Quote from: Skippy_Jif on June 30, 2012, 11:15 pmSo assuming that sr cannot be trusted what happens when another person gets your pgp key? Answer that with a definable cure to paranoia and ill submit. There isn't an answer. The vendor's key or the buyer's key? I'm going to assume, for this thread that you mean the secret key of anyone to whom the address in encrypted (i.e. definitely the vendor's key and possibly the buyer's).If the vendor's account and key is completely compromised (e.g. LE use a trojan to plant a keylogger on a vndor's system), then all the buyers using that vendor are screwed.If the secret key is leaked in some way, the secret information is still encrypted. That can only be accessed with the corresponding passphrase. Thus OpenPGP provides a two-step authentication process which the SR system does not.Quote from: Skippy_Jif on June 30, 2012, 11:15 pmSame as email. Anyone can get your key at any given point when you give it to another person outside encryption. If the buyer's key is compromised (other than by foolishly posting the secret key publicly) then it is likely that other information belonging to the buyer is already compromised, including their address. Even if the secret key is available, there still remains the passphrase.If a buyer wishes to use GPG when sending their address then they should only encrypt to the buyer's key and use the "for your eyes only" option:gpg -ea --for-your-eyes-only -r $VENDORKEYID address.txtThe vendor will only be able to decrypt the file manually using the --output flag.If either the buyer or the vendor is concerned about key security (especially if the vendor has done something inane, like post their secret key or create a key of 1024-bits or less) or the vendor does not have a public key available (but can access GPG) there is the option to use symmetric encryption only:gpg -ca [--for-your-eyes-only] address.txtThe buyer will need to enter a passphrase specific to that message (*NOT* their normal passphrase). The issue then is to transmit the passphrase for the encrypted address to the vendor by some other secure method. Good old-fashioned spy tradecraft is good for this: a book code (where both parties have the same edition of a book and the reference uses numbers to indicate a line on a page), an anonymous message sent through a relay, or some other online reference not related to SR.Public key cryptography was designed specifically to solve the problem of transmitting the above information. In fact, a regular PGP message is encrypted with a symmetric cipher and the passphrase for that message is encrypted with the recipient's public key. If you want to bypass it, though, you can as described above (and yes, you can extract a session passphrase from a message and then manually decrypt just that message with it, but that's a topic for another time and another thread).This is all simple to demonstrate:-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----jA0ECQMCqyfjGKzDQCdg0sBVASaK9IWlnbqPulqaGWJdxYRFePXWMvNyRh2dUZztSPdXMQGQOZjGtNIs22FFMrOSHmge8G6mWu5Qi2aHhCaBMgsEoX8pu7eNbv5h5If0OB22dKoMonUG1rmc6fIOrSWhdsosCwHwfYBPluxa1eZGI4ahLieZty098wy9Lqe72cRwiSARVtDuGHuKnLPD6b4s4ffwQl3Cwju1UOh4X9wxQYGOYjrzrcIsAtpzkEcLLu/BodSUMY07WGqaXWBZmR0KyMsr1US2DMwzWRtjC5EmpsX+hiQpNjGzjYlW2SEOWSZ6nIJ3UjtPXmCFmH6ym5twZS+AGx/PoFVAEYelCWha+Rh4/9AV/UC+IaijmFpnBlh5vN9Lrw===pNCm-----END PGP MESSAGE-----In this example the passphrase is your username.The final argument from your end, of course, is that if the address is encrypted to the vendor then the vendor will be able to save the address data off somewhere if they want to. This is true, but the argument is a bit of a straw-man because there's nothing preventing a vendor keeping a record of any address when they first receive it. At the end of the day buyers have to trust vendors not to do that.Quote from: Skippy_Jif on June 30, 2012, 11:15 pmThe only reason why I followed up on the op response is because I know how it works on the vendors end. Buyers don't.What we don't have, though, is transparency on the methods used by the SR order system to destroy this data when it is no longer needed or how effective it is. Not encrypting in the order leaves a single point of failure: the vendor's login details (presumably that's password and PIN, but possibly just the password).We have no idea, for example, whether the SR admins have the ability to view that data and I'm guessing you don't know that for sure either. One of the reasons GPG is as trusted as it is is because every line of code has been subject to peer review. There are no backdoors. SR, however, is a black box and no one is able to review anything.Now I am definitely not saying that there is something dodgy going on with SR, I'm inclined to think that DPR and the rest of the SR team are *not* pulling a LE-backed long con. I am, however, saying that it is possible that there may be some as yet unknown flaw or vulnerability in the system which LE (or others) might find some way to exploit in the order system. The security through obscurity model employed by SR prevents the kind of review which would reveal such a vulnerability.Taking all of the above into account, it is quite reasonable for a buyer to choose to add a layer of security that they can verify.