[tor-talk] Fwd: Tor Browser Bundle: PGP encryption built-in?

[Robert Ransom]

On 2011-10-10, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) <lists at infosecurity.ch> wrote:
> Hi Kyle and Aaron,
>
> let me answer to you by making in Cc the tor-talk mailing lists where
> there is an on-going discussion about it.
>
> It has been suggested that FireGPG is unsafe
> (https://tails.boum.org/bugs/FireGPG_may_be_unsafe/), your approach by
> design sounds very nice.

You seem to have missed the point of that page -- the problem with
FireGPG is what it allows, not how it was implemented.

> I am wondering whether it would be possible to add another simple
> security mechanism so that the user is "alerted" anytime a GPG related
> operation is going to be executed.
>
> Something like:
> "The website blahblah.com would like to use PGP to [encrypt|sign|cipher]
> web-data, do you want to allow it?"
>
> Ransom, what do you think about Kyle and Aaron approach? (Eventually
> including a "pre-warning" for any sensitive operation to the end-user)?

A warning before JavaScript enumerates your keyring isn't sufficient.
Users must, at a minimum, be able to block all further attempts by a
page or website to use GPG features.

And even that won't help most users -- a request-for-permission dialog
can only protect users who read messages before clicking 'Allow', and
who understand that allowing a website to use a GPG plugin is
dangerous.

> By embedding a GPG support into TorBrowserbundle, the Tor Project would
> eventually provide a "Trusted PGP Key lookup server" on a Tor Hidden
> Service that forward the PGP key lookup to public internet key servers.

No we wouldn't.

> I mean, today everything goes over HTTP, but our browsers are capable of
> doing end-to-end encryption only by using Javascript.
> Why not try to "enable" the best of Anonimity (Tor) + best of Web
> Browsing (Firefox) with best of encryption (GPG) ?

I don't consider Firefox the 'best of Web Browsing' or GPG the 'best
of encryption'.  They are only the crap tools we're stuck with for
now.


Robert Ransom