGP, but that's a detail; identity is important.) > Thunderbird seems to be going to that direction and it is probably a > good thing. From the mindset of crypto nerds (like us) or Unixy tool box > this can be a barrier, obviously. Humph, I was already grumpy about Mozilla products' insistence on having their own insular X.509 store, meaning that I have to install certificates twice (once for Firefox, again for *everything else*.) Maybe there will be an add-on, so that those who care can choose to integrate Thunderbird into their systems rather than having it still standing off to one side haughtily awaiting special treatment. -- Mark H. Wood Lead Technology Analyst University Library Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis 755 W. Michigan Street Indianapolis, IN 46202 317-274-0749 www.ulib.iupui.edu
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