Last Thursday, Yahoo announced their plans to support end-to-end encryption using a fork of Google’s end-to-end email extension. This is a Big Deal. With providers like Google and Yahoo onboard, email encryption is bound to get a big kick in the ass. This is something email badly needs.
So great work by Google and Yahoo! Which is why following complaint is going to seem awfully ungrateful. I realize this and I couldn’t feel worse about it.
As transparent and user-friendly as the new email extensions are, they’re fundamentally just re-implementations of OpenPGP — and non-legacy-compatible ones, too. The problem with this is that, for all the good PGP has done in the past, it’s a model of email encryption that’s fundamentally broken. It’s time for PGP to die.
In the remainder of this post I’m going to explain why this is so, what it means for the future of email encryption, and some of the things we should do about it. Nothing I’m going to say here will surprise anyone who’s familiar with the technology — in fact, this will barely be a technical post. That’s because, fundamentally, most of the problems with email encryption aren’t hyper-technical problems. They’re still baked into the cake.