Re: not really pgp signing in van

On 10 Sep 2013, at 3:53, John R Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:

> > > Typical S/MIME keys are issued by CAs that verify them by
> > > sending you mail with a link.  While it is easy to imagine ways that
> > > could be subverted, in practice I've never seen it.
> > The most obvious way that it can be subverted is that the CA issues you a 
> > key pair and gives a copy of the private key to one or more others who would 
> > like either to be able to pretend to be you, or to intercept communication 
> > that you have encrypted.   I would argue that this is substantially less 
> > trustworthy than a PGP key!
> Like I said, it's easy to imagine ways it could be subverted.  If you believe 
> all CAs are crooks, you presumably don't use SSL or TLS either, right?
There's using it, and then there's trusting it to be good enough to protect 
what it's applied to protect. 

I'm reasonably certain attackers that can subvert TLS through undisclosed 
implementation vulnerabilities and/or compromised CA's aren't interested in my 
credit card number, and even if they are, the law limits my liability if I'm a 
victim of fraud -- it's priced in to the payment system. I'd estimate my risk 
is 1e-4 or so of a few hours of phone calls and paperwork, my reward is I can 
order stuff from Amazon, which is a pretty good tradeoff.

For situations where I'd actually want to encrypt email, the math is different.

> If we think that PGP is so great, how about writing native PGP support for 
> Thunderbird and Evolution, and contribute them to the open source codebase?
More important for making sure message privacy is there in the future: if we 
think that PGP is so great, let's work on native PGP support for MUAs/messaging 
apps for Android and iOS devices. We're not going to be in a situation much 
longer where the majority of the planet is using PCs for messaging, if, indeed, 
we still are.

Cheers,

Brian

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