The Pgp Problem (2019)
Posted6d agoActive40m ago
latacora.comTech Discussionstory
informativenegative
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PgpCryptographyData_security
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Pgp
Cryptography
Data_security
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Dec 28, 2025 at 3:39 AM EST
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453461
GnuPG has decided a couple things are out of scope, fixed a couple others. Not all is in distro packages yet.
age didn't have the clearest way to report things - discord is apparently the point of contact. Which will probably improve soon.
minisign was affected by most everything GnuPG was, but had a faster turnaround to patching.
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/#th...
I was also frustrated with this criticism in the past, but there are definitely some concrete alternatives provided for many use cases there. (But not just with one tool.)
If someone scotch tapes age+minisig and convince git/GitHub/gitlab/codeberge to support it, I’ll be so game it’ll hurt. My biggest usage of pgp is asking people doing bug reports to send me logs and giving them my pgp keys if they are worried and don’t want to publicly post their log file. 99.9% of people don’t care, but I understand the 0.1% who do. The other use is to sign my commits and to encrypt my backups.
Ps: the fact that this post is recommending Tarsnap and magicwormhole shows how badly it has aged in 6 years IMO.
What's wrong with magic wormhole?
>They urgently need to make a "modern version" of GPG.
Absolutely not.
You may also search for his posts in this HN thread, his nickname is “some_furry”.
[1]: https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specificat...
https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement
So what to do? PGP by the way never claimed to prevent traffic analysis, mixmaster was the layer that somehow got dropped, unlike Tor.
"In June 2013, Cryptocat was used by journalist Glenn Greenwald while in Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the first time, after other encryption software failed to work."
So it was used when Snowden was already on the run, other software failed and the communication did not have to be confidential for the long term.
It would also be an indictment of messaging services as opposed to gpg. gpg has the advantage that there is no money in it, so there are unlikely to be industry or deep state shills.
"Use Signal. Or Wire, or WhatsApp, or some other Signal-protocol-based secure messenger."
Neither of them supports hardware keys though, as much as I could see. OTOH ssh and GnuPG do support hardware keys, like smart cards or Yubikey-like devices. I suppose by the same token (not a pun, sadly) they don't support various software keychains provided by OSes, since they don't support any external PKCS11 providers (the way ssh does).
This may reduce the attack needed to steal a private key to a simple unprivileged infiltration, e.g. via code run during installation of a compromised npm package, or similar.
https://github.com/str4d/age-plugin-yubikey
So let's get the party started: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/183391
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...
Of course, people here who have recommended Signal are silent about these issues and rather continue to bash gpg.
I've reviewed Signal extensively on my blog. https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...
I analyze cryptosystems based on what an attacker can do, given sufficient capabilities.
"The user adds the wrong person to a group chat" is not a cryptographic weakness, nor a particularly interesting one. Why would I have anything to say about it?
We aren't "silent" about your pet peeves. We just have lives and more interesting things to talk about.
> EDIT: tptacek enters the chat, my messages are downvoted. This is how he convinces people to use Signal.
This kind of comment gets people banned from Hacker News. Please stop that.
What? You mean a vulnerability that was mitigated in February of last year? In what sense am I obligated to comment on such a thing? You use the verb "omit" as if such an obligation exists. This is delusional rhetoric.
First you complain about tptacek choosing to comment about a tangent, and then you get upset that I didn't entertain your tangent. Pick a lane.
> just like tptacek tried to deflect in the other subthread after his Cryptocat objection was refuted.
I didn't see a refutation.
You just did.
> if you use Simple Sabotage Field Manual tactics.
No idea what you're even talking about there.
* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg
Signify/Minisign is Ed25519. Boring, simple, fit-for-purpose.
You can write an implementation of Minisign in most languages with little effort. I did in PHP years ago. https://github.com/soatok/minisign-php
Complexity is the enemy of security.
* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp