Editing Talk:1181: PGP
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− | Everybody below seems to have misread the comic. It says nothing about 'verifying that the email is secure' or secret, or encrypted. It says verifying that the email is | + | Everybody below seems to have misread the comic. It says nothing about 'verifying that the email is secure' or secret, or encrypted. It says verifying that the email is AUTHENTIC. This is a significant difference in meaning.[[Special:Contributions/24.70.188.179|24.70.188.179]] 15:55, 4 March 2013 (UTC) |
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I don't really understand what's funny about this comic. [[Special:Contributions/76.106.251.87|76.106.251.87]] 05:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | I don't really understand what's funny about this comic. [[Special:Contributions/76.106.251.87|76.106.251.87]] 05:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | ||
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I think merely the fact that PGP is in the email itself suggests the sender of the email is probably just a big nerd and therefore can be trusted. {{unsigned|153.90.91.1}} | I think merely the fact that PGP is in the email itself suggests the sender of the email is probably just a big nerd and therefore can be trusted. {{unsigned|153.90.91.1}} | ||
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Isn't it that those markers could very simply just have been typed in, rather than being part of the decryption system? [[User:DonGoat|DonGoat]] ([[User talk:DonGoat|talk]]) 07:41, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | Isn't it that those markers could very simply just have been typed in, rather than being part of the decryption system? [[User:DonGoat|DonGoat]] ([[User talk:DonGoat|talk]]) 07:41, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | ||
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:You may be confusing "ASCII armored" (which in OpenPGP speak is "a BASE64-encoded version of the signature or encrypted text") with the encoding of the actual data (which may also be BASE64, or it may be Quoted-Nonprintable, or it may be actual plain-text ASCII). This separation line signals that signature will be at the end, and that the mail will not be encoded in PGP-MIME, which pretty much requires that the signature is ASCII armored.[[Special:Contributions/195.144.91.202|195.144.91.202]] 12:03, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | :You may be confusing "ASCII armored" (which in OpenPGP speak is "a BASE64-encoded version of the signature or encrypted text") with the encoding of the actual data (which may also be BASE64, or it may be Quoted-Nonprintable, or it may be actual plain-text ASCII). This separation line signals that signature will be at the end, and that the mail will not be encoded in PGP-MIME, which pretty much requires that the signature is ASCII armored.[[Special:Contributions/195.144.91.202|195.144.91.202]] 12:03, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | ||
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:I also agree that the explanation doesn't really explain the point. PGP does not only provide encryption (which is in some sense privacy), but also authentication. If I publish my public key, anyone can use it to verify an email I signed with my private key. The joke is about what really happens. The text says: "If you find a header, this indicates a signed message. You are pretty safe if you assume the mail is authentic." This is funny, because email signatures are still so uncommon that there actually is no need to fake it. If you fake an email, why faking a signature? Just don't sign it. The image text goes one step further saying that you're safer when you look at the bottom of the mail and look for some weird random characters. This is what the actual signature looks like, but of course, the only way to really authenticate the mail is to use the sender's public key to verify that the random characters are a real signature. --[[User:BKA|BKA]] ([[User talk:BKA|talk]]) 12:19, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | :I also agree that the explanation doesn't really explain the point. PGP does not only provide encryption (which is in some sense privacy), but also authentication. If I publish my public key, anyone can use it to verify an email I signed with my private key. The joke is about what really happens. The text says: "If you find a header, this indicates a signed message. You are pretty safe if you assume the mail is authentic." This is funny, because email signatures are still so uncommon that there actually is no need to fake it. If you fake an email, why faking a signature? Just don't sign it. The image text goes one step further saying that you're safer when you look at the bottom of the mail and look for some weird random characters. This is what the actual signature looks like, but of course, the only way to really authenticate the mail is to use the sender's public key to verify that the random characters are a real signature. --[[User:BKA|BKA]] ([[User talk:BKA|talk]]) 12:19, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | ||
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As several others have noted, PGP can be used to encrypt and/or authenticate a message. I'd argue that the latter function is of little utility in the real world, as it solves a problem that few people have (the system itself dates to when e-mail was used very differently, and the expected future use case didn't exactly go as we all imagined). Security nerds would rarely need to authenticate anything that is otherwise unimportant enough to not bother to encrypt; typical end-users often can't even recognize obvious phishes, so unless their OS transparently refused to even display an email from a sender whose key was not in the recipients' keyring (ignoring all the complexity putting it in there entails) they would treat all emails as authentic anyway...which is what they do. E-mail was never designed for security, and nowadays the majority of it is spam, legit-spam, virtual receipts, and the like; there is so much noise now that most people who need secure communications have other vectors for such. <br> [TL;DR: if you both need and know how to use PGP authentication of plaintext e-mail for important communication, you probably don't send those important things via plaintext e-mail.] [[Special:Contributions/173.161.183.129|173.161.183.129]] 18:49, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | As several others have noted, PGP can be used to encrypt and/or authenticate a message. I'd argue that the latter function is of little utility in the real world, as it solves a problem that few people have (the system itself dates to when e-mail was used very differently, and the expected future use case didn't exactly go as we all imagined). Security nerds would rarely need to authenticate anything that is otherwise unimportant enough to not bother to encrypt; typical end-users often can't even recognize obvious phishes, so unless their OS transparently refused to even display an email from a sender whose key was not in the recipients' keyring (ignoring all the complexity putting it in there entails) they would treat all emails as authentic anyway...which is what they do. E-mail was never designed for security, and nowadays the majority of it is spam, legit-spam, virtual receipts, and the like; there is so much noise now that most people who need secure communications have other vectors for such. <br> [TL;DR: if you both need and know how to use PGP authentication of plaintext e-mail for important communication, you probably don't send those important things via plaintext e-mail.] [[Special:Contributions/173.161.183.129|173.161.183.129]] 18:49, 4 March 2013 (UTC) | ||
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