Re: Physical storage of key is the weakest link

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

> 
> Excuse my ignorance of PGP, I am fairly new to using it, and thinking about
> its operation and source code. Is not your secret key stored encoded by
> the pass phrase, so that if the pass phrase is in your head, the secret
> key on disk is useless to an attacker? Of course, while PGP is running,
> after you have entered the pass phrase, the secret key is available within 
> your machine, and could be stolen, and if your OS leaves pagefiles etc
> arounnd, might even be taken after you shut down PGP.
> 
> Or am I missing something? Thanks, Andy

I haven't seen a formal analysis of the strength of PGP if the secret
key is known but the passphrase is still secure, but from conventional
crypto we would assume that the search space would be greatly reduced.
My passphrase, for example, is 11 characters long. Other folks may use
fewer characters. 

And many people pick passphrases of less total entropy (that is, more
predictable). Fragments of names, phrases, etc.

The number of passphrase guesses that would have to be made depends on
the characters used and the particular characters chose. For example,
if most people use 8 characters chosen from the 26 letters, in one
case, then 26^8 = 2 x 10e11 possibilities. Increasing this to, say, 40
characters and a length of 10 implies 4 x 10e17 possibilities, which
is almost out of reach for brute-force cracking.

(But most passphrases picked by humans have lower entropy than this.)

Speculatively, knowing the passphrase-encrypted secret key may make it
easier to crack RSA; this is just a speculation. It is not yet even
been proven that RSA is a strong as factoring. i.e., we don't know for
sure that the RSA information provided as part of the protocol doesn't
in some way make the problem simpler than straight factoring of the
modulus.

In short, these are reasons to keep your secret key secret. Your
passphrase alone may be insufficient (else why not just dispense with
the secret key and just have a passphrase?).

I haven't checked to see what Schneier or Zimmermann had to say about
this, so maybe they have more information.

--Tim May





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