SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack
I'd like to gingerly suggest that this is not the way a project that has deliberately set as its adversaries hostile world governments should respond to a trivial, predictable† vandalism attack.<p>Rather, if they're serious about what they're doing – Hansen, in a related document, talks about the "good advice" he gave to dissidents in Venezuela about using GnuPG – they should thank whoever did this. This attack apparently only hit the accounts of two maintainers – that is, two people who are, or should be, exquisitely capable of distilling signal from the attack, and making sensible decisions to mitigate it going forward.<p>A serious attacker, on the scale of the adversaries this project has, again, deliberately selected for itself, wouldn't waste the vulnerability this way. They'd wait for the most opportune time and apply the attack broadly to accomplish their own state-level goals.<p>This isn't the first time the GnuPG ecosystem has responded this way to attacks. They similarly (and dishonestly) attacked the Efail researchers, and in the same document I referred to above, Hansen attacked EFF and Micah Lee for publishing exploit code; "Academic freedom should not be construed as permission to publish attack tools against a critical service with known vulnerabilities". This is what you'd expect from one of the vendors posting about a tempfile race condition on the CORE clique list in 1992; it's preposterously out of step with how the field handles vulnerability research today.<p>If you're relying on GnuPG for anything serious, you should be alarmed at the way they react to security setbacks.<p>† <i>Indeed, repeatedly predict-ed</i>