GnuPG and freedom

Additional note: as of fall 2001 the commercial PGP has essentially been dead with only a few critical bug fixes.

September 22, 1999 - Well last week caused a bit of a stir, which is good. Hopefully this week will really get people thinking. As you may or may not have heard, GnuPG 1.0 has been released. If you haven't heard, GnuPG is a GPL'ed cryptographic program that uses no patented algorithms, and happens to be perfectly compatible with PGP. I interviewed Werner Koch (via email), the heart and soul of the GnuPG project.

Kurt: Why did you feel the need to write GnuPG?

Werner: I think it started at a conference in Aachen/Germany where Richard Stallman asked the non European Programmers to work on crypto software, now that the Diffie-Hellmann was void (about fall 1997).

A few weeks later I got bored by the programming tasks I was doing at that time and suddenly started to write a parser for PGP keyrings. After I could decrypt PGP 2 messages I remembered, that a PGP like program has been on the GNU task list for a long time. I contacted them and started to write a PGP based on ElGamal (a Diffie Hellmann variant). And it was quite interesting as I have been interested in cryptography for quite a while.

Another important reason was the fact, that PGP 5 was not free anymore and the available Unix version was quite bad.

Kurt: Do you think people are actually concerned enough about "freedom" to switch to GnuPG? Do you have any plans for public education/advertising this?

Werner: To face the reality, most folks are concerned whether they can get stuff for free (beer). And many folks want to stay with PGP 2 because of all the rumors on key escrowing in PGP 5 and such things.

I think that in the near future many will realize that only free (speech) software can guarantee that there are no hidden backdoors. And to take it further, a free operating system is also useful for such software, because a OS has so much power over the running applications, that it must be technically well designed and open for public analysis.

We are currently evaluating ways to promote and offer GnuPG to the broad masses. This means that we need a Windows version (I did a first working version with a real random number generator and internationalization yesterday), a front-end for key management and plugins for some mailers.

Kurt: With public domain software like GnuPG, and other GPL/BSD licensed strong crypto, are you worried that countries might remove the portions of their crypto laws (such as Germany, Canada, and the Wassenaar agreement) that allow public domain crypto to be exported freely?

Werner: It may happen but I don't believe it. According to lawyer of the "Innenministerium" (Home Office) they tend to change the definition of "public domain" in the Wassenaar agreement to be more like "academic research results" which means that they will basically allow software which is published under the GPL (He did exactly know the contents of the GPL). So at least it will be legal to put such software onto FTP servers.

I don't know of any thoughts to regulate technical advices or support like it is done in the U.S. I do not know what will happen in the UK, they have always different politics than the rest of the EU.

So what does this mean?

Most countries that have non-restrictive crypto policies allow public domain software to be exported without any restrictions or review. This has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of crypto software (especially GPL and BSD licensed stuff) being written. Linux and most versions of BSD now support IPSec, they all support SSL, and they now have a free (as in free beer, and free speech) PGP replacement. The arguments used by most government agencies don't hold much water, as any naughty person (read terrorist) can now simply download strong crypto for free over the Internet (not that this would stop them buying US software and making a million copies in any case).

There are two kinds of crypto laws, either they are restrictive and impose limits, or they allow anything. You simply cannot have it both ways. The US recently "relaxed" their crypto policy, however no provisions were made to relax controls on public domain software. In addition to this they still require you to submit your software for a "one time technical analysis", it is unclear whether you must wait for a yes before shipping, if so this would provide an effective way to deny exports. The official reasoning behind this is that terrorist organizations and criminals (of course they would have to be outside the US) might get ahold of strong US crypto.

It would seem that the barn door is wide open, anyone with an internet connection can download OpenBSD, Linux and IPSec, or a copy of GnuPG (all written in "free" countries), and use them to encrypt their data. This might encourage various governments to loosen crypto policies, as they are obsolete in a world where a small group of people can create and distribute software to millions of people at very little cost. On the other hand it might lead to a crack down on public domain software, which might be to late at this point, due to the plethora of software currently available. Hopefully business will bring pressure to bear on governments to loosen crypto laws, in Britain key escrow was successfully killed by businesses lobbying the government.

In addition to this the majority of GPL and BSD licensed software is free, as in free beer. To many people, issues such as the freedom to take the code and improve it are immaterial (try explaining the GPL to business people, it's usually a painful process). Smart management will realize that the initial purchase price of software is usually a minor portion of the total amount spent, but if GnuPG has the same interface, and plug-in capabilities as the commercial version, in the long run they can save a lot of money (currently the commercial version of PGP is $40 USD a copy). This means that any well written open source software will spread like kudzu (a vine like plant), due to the fact that it tends to fit the needs, and budgets of people.

So one day we'll have strong crypto in every computer?

I sure hope so. Computer security has been, until recently, seriously ignored by most people. We are moving towards a computing environment where everything is connected to the Internet (I'm not 100% sure why, but it seems to be happening). This causes some pretty fundamental problems, simple things like credentials (user names and passwords typically) flowing across insecure networks, and the simple fact that if you are connected to the Internet, and I'm connected to the Internet, I can get at your computer(s). A good example of this is the SANS "Universal SSH" project, it's ultimate goal to get all universities to use SSH to secure login's, and other network activity. So why should you care (unless of course you are an administrator at a university). The simple fact is most universities are very insecure, and are used as bases to launch attacks on other systems. It makes sense to encourage the use of strong crypto, as it will potentially save a lot of time and money, and possibly prevent security incidents for other people (like you).

Hey, I wanted to read about GnuPG!

When I wrote this article I didn't want to focus to much on the technical side of GnuPG, but I realized if I didn't people would hunt me down and force me to. GnuPG for Win32 is not yet ready (this is something they are working on), however the UNIX versions (at least the Linux one) work great. I generated a keypair "gpg --gen-key", specifying a 4096 bit sized key (because it recommended 2048 as a maximum), and it took a long to calculate (like it warned me). I then exported my public key "gpg --export --armor", tossed it into PGPi for windows (I figured that would be a good interoperability test), and successfully signed, verified, encrypted and decrypted some files. To get help for gpg simply type "gpg -h" or "man gpg", if you've ever executed "pgp -h" or "man pgp" you know what to expect. The only real difference is that unlike "modern" pgp there is only the "gpg" command, whereas pgp has "pgpk", "pgpo", "pgpe", etc, this is of course a trivial detail (and I actually prefer having just "gpg"). Basically there isn't much to say, other then it works as it should, and you might want to read the man page, but I wouldn't really bother if you're at all familiar with pgp.

Summary

Free crypto software, written in "free" countries is good. If you are using PGP under UNIX I'd highly recommend switching to GnuPG. Le Fini. I'd also like to thank Werner Koch for doing the interview.

Reference links:

GnuPG:
http://www.gnupg.org/

SANS "Universal SSH" project:
http://www.sans.org/newlook/resources/ssh.htm

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Last updated 7/7/2002