Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
We implement PGP client-side, on the user's devices. Their central complaint of
> If it’s running in the browser with code downloaded from our servers, then if we get compromised, we can serve up a version of the PGP code which leaks keys or plaintext.
is well-known but only applicable to the web app, the other clients are less susceptible to this. Even for the web app, we are proposing to solve this problem: https://github.com/twiss/source-code-transparency
https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt
And occasionally to encrypt files, or receive encrypted files.
These are practical things which are non-theoretical.
> Using multiple keys don't offer added security or secrecy.
Depends on how careful you are or want to be, with your private key. My house key isn't the same as my car key isn't the same as my bike key.
> This is nothing like data harvesting
Alright fair, bad example. What I was grumbling about was more the lack of any clear communication that you've been auto-opted-in to a feature on protonmail, with no user interface signal indicating so, leading to confusion for a couple months like in TFA. I definitely wasn't casting shade on the opengpg keyserver, nor protonmail. It's the "hey! I didn't check a box for this, and it's not mentioned anywhere in the protonmail docs" hidden functionality which could do with some clarification.
I'm a forgetful creature. If I intentionally put my key on a keyserver, because I'm playing around and learning about PGP, will I make the connection between it and protonmail a few months down the line if I move my email account to them? Unlikely.
It's a nice automated feature. Protonmail-to-protonmail e2e encryption makes a lot of sense. I just think protonmail-to-non-protonmail e2e needs a tooltip in the UI, and the option to opt out, potentially with the ability to opt out for specific email addresses. I wouldn't at all assume it would be on by default even IF I've been actively using PGP in my email clients, because it's something you usually have to manually set up yourself, very explicitly. That, and 99.9% of emails are plaintext.
Anyhoo, one thing I forgot which kind of negates the "what if I have multiple encryption keys tied to my email" is the fact that the opengpg keyserver does tie 1 email address to 1 key so you can't publish multiple encryption keys, fair enough. Git-crypt and file encryption, I set my associated email address to use +tags eg [email protected], so as far as protonmail etc are concerned there's only one key per logical email address.