- This OpenPGP and GnuPG criticism is brought up regularly here, but the proposed alternatives come with their own downsides: some of those are proprietary, some are centralized systems or depend on such. In addition to all the inconvenience, when such centralized systems are blocked, casual users switch to explicitly backdoored options. The advertised IMs are tied to phone numbers, introducing both privacy and availability issues. Almost nothing of that is available from Linux distributions' system repositories. Integration with other software and infrastructures is lacking. Dealing with multiple specialized tools is more of a headache even for expert users, especially when their added benefits do not make much sense given one's threat model. OpenPGP/GnuPG is more resilient and versatile than those, still usable where those are not.
I think such an article would seem more convincing, at least to me, if more sensible alternatives were proposed. Ideally without the advice to not encrypt email, without assumptions of continued availability of all the online services, of trust to certain third parties, and so on. Or it could be just a plain criticism without suggestions, which would still be somewhat informative.
Edit: there is another list of alternatives in a sibling comment, advising against (well, actually being quite hostile towards, and generally impolite) usage of what I had in mind as one of the possible more sensible alternatives: XMPP with OMEMO. Though upon skimming the criticism of that, I have not found it particularly convincing, either, and it just looks like some authors try to be particularly provocative/edgy.
by felipelalli
2 subcomments
- Even though I read so many posts criticizing PGP, it's still difficult for me to find an alternative. He states in the article that being a "Swiss Army Knife" is bad. I understand the argument, but this is precisely what makes GPG so powerful. The scheme of public keys, private keys, revoke, embedded WOT, files, texts, everything. They urgently need to make a "modern version" of GPG. He needs a replacement, otherwise he'll just be whining.
- I tried to find something in the article that bothered me, but I don’t find it very convincing. Points like "someone can forward your email unencrypted after they decrypt it" are just... well, yeah - that can happen no matter what method you choose. It feels like GPG gets hate for reasons other than what’s actually mentioned, and I'm completely oblivious to what those reasons might be.
by zimmerfrei
2 subcomments
- As mentioned a few days ago, this post mainly covers a gpg problem not a PGP problem.
I recommend people to spend some time and try out sequoia (sq) [0][1], which is a sane, clean room re-implementation of OpenPGP in Rust. For crypto, it uses the backend you prefer (including openssl, no more ligcrypt!) and it isn't just a CLI application but also as a library you can invoke from many other languages.
It does signing and/or encryption, for modern crypto including AEAD, Argon2, PQC.
Sure, it still implements OpenPGP/RFC 9580 (which is not the ideal format most people would define from scratch today) but it throws away the dirty water (SHA1, old cruft) while keeping the baby (interoperability, the fine bits).
[0] https://sequoia-pgp.org/
[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-20...
- The biggest issue with PGP/gpg is the difficulty of getting rid of it. If you work on big distros, or know someone who works on big distros, please (start asking them to) add https://github.com/jedisct1/minisign to pre-installed packages to facilitate transition. It's almost a chicken egg problem but the sad thing is, no project wants to swap the signing tool to a better one until everyone can verify the new signatures.
- I wasn’t aware of the efail disclosure timeline. Apparently Koch responds to the report by noting that GPG prints an error when MDC is stripped, which has eerie parallels to the justification behind the recent gpg.fail WONTFIX response (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403200)
- I agree that age + minisign comprise a much neater stack that does basically everything I would need to use PGP for.
Neither of them supports hardware keys though, as much as I could see. OTOH ssh and GnuPG do support hardware keys, like smart cards or Yubikey-like devices. I suppose by the same token (not a pun, sadly) they don't support various software keychains provided by OSes, since they don't support any external PKCS11 providers (the way ssh does).
This may reduce the attack needed to steal a private key to a simple unprivileged infiltration, e.g. via code run during installation of a compromised npm package, or similar.
- Probably resurfacing, because we have some new attacks thanks to CCC. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453461
- How does this help people who are not following this issue regularly? gpg protected Snowden, and this article promotes tools by one of the cryptographers who promoted non-hybrid encryption:
https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement
So what to do? PGP by the way never claimed to prevent traffic analysis, mixmaster was the layer that somehow got dropped, unlike Tor.
by matted7505
0 subcomment
- After reading the PyCon 2016 presentation about wormhole, and say my understanding of channels is correct (that is, each session on the same wireless network constitutes a session). What's stopping a hostile 3rd party, who wishes to stop a file transfer from happening, from spamming every channel with random codes?
- My comments on The PGP Problem:
* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp
- PGP is horrible and way overly complicated but this article concludes by trading that for a long list of piecemeal solutions, some of which are cloud based and semi or fully proprietary.
PGP has hung on for a long time because it “works” and is a standard. The same can be said for Unix, which is not actually a great OS. A modern green field OS designed by experienced people with an eye to simplicity and consistency would almost certainly be better. But who’s going to use it?
- GPG, as OpenSSL, are too huge and complex in order to use them on daily basis.
OpenBSD has signifiy, which works fine. But I wouldn't mind something like a cleaned up age(1) but without the mentioned issues.
GNU tends to stack features like crazy. It had sense over the limited Unix tools
in the 90's, but nowadays 'ls -F', oksh with completion and the like make them
decent enough while respecting your freedom and not being overfeatured.
LibreSSL did the same over OpenSSL.
by stackghost
2 subcomments
- Anyone know why GitHub doesn't support signing commits with signify/minisign?
- Recently, this opinionated list of PGP alternatives went around:
https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/
One use case I've not seen covered is sending blobs asynchronously with forward secrecy. Wormhole requires synchronously communicating the password somehow, and Signal requires reasonable buy-in by the recipient.
Basically, I'd like to just email sensitive banking and customer data in an encrypted attachment without needing to trust that the recipient will never accidentally leak their encryption key.
- I'm curious. What's the advantage of using signify/minisign instead of good old PGP/GPG?
by brianjlogan
1 subcomments
- Is anyone else unable to read the report on mobile? Completely broken styling for me.
- i like the approach by the bsd people. shut the f* up and code.
as long as there's not (audited and verified) replacements for each niche, we still have to use it.
sadly even gpg (because of all this fud'ing around) even falls now the grace and tries to say "well, not THAT application, only THAT".. sigh.
- Can the link be updated to not be to the end of the page?
- [flagged]
- on another note: it's so funny that this says, that email should not be used, when the whole world uses email. it's so far detached from reality...
by ekjhgkejhgk
2 subcomments
- I feel like I'm taking pills, but hear me out.
If there's one thing we learned from the Snowden leaks is that the NSA can't break GPG.
Look at it from the POV of someone who like me isn't an expert: on the one hand I have ivory tower researchers telling me that GPG is "bad". On the other hand I have fact that the most advanced intelligence in the world can't break it. My personal conclusion is that GPG is actually fucking awesome.
What am I missing?
by NooneAtAll3
1 subcomments
- > If you’d like empirical data of your own to back this up, here’s an experiment you can run: find an immigration lawyer and talk them through the process of getting Signal working on their phone.
> Long term keys are almost never what you want. If you keep using a key, it eventually gets exposed.
Have a sentence praising Signal followed by a sentence explaining the main critique of Signal (requiring mobile number) makes me question the whole post for credibility
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