Someone Is Spamming and Breaking a Core Component of PGP's Ecosystem

'A new wave of spamming attacks on a core component of PGP's ecosystem has highlighted a fundamental weakness in the whole ecosystem. From a report: Unknown attackers are spamming a core component of the ecosystem of the well-known encryption software PGP, breaking users' PGP installations and clients. What's worse, there may be no way to stop them. Last week, contributors to the PGP protocol GnuPG noticed that someone was "poisoning" or "flooding" their certificates. In this case, poisoning refers to an attack where someone spams a certificate with a large number of signatures or certifications. This makes it impossible for the the PGP software that people use to verify its authenticity, which can make the software unusable or break. In practice, according to one of the GnuPG developers targeted by this attack, the hackers could make it impossible for people using Linux to download updates, which are verified via PGP.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/07/03/2048235 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Thu, 4 Jul 2019 11:11:51 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'A new wave of spamming attacks on a core component of PGP's ecosystem has highlighted a fundamental weakness in the whole ecosystem.'
Here <https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/67ab921ffb4084c865b3618d6955275f> is a blog post on GitHub (!) giving more details, for those who are interested. The potential for such an attack has been known for about a decade. It is currently targeting just two specific people, for unknown reasons. But it could easily be done against anybody else who has published a PGP key. Basically, the attack is taking advantage of a fundamental design feature of the current keyserver system: it’s not a bug, it’s a deliberate feature that once an attestation has been attached to somebody’s key, it can never be removed.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann