Werner and Neal will each give a talk at 32C3 as part of the FSFE Assembly. Both talks are on Monday, December 28th. Neal's presentation is at 16:00 in Hall A.1. He'll present "An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG." Werner follows immediately at 17:00 with "GnuPG and its current state of development."

If you want to chat, we (Justus, Kai, Neal & Werner) will be around during the congress. (Neal will be mostly hanging out at the Kidspace and thus will probably be the easiest to find.) If you want to arrange a chat, send us an email. If you see one of us, don't hesitate to ask for a business card with a list of the keys we use to sign GnuPG releases!

Werner was interviewed (in German) by Jürgen Asbeck from Germany's Pirate Party.

There have been two new releases of GnuPG: version 2.1.10 and version 1.4.20.

Version 2.1.10 is the first GnuPG version to include support for TOFU. TOFU stands for trust on first use and should be familiar to anyone who uses ssh. Basically, TOFU is a mechanism to detect when the binding between an identity and a key changes. This can prevent or detect active man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and forgeries. Although this protection is weaker than the Web of Trust's theoretical guarantees, we have observed that most people don't bother to sign keys or set owner trust. The practical result is that most users don't make use of the web of trust and, as such, GnuPG only protects them from passive MitM attacks. TOFU provides protection against active MitM as long as they are not sustained while not requiring any user support. Happily, the web of trust and TOFU can be combined. To read more about how to use TOFU, see this email. A more theoretical handling of how TOFU works is described in our forthcoming paper. (Feedback is welcome.)

Another noteworthy addition to 2.1.10 is Tor support. To enable this, simple add the following to your dirmngr.conf file:

use-tor
keyserver hkp://jirk5u4osbsr34t5.onion

(hkp://jirk5u4osbsr34t5.onion is the .onion address for SKS Keyserver Pool.) Note: for this to work, you'll need to be running Tor. On Debian, you just need to install the Tor package; there is nothing more to configure.

2.1.10 also includes a number of small additions. It is now possible to use --default-key multiple times and GnuPG will use the last key that is available for signing (this is good when using a configuration file shared among multiple hosts). --encrypt-to-default-key will causes all messages to also be encrypted to the key specified in --default-key. --unwrap will strip an OpenPGP message of its encryption layer (and everyone thing outside of it). Since most messages are signed and then encrypted, this preserves the signature (unlike --decrypt). --only-sign-text-ids causes --sign to not sign photo IDs.

In 2.1.10, Neal added code to detect ambiguous key specifications. This code proved to be incomplete and has since been removed from git. Given that it will take some time to ensure that the code is stable, this feature will return in 2.3.x. (2.2 is planned for the beginning of 2016.)

2.1.10 also includes a number of bug fixes for dirmngr. In particular, there was a bug that prevented fetching a large number of keys over TLS streams.

Both 2.1.10 and 1.4.20 include support for the new --weak-digest option, which can be used to explicitly mark a digest as deprecated. (You should consider doing this for SHA-1, which is no longer considered safe.)

Andre published version 2.3.0 of gpg2win. He's also been working on GpgOL (a GnuPG plug-in for Outlook). The latest test version includes support for sending PGP/MIME mails. If you are interested in helping to test it, read the wiki and follow the gpg4win-devel mailing list for details.

Jussi has continued his work on libgcrypt. He recently added a variable length output interface for the digest API, which was needed for new SHAKE algorithms. He has also worked on some new optimizations for the hash-algorithms; fine-tuned existing SHA-3/SHAKE and Tiger implementations and added an ARMv7/NEON implementation of SHA-3/SHAKE.

Niibe fixed an important long standing bug in scdaemon whereby users cannot access their smartcard after reinsertion. Another minor bug that he fixed is that the removal of smartcards was not always correctly detected. These bugs are fixed in 2.1.10 and will be backported to 2.0.x.

Niibe also did a major change in libgcrypt for Curve25519, which changes the point format of the curve by adding the 0x40 prefix (this is the same as Ed25519). New private keys and encrypted messages created with the new libgcrypt will always have the prefix 0x40. Any users of Curve25519 encryption should update their libgcrypt. Existing keys should continue to be handled correctly.

For those interested in Werner's work on g13 (a LUKS replacement, which allows using a smartcard to decrypt the master key), he has pushed his current work to the wk/g13work branch.

Werner announced the official chat room for developers. Note: for general questions, #gnupg on freenode remains the better real-time chat forum.

Guilhem Moulin discussed using OpenPGP notations to limit the scope of subkeys.

James asked about best practices for creating keys and got a number of helpful responses.

The Nitrokey developers announced an effort to develop a new USB Security Key with hidden storage (for plausible deniability). Nitrokey is 100% free software and open hardware. Their crowdfunding campaign runs until the end of December.

Robert J. Hansen shared a link to an MIT Technology Review article on how user error subverts communication security.

Matthias Apitz asked about why private keys are stored differently in GnuPG 2.1 and Werner provided a detailed explanation.

At the beginning of 2015, the Linux Foundation, as part of their core infrastructure initiative, made a one-time USD60,000 donation. We are pleased to report that the Linux Foundation has decided to renew their support for 2016 and have donated another USD60,000. Thanks!

Unfortunately, although Facebook initially announced that they would provide USD50,000 of support per year, they have since rescinded.

We have meanwhile received unofficial information that Facebook did not rescinded their support pledge. We are waiting for an official comment and will report on that then.

With the help of the friendly Facebook folks we were meanwhile able to clarify our perceived problem with their donation promise. It was all due to an unfortunate misunderstanding between us. Facebook will keep on supporting GnuPG in 2016 with a donation of 50000 USD.

This support greatly helps us to pay our developers who are busy working on improving GnuPG and the global encryption infrastructure.

We try to write a news posting each month. However, other work may have a higher priority (e.g. security fixes) and thus there is no promise for a fixed publication date. If you have an interesting topic for a news posting, please send it to us. A regular summary of the mailing list discussions would make a nice column on this news.