Re: [openpgp] "OpenPGP Simple"

I have repeatedly found it useful, even in recent times, to cut/paste
ASCII-armored messages on my mobile. Am I a Neanderthal?
On Mar 17, 2015 3:05 PM, "Peter Gutmann" <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:

> Jon Callas <jon@callas.org> writes:
>
> >Certainly the ASCII Armor checksum is something that could go, since we
> don't
> >need to worry so much about modem line noise. :-) But you have to know
> enough
> >to ignore it.
>
> It's not just the checksum, the entire ASCII armoring should have been
> discarded years, no decades, ago.  The whole thing was originally
> implemented
> because facilities like FidoNet and Usenet didn't handle binary messages,
> and
> the checksum was because things like 2400bps modems (pre-MNP) on the DOS
> PCs
> that PGP 1 was written for wouldn't cancel out line noise, so it was
> useful to
> check for inadvertent message corruption before you warned about invalid
> signatures.
>
> The MIME standard (going back to RFC 1341) is over 20 years old and pretty
> much everything supports it, but PGP persists with something from even
> earlier
> (PEM, from 1987, that's nearly 30 years ago).  It's not just "a museum of
> 1990s crypto" (thanks to Matthew Green for the great quote), it's also a
> museum of 1980s and 1990s everything-else.  The entire discussion of "ASCII
> armour" should have been replaced with "use a mechanism like MIME" years
> ago.
>
> (Oh, and by "MIME" I mean proper use of MIME, not "wrap PGP-PEM in MIME
> headers and pretend it's MIME", RFC 2015/3156).
>
> Peter.
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