[woodruffw]

This feels pretty unsatisfying: something that’s been “considered harmful” for three decades should be deprecated and then removed in a responsible ecosystem.

(PGP/GPG are of course hamstrung by their own decision to be a Swiss Army knife/only loosely coupled to the secure operation itself. So the even more responsible thing to do is to discard them for purposes that they can’t offer security properties for, which is the vast majority of things they get used for.)

[LtWorf]

Well python discarded signing entirely so that's one way to solve it :)

[woodruffw]

Both CPython and distributions on PyPI are more effectively signed than they were before.

(I think you already know this, but want to relitigate something that’s not meaningfully controversial in Python.)

[LtWorf]

Being signed by some entity which is not the author is hardly more effective.

(I think you already know this as well)

[woodruffw]

It is, in fact, signed by the author. It's just a PKI, so you intermediate trust in the author through an authority.

This is exactly analogous to the Web PKI, where you trust CAs to identify individual websites, but the websites themselves control their keypairs. The CA's presence intermediates the trust but does not somehow imply that the CA itself does the signing for TLS traffic.

[LtWorf]

Not really, uploading via trusted publishers I don't own any private key, as you probably know having implemented it yourself I presume.

[woodruffw]

Trusted Publishing doesn’t involve any signing keys (well, there’s an IdP, but the IdP’s signature is over a JWT that the index verifies, not an end signature). You’re thinking of attestations, which do indeed involve a local ephemeral private key.

Again, I must emphasize that this is identical in construction to the Web PKI; that was intentional. There are good criticisms of PKIs on grounds of centrality, etc., but “the end entity doesn’t control the private key” is facially untrue and sounds more like conspiracy than anything else.

[cpach]

GPG is indeed deprecated.

Most people have never heard of it and never used it.

[woodruffw]

Can you provide a source this? To my understanding, the GnuPG project (and by extension PGP as an ecosystem) considers itself very much alive, even though practically speaking it’s effectively moribund and irrelevant.

(So I agree that it’s de facto dead, but that’s not the same thing as formal deprecation. The latter is what you do explicitly to responsibly move people away from something that’s not suitable for use anymore.)

[cpach]

Ah. I meant in the de facto sense.

[IshKebab]

I would be very much surprised if GPG has ever really achieved anything other than allowing crypto nerds to proclaim that things were encrypted or signed. Good for them I guess, but not of any practical importance, unlike SSH, TLS, 7Zip encryption, etc.

[tptacek]

They allow some kind of nerd to claim that, but nobody who nerds out on cryptography defends PGP. Cryptographers hate PGP.