Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-05-23 17:32:34
Published on: 2014-05-23T17:32:34+00:00
In an email conversation dated May 23, 2014, Kyle Jerviss mentioned that Multisig is great for irreversible actions but pointless most of the time, which is why no PGP developer or user ever thought to implement it. He also pointed out that if one loses a key and an attacker signs a bogus email or commit with it, the community can roll back with no lasting harm done. However, PGP, in general, is not very thoughtful about security and has a lot of weaknesses. This can be excused considering its historical context, as it was the first real cryptographic tool used. While much more powerful things can be done now from a cryptosystem perspective, there is still a long way to go in figuring out how to make any cryptographic tool usable to people.PGP is a general-purpose tool that is also used in a lot of irreversible contexts. If a key deploys a bad software release that steals everyone's data or wipes their disks, such an action is not irreversible by any means. While no one has written tools for threshold PGP yet, it is possible as the RSA cryptosystem is directly compatible with threshold cryptography. However, bare cryptosystem implementations are available. Jerviss' longer-term goal for an upgraded bitcoin script 2.0 is being thoughtful enough in the design that it could be adopted as a signing cryptosystem in other applications. This would allow creating a public key that can only issue trust level 0 certifications, only certifications for certain organizations unless thresholded with an offline key, or only signing for messages meeting a certain programmatic predicate generally.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:54:34.201389+00:00