Some good news: after a long hard decade, OpenPGP is now on standards track. That means that it is a standard, more or less, for the rest of us, and the IETF process will make it a "full standard" according to their own process in due course.
RFC4880 is now OpenPGP and OpenPGP is now RFC4880. Hooray!
Which finally frees up the OpenPGP community to think what to do next?
Where do we go from here? That's an important question because OpenPGP provides an important base for a lot of security work, and a lot of security thinking, most of which is good and solid. The OpenPGP web of trust is one of the seminal security ideas, and is used by many products (referenced or not).
However, it is fair to say that OpenPGP is now out of date. The knowledge was good around the early 1990s, and is ready for an update. (I should point out that this is not as embarrassing as it sounds, as one competitor, PKI/x.509, is about 30 years out of date, deriving its model from pre-Internet telco times, and there is no recognition in that community of even the concept of being out of date.)
Rising to the challenge, the OpenPGP working group are thinking in terms of remodelling the layers such that there is a core/base component, and on top of that, a major profile, or suite, of algorithms. This will be a long debate about serious software engineering, security and architecture, and it will be the most fun that a software architect can have for the next ten years. In fact, it will be so much fun that it's time to roll out my view, being hypothesis number one:
H1: The One True Cipher Suite In cryptoplumbing, the gravest choices are apparently on the nature of the cipher suite. To include latest fad algo or not? Instead, I offer you a simple solution. Don't.
There is one cipher suite, and it is numbered Number 1.Cypersuite #1 is always negotiated as Number 1 in the very first message. It is your choice, your ultimate choice, and your destiny. Pick well.
If your users are nice to you, promise them Number 2 in two years. If they are not, don't. Either way, do not deliver any more cipher suites for at least 7 years, one for each hypothesis.Posted by iang at November 8, 2007 11:08 AM | TrackBackAnd then it all went to pot... We see this with PGP. Version 2 was quite simple and therefore stable -- there was RSA, IDEA, MD5, and some weird padding scheme. That was it. Compatibility arguments were few and far between. Grumbles were limited to the padding scheme and a few other quirks.
Then came Versions 3-8, and it could be said that the explosion of options and features and variants caused more incompatibility than any standards committee could have done on its own.
Avoid the Champagne Hangover Do your homework up front.
Pick a good suite of ciphers, ones that are Pareto-Secure, and do your best to make the combination strong. Document the short falls and do not worry about them after that. Cut off any idle fingers that can't keep from tweaking. Do not permit people to sell you on the marginal merits of some crazy public key variant or some experimental MAC thing that a cryptographer knocked up over a weekend or some minor foible that allows an attacker to learn your aunty's birth date after asking a million times.
Resist the temptation. Stick with The One.