[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

[Jon Callas]

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On Dec 11, 2013, at 5:38 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com> wrote:

> Takeup of PGP and S/MIME seems to be very much like takeup for IPSEC. There are some big intranet deployments and possibly a few extranet deployments.
> 
> What is the gap we have to close to turn this on by default?

I don't think my answer is lots different than it's been for the last decade.

First of all, people have to actually care. There are lots of systems that are extremely easy to use if people actually care.

For example, there's Enigmail for Thunderbird. 

But there's also the built-in S/MIME support in many popular systems. I can tell you from experience that the S/MIME support in OS X and iOS effin' rocks. I hear it's good on other platforms, too. The easiest email encryption I've every used is S/MIME on OS X and iOS, modulo a whole bunch of things -- like the out-of-the-box experience, which sucks. (I could mention other issues, but that's a digression.)

However, the whole model is one that weeds out the people who don't actually care. It's not something where someone just checks a box and turns on secure email, you have to prove you're *worthy* of it. 

For S/MIME, that means getting a cert, for example, which is surprisingly hard. It means renewing certs, which sometimes is amazingly harder. (At one time when I was doing S/MIME things, a certain commercial CA actually would not work if you tried to buy a new cert before your old one expired. Shame on me for wanting to renew. I solved this by buying from a different CA.) It means the way that the software actively discourages self-signed certs or private PKIs. 

For OpenPGP, this includes the difficulty of generating your keys, figuring out there to publish them, etc. Many of the community keyservers have no way to *delete* keys. I keep getting things sent to me encrypted to keys that I retired in the last millennium.

The bottom line is that the infrastructure for secure email makes it hard, because that's apparently good for you or something. There are plenty of things that make it really simple -- oh, like my aforementioned PGP Universal, excuse me, Symantec Encryption Server. I use that myself and it passes the "My Seventy-Nine Year Old Mother Can Use It" test because in fact, my seventy-nine year-old mother *does* use it. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't do secure email because, well, it's basically so hard that I can't be bothered, either.

The real underlying issue is that the people who are *creating* email security don't care enough to make it easy. The idea seems to be that only those who care enough to jump through the hoops deserve security.

	Jon



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