This is silly. Nothing that happens with the standard or its implementation is going to prevent you from decrypting a 20 year old email. It shouldn't need saying, but one reason for that is that PGP's cryptography is schoolbook cryptography.
Upstream spoke of deprecated support for older emails. My response is aimed there.
And there is loads of software that will not compile on modern hardware. End users don't often have that ability to re-write, or even to easily validate a random bit of code on github.
A project like this, needs to maintain backwards operability. For decades.
Once again: this is silly, because whatever conversation we are having about the standard, your ability to decrypt old messages would not have been impacted. Standard revisions don't turn the previous standard into secret forbidden knowledge.
What's really being asked for here is the capability to seamlessly continue sending messages with the previous, weak constructions, into the indefinite future, and have the installed base of the system continue seamlessly reading them. I think that is in fact a goal of PGP, and one of its great weaknesses.
When standards remove the requirements for something after a period of obsolescence, that tends to send a message to the implementors to remove that from the software.
Users who still rely on that have to use the old software, against which there can be barriers:
- old executables don't run on newer OS (particularly in the Unix world).
- old source code won't build.
- old code won't retrieve the old data from the newer server it has been migrated do.
Things like that.
The barriers could be significant that even someone skilled and motivated such as myself would be discouraged.
> Users who still rely on that have to use the old software, against which there can be barriers
Not all reliance is reasonable though.
Some legacy software can only do SSLv3 or lower, does that mean the rest of the internet has to carry that support around? Abso-f-lutely not.
The same applies here. If you really need that ancient stuff that loses support, repackage them in newer encryption or remove the obsolete layer. It's highly probable that information no longer needs to stay encrypted at rest anyways.
In my opinion, the Internet should not be removing support for older SSL. The highest SSL version that is common to server and client should always be used.
> The highest SSL version that is common to server and client should always be used.
That is how it works. What you're missing is that everyone, both servers and clients, agrees that supporting old SSL versions is a bad idea. And they're right.
If that were the actual principle being accurately followed, the first feature to have been removed from browsers would have been plain HTTP before any version of SSL.
Plain HTTP is what people resort to when their browser refuses to connect to an old device or server using HTTPS, which is worse than old SSL.
No, because clear lack of security is better than faux security. With older SSL versions, it's security that even creates extra risk for all clients (by leaking server secrets and allowing ciphersuites that don't have PFS).
The absurd idea that a user will have a 20 year old encrypted mail, because software still supports it, is ridiculous. What really happens is someone has a 20 year old mail no matter what, itcwill always exist, and the choice is, support it or not. Support it to be read, support it to be converted, warn the user, suggest fixes.
And your SSL example is senseless! In what world do you envision super secure stuff alongside weaker legacy, on the same damned server. You literally are not thinking sensibility about any of this, you examples are paper tigers.
How do you alert the users that are running the problematic software and haven't yet updated it? The very premise is ridiculous.
> What really happens is someone has a 20 year old mail no matter what, itcwill always exist, and the choice is, support it or not. Support it to be read, support it to be converted, warn the user, suggest fixes.
Well yeah and the choice should be to not support it. If the user needs those letters they can either decrypt or just re-encrypt them. It's silly to claim that a message can somehow be both so vital to be protected by encryption, but not upgraded to something more modern.
> And your SSL example is senseless! In what world do you envision super secure stuff alongside weaker legacy, on the same damned server.
I'm not envisioning it. Nobody should be running such old useless garbage. What was suggested earlier in this thread does not work and must not happen in practice.
How do you alert the users that are running the problematic software and haven't yet updated it? The very premise is ridiculous.
Where did you get the weird idea the software isn't updated? This entire discussion is about deprecation of older encryption methods in new versions of software.
Yes, but that is only needed to connect with old software that has not updated. Two pieces of new software will not negotiate on using old crypto even if they both support it.
In the trouble situations, one of the two pieces of software being upgraded is thrust upon the user.
