No, it's not just you, it is indeed broken. So there are a number of
culprits:
- Probably mainly RSA for being difficult to deal with, and in general
letting lose a bunch of rabid lawyers on the crypto community.
Fortunately the patent has no expired.
- PGP/NAI for shipping versions without RSA support, and for some of
that time shipping add ons which added RSA support
- GPG/FSF for shipping versions without RSA support for patent
reasons. (And also without IDEA support for patent reasons even now
that the RSA patent has expired.)
I hate patents.
It seems also there was a fair bit of stupidity on the part of PGP. I
think they were trying to deal with the problems RSA were causing
them, when they tried to renege on the license to use RSA that PGP
acquired through ViaCrypt or whatever the story was. But then they
apparently decided to conciously try to stamp out use of RSA, and
release versions without RSA support during times when they in fact
could use RSA. PRZ was I'm pretty sure I recall trying to persuade
people to stop using it.
As good cause as it was to stop people using RSA before the RSA patent
expired -- the approach taken had precisely the opposite effect of
that desired. Loads of people stuck to 2.x because it was the only
version that worked. If they had instead made the upgrade smooth with
no incompatibility issues, I reckon a lot more people would've moved
over to pgp5.x/6.x. I know I tried it several times and gave up in
disgust.
And lastly even if they had done it right, GPG went in and fucked it
up some more by sticking religiously to the "don't use patented
algorithms" free software mantra to the huge detriment of PGP
interoperability. The only remaining patent problem is IDEA, and they
are incredibly reasonable about licensing compared to RSA
(non-commercial use free, fixed published licensing terms, etc)
I'm sure Vin'll give us the RSA labs spin... over to you Vin :-)
Perhaps even some PGP folks would like to defend their decisions to
release PGP versions without RSA support.
Adam
> Is it just me, or is PGP broken? I don't mean any particular version
> of PGP -- I mean the fact that there are multiple versions of PGP
> which generate incompatible cryptography. Half the time when someone
> sends me a PGP-encrypted message, I can't decrypt it. Presuming that
> I'm right, is anyone attempting to fix PGP?
>
> Not to mention anything about PGP keyservers, or the utter and
> complete absence of anybody doing point-source PGP signing.
