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LeaKissner

Cryptography is a tool for turning a whole swathe of problems into key management problems. Key management problems are way harder than (virtually all) cryptographers think.

@leak This potentially gives new meaning to an old acronym PEBCAK

@leak pfttttt! all my keys are in my single keychain behind the door. (I lied! one is under the doormat...)

@leak @dalias

Me: I made this super secure system to exchange data. Make a private GitHub repo, give yourself and recipients access and share data

Cryptographer: 🤦

C: I made this actually secure New Age program that uses an asymmetric key for encryption, so eavesdroppers have no chance.

Me: Where does the key come from?

C: Dunno it’s just a file. It supports SSH keys so with GitHub slash username dot keys it’s easy to use.

Me: So GitHub can spoof my keys?

C: You decide the risk.

Me: 🤦‍♂️

@leak @dalias If you don’t trust GitHub to keep your data secure, you also shouldn’t trust them to publish your public keys.

And vice versa, if you trust them to publish your keys, why not trust their ACLs?

@jornane @leak Well there's a lot less room for error (or pretending malice is error) publishing keys than implementing ACLs. But yes it's bad.

@leak this is why we use burner keys for GPG/email.

anonymity!

@SoniEx2 Because you prefer trust-on-every-use to trust-on-first-use?

GPG is so amazingly hard

@leak GPG sucks and it doesn't even have """niceties""" (read: things often considered critical for protocols like these) like PFS, PD and whatnot ;-;

@SoniEx2 GPG was a big advancement at the time, as I understand it, even if things like web of trust didn't work out

... But yeah I personally don't use it

@leak nothing a pad of one time keys and a diplomatic bag can't solve 😆

@tiraniddo Mastodon is secure, right?

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEowIBAAKCAQEAvpnaPKLIKdvx98KW68lz8pGaRRcYersNGqPjpifMVjjE8LuC
oXgPU0HePnNTUjpShBnynKCvrtWhN+haKbSp+QWXSxiTrW99HBfAl1MDQyWcukoE
b9Cw6INctVUN4iRvkn9T8E6q174RbcnwA/7yTc7p1NCvw+6B/aAN9l1G2pQXgRdY
C/+G6o1IZEHtWhqzE97nY5QKNuUVD0V09dc5CDYBaKjqetwwv6DFk/GRdOSEd/6b
W+20z0qSHpa3YNW6qSp+x5pyYmDrzRIR03os6DauZkChSRyc/Whvurx6o85D6qpz
ywo8xwNaLZHxTQPgcIA5su9ZIytv9LH2E+lSwwIDAQABAoIBAFml8cD9a5pMqlW3

@leak even if its public as long as you used a suitably long passphrase to encrypt the private key then it's secure. This solves the key distribution problem, because as everyone knows distributing passphrases is a completely different problem which I assume has been solved by now.

@leak Hey, at least I only have one category of problem now!

@leak but there's such "great" documentation on threat modeling practical key management challenges, such as for TLS session ticket encryption keys 🙃

@saraislet
No problem*

* as long as you're Google

@leak Don't worry, cryptography has also graced us with a wealth of solutions for turning key management problems into other key management problems

@artemist
It's the cirrrrrcle of life!

@leak is "IV Management" also lumped into the key management bucket or do we still get to surprise people? :blobcatwinktongue:

@leak yup. We don't recommend clients to use encryption at work specifically because our clients are small businesses, and they lose keys. Simple as. People in interesting industries already know the stakes and do it.

@Aranjedeath There are certain kinds of encryption your clients *definitely* should be using.

... But having been in "interesting" (meaning high-target) industries, key management is definitely something we have to address carefully

@leak Yup, but TLS is not a way you can permanently lose your business. When the database is encrypted at rest and the client loses the password? They no longer have a business. We have to do a lot of education around this to make sure a minimum risk of that happening.