German ct magazine postulates death of pgp encryption

Jonathan Schleifer js-gnupg-users at webkeks.org
Mon Mar 2 00:23:24 CET 2015


On Mon, 2 Mar 2015 00:13:07 +0100, Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:

> On what kind of hardware? A high-end gamer PC? Or a low end mobile phone?

According to the paper, the goal is to take 4 minutes on an average PC and that it shall be adjusted according to hardware improvements.
 
> There are much larger bot nets, e.g the ramnit bot net apparently controlled 
> 3.2 million (!) machines (see http://heise.de/-2559388, in German). And with 
> regard to providers not accepting those mails you seem to be missing that the 
> bots simply (ab)use the mail accounts of the bot owners.

Abusing mail accounts only works if they are mail accounts with crappy hosts. Sane providers will block your account if you start sending 100 mails in 1 minute ;).

> Of course, 800,000 spam messages per minute is still many magnitudes less than 
> now.

The question is if that would still be profitable for spammers. Currently, they just send their spam to millions of addresses hoping that one of them is stupid enough to fall for it. They can do that because it's cheap. But if sending isn't cheap, sending to millions to just get one idiot who falls for it isn't an option anymore.

> I don't see BitMessage killing spam. But it will surely kill mailing lists.

It would just need to be extended to groups. The protocol is not set in stone.

In any case, I'm not suggesting we all switch to BitMessage. I'm just saying this is going in the right direction.

-- 
Jonathan
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