More specifically, if I was to attach my public key to every email — even when the recipient doesn’t use PGP.

My assumption is that “life would carry on” and there would be basically no difference but I’m not entirely sure.

the process of using PGP for encrypting content (text messages for example) is something I’m only just started understanding after some reading and practicing

EDIT

Since a couple of people have mentioned it, my email provider provides E2EE between users but it I want to have E2EE with non-users and via my aliases (SimpleLogin) with custom domains I’ll need PGP

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Your public key block is a cumbersome thing and it’s enough to just append its fingerprint, if you consider email to be trusted against forgery but not against eavesdropping. The other person can then use the hash to authenticate your key that they get some other way (or they could just ask you to email it).

    Back in the day, lots of nerds would have their PGP key fingerprint (32 hex digits) printed across the bottom of their business cards. So if someone got a card in person, they could use the fingerprint to authenticate a key that they later received by email.

    Your post doesn’t ask about signing your emails without a good reason, but some commenter seems to think you are asking about that. That can be good, bad, or both, since it means that anyone who gets a copy of the message, including attackers, can now authenticate that the message came from you. Anything that gives attackers capabilities that they didn’t already have, must be examined critically. Dan Bernstein came up with an clever authenticator scheme designed to prevent this exact attack, but PGP doesn’t implement it and I actually don’t know of any software that does.

    Finally, at least some of the old-time PGP community now thinks that PGP solved, to some extent, the wrong problem. It not only made no attempt to conceal metadata, but it actually advertised it, in the form of key servers and key signatures connected with keys. Even if the attackers couldn’t read the encrypted messages, they could still tell who was talking to who, which is almost as bad. Remailer and broadcatch systems tried to solve this, with mixed success. A quote by cryptographer Silvio Micali has stuck with me for a long time: “a good disguise does not reveal the person’s height”. I.e. don’t just try to conceal the message contents from attackers while letting them collect other information. Rather, don’t give them ANY information.

    It’s possible to get rather “Spy vs Spy” about this type of stuff but it can help you think about security. As always, “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson is a fantastic book if you’re interested in the general topic of how to be paranoid. Or to quote the proverb, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you ;). The book is here, 1st and 2nd editions downloadable as pdfs: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html