Symantec To Acquire PGP and GuardianEdge 160
An anonymous reader noticed the news that Symantec has bought PGP and Guardian Edge for $370 million. They plan to standardize their encryption stuff on PGP keys.
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Symantec To Acquire PGP and GuardianEdge
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suckitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:suckitude (Score:2, Insightful)
It means hold on to your current PGP versions.
I wont be trusting Symantec with it.
What are good open source alternatives?
I don't trust Symantec (Score:2, Insightful)
This really sucks. In dial-up days, I used a cool, lightweight firewall application published by WRQ [wikipedia.org] called AtGuard [cryogenius.com]. Symantec licensed the product and incorporated it into their own software; the stand-alone product known as AtGuard then disappeared from the market. I used to use Partition Magic [wikipedia.org]. Again, Symantec bought it and it exists no more.
With that little bit of sample history, I'm sure we can bid PGP farewell.
Re:Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Just another enterprise company that Symantec will acquire, make a half-hearted attempt to integrate it into their company, then systematically lay off all the workers, outsource product development to India, release a nearly completely nonfunctional successor to it, and eventually cancel it outright after the support contract revenue dries up. I've seen this worthless company pull this stunt too many times to expect anything different.
Note to CEOs: getting acquired by Symantec is corporate suicide. If you care at all about your employees or your product, the correct answer is not "no", but rather "hell f**king no". Just saying.
Re:Not bad (Score:3, Insightful)
But, according to my bosses, that proprietary stuff is better! It has support contracts and since we buy the license, that must mean it's good.
It's not like Opensource stuff comes close, right?
Well, that is true for Outlook email client interfacing, which is a crapshoot anyways. The rest OpenSource handles quite well.
Re:Open Source Alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya, that doesn't quite make sense. An RPG survives until it hits the target. While I like explosions as much as any pyromaniac, they aren't designed to be long lived items unless you never use them. What fun is a box full of RPGs when you don't use it?
Re:Pretty *Bogus* Privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless, I would assume the NSA has its fingers everywhere. Backdoors are not trivial to catch in the source code, like the famous if (uid = 0) test on an obscure flag combination on an obscure call.
Don't get me wrong, I'll trust OSS a lot more if the code can be read by anyone,but what good is the potential if no one actually does it?
The beauty is the I don't do anything the NSA cares about, I just like my privacy. Anyone powerful enough to get my personal data has bigger fish to fry.
Re:Not bad (Score:4, Insightful)
If I want top notch security and not trusting some firm (possibly a CA that is offshore and is hostile to anything the country I reside in anyway), I will be using a PGP/gpg web of trust. I will either get a copy of the public key of someone face to face printed physically with a fingerprint (and will download and verify the public key and has from a keyserver), or I will agree on a passphrase that is used only once, and that is to send and receive a copy of the public key.
I also don't like keeping my public key that would be needed for S/MIME on an online machine. My secure private key resides on a machine that isn't Internet connected, it will reside on a smart card, or it will be on a smart card and used on an offline machine, so an attack would have to be done on a physical/local level in order to compromise my private key material. I do use S/MIME and a client key, but that is mainly a stopgap, better than nothing measure, compared to actual end to end manual encryption of data with gpg or PGP.
PGP WOTs were in use a lot in the early to mid 1990s by cypherpunks, but for the most part, convenience won over security and it is extremely rare for someone to use a public key of someone to send mail. A good WOT is far better than a CA. I have more trust in a public key claimed to be someone that is 3-4 links out from me on my PGP/gpg keyring than I do a key that is signed by a CA and told "hey, trust us." Of course, creating a WOT is a lot harder than just letting a CA do the work, but like Phil Zimmermann said, it is better to pack your own parachute when security is critical.
Another use for PGP over S/MIME is signing of files. A signed E-mail is difficult to forward and keep the integrity intact. However, if I have a file and a PGP/gpg signature of it (or just a PGP signed file), I can forward it, archive the two files, back them up to whatever backup media, and all it takes is a validation in the future to ensure that the file and the signature were not tampered with, assuming I have the public key in my keyring, and that hasn't been tampered with. Of course, I can use facilities like the file signing capabilities built into Acrobat, Word, or other software, but again, I have to use a third party CA, or pay for a special signing key, as opposed to a secure WOT. Plus, some files (archives and such) can't be signed internally, so having a separate .sig file is needed.
S/MIME is decent, built into most dedicated E-mail clients, and is better than nothing. However, if you want reliable E-mail security, you are best off using a PGP/gpg WOT.
Re:Not bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Arg... this is so painful to read. What is with the mods? +1 Long post?
If I want top notch security and not trusting some firm (possibly a CA that is offshore and is hostile to anything the country I reside in anyway), I will be using a PGP/gpg web of trust.
I'm not a big defender of the big CAs, but trust chains serve a purpose. In a WOT, who first decides that someone really is associated with a given name, and why on Earth do you trust _them_? Sure, you will all be talking to the same person, but who is that? The point of the chain model is that at least someone is responsible for verifying a certificate holder's identity in some minimal way. To what length they go depends on what the next link in the chain of trust requires.. MS, Apple, Firefox, etc, then you trust them, and so on.
I will either get a copy of the public key of someone face to face printed physically with a fingerprint (and will download and verify the public key and has from a keyserver),
An in person key exchange is the best you could possibly do, and does away with the other complex trust models. This is what the financial industry mostly does, a bunch of P2P symmetric key exchanges. You do have to change keys now and then (you do right?) so P2P gets very expensive. This is why your debit cards have different processor logos on them, because each bank only talks to a couple big processors, and not every other bank in the world. There is no need to use a public keyserver (why would you trust _that_?) if you meet the message recipient in person...
or I will agree on a passphrase that is used only once, and that is to send and receive a copy of the public key.
Uh.. why a passphrase? You were only going to give the passphrase over a secure channel or in person right? Then you'd only need to send the key. Try to think all that through..
I also don't like keeping my public key that would be needed for S/MIME on an online machine.
Im not going to explain PKI here. Just wow.
My secure private key resides on a machine that isn't Internet connected, it will reside on a smart card, or it will be on a smart card and used on an offline machine, so an attack would have to be done on a physical/local level in order to compromise my private key material.
Good. At least you understand the important half of PKI I guess..
I do use S/MIME and a client key, but that is mainly a stopgap, better than nothing measure, compared to actual end to end manual encryption of data with gpg or PGP.
Just wow.
PGP WOTs were in use a lot in the early to mid 1990s by cypherpunks, but for the most part, convenience won over security and it is extremely rare for someone to use a public key of someone to send mail.
Yah...?
A good WOT is far better than a CA. I have more trust in a public key claimed to be someone that is 3-4 links out from me on my PGP/gpg keyring than I do a key that is signed by a CA and told "hey, trust us." Of course, creating a WOT is a lot harder than just letting a CA do the work, but like Phil Zimmermann said, it is better to pack your own parachute when security is critical.
Look, I'm not going to hawk webs, chains or direct or whatever trust schemes.. the only thing that matters is how keys are exchanged, and why you trust them. Just because a CA makes money, that doesn't make the chain model wrong..
Another use for PGP over S/MIME is signing of files. A signed E-mail is difficult to forward and keep the integrity intact. However, if I have a file and a PGP/gpg signature of it (or just a PGP signed file), I can forward it, archive the two files, back them up to whatever backup media, and all it takes is a validation in the future to ensure that the file and the signature were not tampered with