PGP - when you care enough to send the very best!

[Lucky Green]

Curt Smith wrote:
> It is strange that crypto was a lot more popular back when 
> cryptography export was heavily controlled.  Many people 
> fought for their crypto rights, but cannot be bothered with 
> encrypted e-mail.  It is similar to securing the right to 
> vote and then declining to do so.

Acts that are potentially slightly illegal and certainly considered
naughty by some carry more appeal to many than acts that are
unquestionably as above board as they are boring. Once the export regs
changed and more advanced uses of cryptographic applications failed in
the market place, crypto lost some of its sex appeal to its initial
early-adopter rebel constituency.

> Lucky indicates that strong crypto has gone "under the hood" 
> and is now "mainstream" and "ubiquitous".  
> 
> This is not true.  There are countless e-mail and instant 
> messages sent as plaintext across networks, through wireless, 
> and over the Internet.

I believe our viewpoint coincide, rather than conflict. Crypto has gone
under the hood, it is used by anybody accessing an https website, which
nowadays is just about anybody with a web browser. Crypto is used by
many corporate employee's accessing the corporate VPN. It is the rare
Internet user, of which there are of course many more than there were
Cypherpunks got started, that does not employ strong crypto in some
fashion.

> Also "under-the-hood" is a risky place for crypto.  It may be 
> "patched" or "upgraded" right out of your system.  Or perhaps 
> "improved" to 40-bit for optimum performance.

Agreed. Which is why I pointed out that the encryption taking place
under-the-hood tends to be a reasonable defense against a passive or
less-resourced attacker while being frequently unsuitable against the
active, well-resourced attacker. Though I would contend that there are
more of the former than there are of the latter, I too continue to
utilize, as I pointed out, strong crypto that requires active user
interaction permitting the trust decision to occur. 

> Stand alone cryptography is best.  I enjoy sealing my 
> personal letters in an envelope.  I am uncomfortable 
> entrusting that process to a third-party, or to the mailman.  
> I am similarly uncomfortable entrusting e-mail encryption to 
> an embedded system and cached authentication systems.

I indeed consider passive encryption methods alone to be typically
insufficient for some of my personal security needs and am continuing to
utilize encryption that requires me as the user to make that trust
decision. But that does not mean that no security benefits are to be had
from opportunistic encryption of Internet traffic.

Example: the other day I sent an email to a friend that accidentally
failed to PGP encrypt. The email did not contain truly critical
information, but I certainly would have preferred for neither my
friend's nor my ISP to have ready access to the cleartext of that email.
Fortunately, we had encrypted SMTP connections end-to-end, thus
protecting the contents of the email from the ISP's, albeit perhaps not
from the NSA.

Lastly, allow me to address the issue raised that many IM protocols in
use today do not support crypto at this time. This is true, but I
noticed that a good majority of the P2P efforts introduced at CODECON
all included support for encryption as part of the protocol. The various
developers had read Applied Cryptography, understood a sufficient part
of it, and made provisions to design crypto into their protocols from
the beginning rather than as an adjunct to be thought about later. While
the details of the initial implementations were of varying quality, one
project began by using Blowfish in ECB mode until the developer realized
that he could see patterns in the ciphertext, but changing a protocol
during alpha testing to use a secure mode of a block cipher given that
the protocol already contains all the hooks for crypto, may be
considerably easier than gluing crypto onto some of the existing IM
system

Given the rapid changes in the P2P space, just because some IM and P2P
systems today fail to offer cryptographic protections should not be
taken as an indicator that these protocol's successors will not offer
transparent crypto as a default feature.

One such project that I have been somewhat following is the Anonymous
IRC project. While their design is far from perfect, it is one of many
steps into the right direction. http://www.invisiblenet.net/

There are dozens of similar projects underway, all employing crypto,
that may one day replace the prevalent IM clients as rapidly as Gnutella
and later Kazaa and Morpheus replaced Napster.

How does the increased use of strong crypto under-the-hood help
Cypherpunks? The answer reminds me of the response another Cypherpunk
gave to my posting statistics about the nature of the USENET traffic
seen by a major node. I expressed surprise at these rather revealing
statistics, musing that there had to be a lesson to be learned from the
fact that the bulk of the data is generated in newsgroups that one would
not initially consider mainstream. His response was illuminating: "Yes,
the lesson is: just look at all that cover traffic".

--Lucky