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creatonez | on: Removing PGP from PyPI (2023)
Its benefits are very much completely negated in real-world use. See https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/05/21/PGP-signatures-on-PyPI... - the data suggests that nobody is verifying these PGP signatures at all.
dig1 | parent | next
I stopped reading after this: "PGP is an insecure [1] and outdated [2] ecosystem that hasn't reflected cryptographic best practices in decades [3]."

The first link [1] suggests avoiding encrypted email due to potential plaintext CC issues and instead recommends Signal or (check this) WhatsApp. However, with encrypted email, I have (or can have) full control over the keys and infrastructure, a level of security that Signal or WhatsApp can't match.

The second link [2] is Moxie's rant, which I don't entirely agree with. Yes, GPG has a learning curve. But instead of teaching people how to use it, we're handed dumbed-down products like Signal (I've been using it since its early days as a simple sms encryption app, and I can tell you, it's gone downhill), which has a brilliant solution: it forces you to remember (better to say to write down) a huge random hex monstrosity just to decrypt a database backup later. And no, you can't change it.

Despite the ongoing criticisms of GPG, no suitable alternative has been put forward and the likes of Signal, Tarsnap, and others [1] simply don't cut it. Many other projects running for years (with relatively good security track records, like kernel, debian, or cpan) have no problem with GPG. This is 5c.

[1] https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html

[2] https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html

[3] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

wkat4242 | root | parent | next
Yeah I still use pgp a lot. Especially because of hardware backed tokens (on yubikey and openpgp cards) which I use a lot for file encryption. The good thing is that there's toolchains for all desktop OSes and mobile (Android, with openkeychain).

I'm sure there's better options but they're not as ubiquitous. I use it for file encryption, password manager (pass) and SSH login and everything works on all my stuff, with hardware tokens. Even on my tablet where Samsung cheaped out by not including NFC I can use the USB port.

Replacements like fido2 and age fall short by not supporting all the usecases (file encryption for fido2, hardware tokens for age) or not having a complete toolchain on all platforms.

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| root | parent | next
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Diti | parent
I believe the article you linked to doesn’t seem to say anything about “nobody verifying PGP signatures”. We would need PyPI to publish their Datadog & Google Analytics data, but I’d say the set of users who actually verify OpenPGP signatures intersects with the set of users faking/scrambling telemetry.
woodruffw | root | parent
I wrote the blog post in question. The claim that "nobody is verifying PGP signatures (from PyPI)" comes from the fact that around 1/3rd had no discoverable public keys on what remains of the keyserver network.

Of the 2/3rd that did have discoverable keys, ~50% had no valid binding signature at the time of my audit, meaning that obtaining a living public key has worse-than-coin-toss odds for recent (>2020) PGP signatures on PyPI.

Combined, these datapoints (and a lack of public noise about signatures failing to verify) strongly suggest that nobody was attempting to verify PGP signatures from PyPI at any meaningful scale. This was more or less confirmed by the near-zero amount of feedback PyPI got once it disabled PGP uploads.

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