💾 Archived View for tdem.in › post › pgp-alternatives.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:11:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2021-07-26 02:00
The market of the software to replace GnuPG and the OpenPGP infrastructure appears to be quite a topic on itself, the precondition to replace GnuPG being its complexity (which has gone to levels so high the official library to interface with GnuPG, gpgme, is literally a command-line wrapper[^1] to GnuPG), it being the de-facto implementation of OpenPGP, and its other problems, as commonly illustrated by this post by Latacora.
[^1]: See `src/engine-gpg.c` in GPGME source tree.
Theoretically, the program (or programs, thinking the Unix way) to replace GnuPG as a cryptography software suite should do these two things at the very minimum (GnuPG is capable of a lot more, including keyservers, Web of Trust, etc, but for simplicity let's talk about the bare minimum):
One of the most well-known tools to do encryption is age, which, as of July 2021, isn't out of release candidates just yet. age doesn't even raise many concerns on its own, but it lacks even the simplest public/private key management capabilities (like key aliases or "use this private key as the default").
It goes along well with the Unix way (one program per job to do it well), but can you seriously imagine an encryption tool where you provide your full recipient public key every time with a command-line key? Me neither. `age` seriously assumes you're fine with entering something like this every time[^2]:
[^2]: To be completely fair, you can more or less solve it with a wrapper. For this job I made akm, a shell script wrapper that will read recipient keys for you from `~/.akm` and pass them to `age`. It can also set your default encryption key for you unless you specify one on the command line.
% age -r age1h0ea8x07z33fc5lzkqj3kghup4g6jkzsaj6v86pgngwn7gs8q9es56lpwv \
-o file.enc file.txt
`age` also raises concerns by letting trivially discoverable bugs such as this one slip in the release candidates. This one is for sure easily discoverable, as I ran into it while writing akm in my first hours of trying `age`, and its presence seriously raised my eyebrows, as it's been one of the tools recommended by supposedly competent cryptographers at Latacora long before the bug has been fixed.
reop can also do encryption for you, it will be discussed later.
With digital signatures and the tools to verify them we have quite a number of options, with different problems / concerns surrounding them (remember, we want our tool to be at least somewhat reputable):
unrelated changes slipped into it
While out of these described above I have already gone with a pair of age/minisign keys for testing, there's an inherent problem of having them integrated in my workflow. For instance, while you can sign commit/tag data with Git with GnuPG, there's no way to sign those with the current set of Git hooks available (although there are hacks to do so using current Git GnuPG support).
current set of Git hooks available
Other tools, like NeoMutt, also appear to lack support for arbitrary digital signature / encryption tools unless you're fine with hacking / gluing them together in ugly ways.
Unless Git and other software projects start abandoning GnuPG, GnuPG and OpenPGP are unlikely to go anywhere, as being tied too deep into software codebases and seeing no perfect simple alternatives just yet.
There's also a new OpenPGP library in Rust, Sequoia, which solves a number of issues associated with GnuPG (namely the monolith problem), but it doesn't look like any of the applications using GnuPG integrate with it just yet.
Anyways, you can now encrypt me messages with age (or akm), and verify my signatures with minisign with those keys:
age: age1h0ea8x07z33fc5lzkqj3kghup4g6jkzsaj6v86pgngwn7gs8q9es56lpwv minisign: RWRltlKLStovfiGdhWNzla+GyANAL9ok1Bg15qCAq8oRPCGN6G4fjLj1