About document signing

[defdefred]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday 18 May 2020 14:45, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:
> 1.  Provides literally nothing in the way of confidentiality (the first
>     request happens totally as plaintext, right?). That means your ISP
>     can monitor everything you read via Gemini and compile a behavioural
>     profile to sell to marketers and/or to have stolen by state security
>     serivices. States with censorship regimes can requires ISPs to
>     terminate connections when forbidden keywords are detected in plaintext
>     content. In this respect, Gemini would be no improvement over Gopher.

GPG signing is only for data integrity and achieve simple secure public data diffusion with optional client driven computation.
If someone need to store private information in a gemini server I will tell him to store file already encryted with his public key.
Is TLS really useful in censorship regimes or are they closing access to all web site where they can't add TLS inspection?
Courageous people are rather using VPN and/or multiple ssh jump to hide...

With TLS, only the transport layer is "secure", but you don't know if someone hack the server and the files!
It is not End-to-End encrypted between the writer and the reader.

> 2.  Provides authentication and integrity if and only if the client has
>     some totally unspecified way of securely acquiring the public key
>     required to validate the signature downloaded in the second request

Initial TOFU is no more an option?

Maybe having gimini:// and TLS geminis:// is the way to go to keep gemini usable for small computer and low bandwith networks.

Imagine, the gemini browser:
1. download the first file.gmi and present it to the user.
2. download the second file.gpg while the user is reading.
3. after computation notice if file integrity is preserved.

Regards,
freD.