Timothy C. May says:
Some folks who use PGP on such machines at least take steps to better secure things....Perry Metzger, for example, once described the multi-stage process he went through each day to reload his key material in a way he felt was quasi-safe.
Quasi. I'm pretty sure that anyone who cared enough could have gotten hold of my ancient pmetzger@shearson.com key, which I keep around only for nostalgia reasons at this point -- I believe its one of the oldest keys still on the rings. On the few occassions when I've truly cared, I've generated new keys to use and only used them for a brief period -- PGP provides very poor forward secrecy. (By the way, I've become convinced with time that the forward secrecy characteristics of systems like this are far more important than people believe, especially since keys are likely to be so poorly managed by most non-paranoid users. Diffie-Hellman provides perfect forward secrecy.) Tim's point is, however, correct -- using PGP on Joe Random University's central computing facility is not the way to go if you are really concerned about security. You have to run it only on hardware you personally control, and which others do not have much if any physical or network access to. Also importantly, the user interfaces for PGP simply suck as it stands, making people like Tim uninterested in going through the rigamarole needed to use it on a day to day basis. The real revolution isn't going to come until people are able to use PGP and the rest both reasonably securely without it being especially noticable that they are doing so -- and that is a while off. Perry