Hey, most of your points about crypto going under the hood are well taken. I wanted to echo Peter Gutmann's comments about PGP, and add that I see PGP as a protocol, and most of the protocols I use daily (TCP, IP, UDP, DNS, HTTP, SMTP) have not changed in the last 10 years and I don't need to upgrade my software to deal with them. Looking at PGP as a protocol gives you a different perspective. (I also see .doc, .xls and .ppt as protocols, and bad ones) Adam On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 01:44:53AM -0700, Lucky Green wrote: | You may be asking yourself: where, oh where, has all the crypto gone? | Where are the BlackNet's? Where is the untraceable Ecash? Where is the | Cryptanarchy that we've been waiting for? For that matter...where is the | crypto? | | The staunchest Cypherpunk will by now have noticed that PGP/GPG usage | even amongst list members, once the bellwether indicator of Cypherpunks | crypto adoption success, is in decline. | | NAI has pulled PGP off the shelves. Conspiracy theories as to what may | have been driving this business decision abound. The fact of the matter | is that the usage of PGP by businesses, the sole significant source of | NAI PGP revenue, had long passed its peek. How many business do you know | that rolled out PGP in the last year? How many do you know that quietly | stopped using PGP after formally adopting its use with big fanfare a few | years ago? The facts are that there are more of the latter than of the | former. Did NAI receive The Briefing? I don't know. Nor does it really | matter. There wasn't enough money to be made with PGP. | | A well-respected Cypherpunk recently expressed hope that if NAI's PGP | were to disappear for good, perhaps compatibility problems amongst | versions of PGP would diminish. A plausible sounding theory, if one were | to assume that the compatibility problems amongst versions of PGP are | between versions produced by different vendors. Presumably, the theory | would go, with only one major supplier left standing, that being GPG | (yes, I am aware there are others), interop problems with other vendors' | implementations would pretty much disappear by definition. | | However, a closer inspection of the PGP interoperability problems, which | have been at one of the issues coming up in just about every single | discussion I've had with anybody about PGP over the last year, shows | that the interop problems are not between current versions by multiple | vendors, but between versions, in some cases by the same vendor, that | were released over time. The current version of NAI-PGP will | interoperate just fine with the current version of GPG. | | So why is PGP interoperability such a frequently raised issue? And why | does the importance of this topic seem to diminish the further away you | stray from Cypherpunks into the realms of the casual PGP users? The | answer to the second question is straight-forward. Even the most casual | user of software tends to be familiar with and acceptant of the need for | occasional software upgrades. It appears that those that are | experiencing interop problems are those that are insisting on using up | to 5-year old versions of PGP. It is true and should come as no surprise | that those 5-year old versions do indeed have interop problems with | newer versions of PGP. | | Some may say: I shouldn't need to keep on upgrading my software to be | able to send encrypted email. Does anybody seriously believe that those | that insist on using 5-year old versions of PGP have not upgraded their | operating systems in those 5 years? Indeed, upgraded more their | operating systems more than once? Or does anybody seriously believe that | those that insist on using old versions of PGP still run the exact same | version of their MUA and text editor as they did 5 years ago? Of course | they don't. If they did, their boxes would long have become unusable due | to the warez traffic taking place on the machines as a result of the | countless remote exploits discovered over these last 5 years. | | The reluctance to upgrade to a newer version of PGP does not appear to | be driven by a refusal or inability to upgrade software in general. This | reluctance to upgrade appears PGP specific. Why this is the case I do | not know. (And don't greatly care. I am running the latest version of | NAI PGP and I can make my copy talk to any version of PGP 2.x or | higher). | | Now perhaps there may be the rare case of a PGP user that is still | running PGP 2.x on the same DOS box, using the same mailer and the same | text editor as they did 5 years ago. I don't know of any such users, but | that doesn't mean no such users exists within the vastness of the | Internet. What I do know is that those that I am aware of that are | complaining about PGP version interoperability problems do not fall into | the rare category of users who have not upgraded any software at all for | the last 5 years. | | Since the existence of multiple PGP software providers has not been the | cause of the interop problems experienced by some, reducing the number | of PGP implementation providers should not be expected to have a | significant impact on the number or severity of PGP interop problems | experienced by the users. | | The same Cypherpunk expressed a hope that absent NAI's PGP, the German | government group currently funding GPG might be more inclined to fund UI | work for Windows. Perhaps they would. Assuming for a moment they will, | would this lead to a better PGP Windows UI than NAI's PGP offered? NAI's | PGP UI is pretty darn good. Looking at the sorry state of UI's currently | offered for GPG, even with government funding, I suspect that it will be | a long time indeed before we will see a GPG UI that will compare | positively to the current NAI PGP UI. Of course Cypherpunks know that it | is dangerous to base one's hope for the development of a Cypherpunk | tools on funding by a government. Be that the US government or the | German government. Strongly pro-crypto German governmental officials | have been know for their propensity to stumble out of the windows of | high story buildings. Warnings regarding the dangers that may lure in | parking lots come to mind. | | Where has the crypto gone? The crypto has gone under the hood, away from | the UI, to a place where the crypto will be of most use to the average | user. Yes, for crypto to be secure against the active, well resourced, | attacker, the crypto must at one point touch the user to permit the user | to make a trust decision. But to secure communications from passive | and/or less resourced attacker, crypto can be placed under the hood. | | I bet a good percentage of the readers of this list that still require | to be engaged in a form of employment nowadays access their company | network via some form of VPN. Up by orders of magnitude from a few years | ago. More importantly, a good percentage of users that have never heard | of this mailing list and will never hear of this mailing list are using | strong crypto to access their company's information. The percentage of | users utilizing strong crypto is increasing daily. | | Another major segment of Internet infrastructure in which strong crypto | is rapidly becoming the default rather than the exception, at least | amongst those running their own servers, is SMTP. The percentage of SMTP | connections to my mail server that use TLS to encrypt SMTP has grown | from around 30% a few months ago to well over 60% today. This increase | in the use of STARTTLS on SMTP appears to parallel a loss of sendmail | MTA market share in favor of postfix. It is just too darn easy to turn | on support for STARTTLS during a migration to postfix, hence most sites | performing such a migration appear to do so. | | (I am aware that sendmail and qmail support STARTTLS as well, but the | increases in the use of STARTTLS that I am seeing at my SMTP server | coincides with sites switching MTA's to postfix. I see a handful of | qmail sites using TLS, representing a fraction of the postfix sites, and | no sendmail site that I have noticed. Having once considered activating | STARTTLS in sendmail myself, I vividly recall myself reading the | instructions, bursting out laughing, followed by my researching | competitive MTA's. Within a week I had switched to postfix. Wished I had | done so years ago. All these hours that I wasted over those years... | YMMV). | | An interesting side-effect of the increased adoption of MTA's and MUA's | that support STARTTLS is that I now have a link that is secure against | passive eavesdroppers to the majority of those with whom I regularly | correspond in encrypted email. Is protection against only passive | eavesdroppers good enough for me? No. Are we a heck of a lot further | along than we were 5 years ago? I would argue that we are. | | Where has all the crypto gone? It has gone mainstream. Some of you may | remember the discussions from years ago how we should try to find a way | to make crypto cool and attractive for the average person. | | This afternoon, I installed the "Britney Spears SmartFlash Kit" on my | Windows XP test box. For $29.95 plus shipping and handling, you too can | own a Britney SmartFlash Kit, which includes a USB smartcard reader, a | Gemplus smartcard (both the reader and card are graced with pictures of | Britney), and a CD with Gemplus GemSafe smartcard crypto driver software | (the click-wrap EULA reminds you that export to Cuba, Libya, and other | naughty countries or those developing biological weapons is strictly | prohibited. Sorry pop music fans located in Cuba or at the CDC). | | Once you installed the gear and inserted your one of 5 possible Britney | Spears' smartcards (collect all 5), you will automatically be taken to a | client-authenticated, 128-bit RC4 encrypted website that provides you | with exclusive access to such exciting content as 45 second QuickTime | clips of Britney purchasing chocolates and of course Fe's (Britney's | most trusted advisor) indispensable advice column. A representative | sample question follows. | | "Dear Fe: | I'm 14 but my parents treat me like I am 10! They won't let me go out at | night, and won't even let me bring a boy to the Homecoming dance. I'm in | high school and want to do all the things that go along with that, but | they won't let me! -- Trying to Grow Up, Americus, GA". | | I will spare you Fe's answer (get your own smartcard :), but I won't | spare you this: if you wonder where crypto has gone, you need to look no | further than Americus, GA. If the question posed to Fe leaves any doubt | about the nouveau crypto users' demographics, a drop-down list inquiring | about the user's age to participate in a contest (smartcard required) | should help clarify matters. The age selections offered are: [2-6], | [7-12], [13-15], [16-18], [over 18]. Do not worry should your parents | disapprove of your choice of music. If you hear your parents walk up to | your door, just yank the card out of the reader and your browser will | close instantly. | | Crypto has gone as mainstream as can be. While crypto for crypt's sake | may not have become cool to everybody, crypto has become a Must Have for | your average 14 year-old high school freshman girl. Crypto has become | ubiquitous. | | http://www.britneyspears.com/smartflashcard/index.php | | As to when we'll see BlackNet and untraceable Ecash, who knows. Here's | hoping to 2005. | | [In the time it took me to write this post, another of the regular | entries in my maillog has turned on STARTTLS, protecting the SMTP | connection with EDH and 3DES]. | | --Lucky | -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume