Last year, a schism in OpenPGP became apparent.
The OpenPGP standard for email encryption has been around since 1997, when it was derived from the venerable Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program that was released in 1991. Since it came about, OpenPGP has been the decentralized, interoperable way to exchange encrypted email, though its use never really took off as advocates hoped. Now, though, it would seem that a split in the OpenPGP community threatens to fragment the OpenPGP-encrypted-email landscape, potentially leading to interoperability woes.
Currently there are two competing standards.
- LibrePGP (v5 packet format) backed by GnuPG (explanation)
- crypto refresh (RFC 9580, v6 packet format) backed by OpenPGP.js (explanation)
To boil it down to one sentence, it looks like LibrePGP desires incremental changes to OpenPGP to avoid breaking compatibility, while crypto refresh desires major changes for security reasons. However, this is very simplified, so I encourage interested people to read the standards and explanations linked above.
I see a few ways for how this schism could get resolved, but cannot predict what will happen. While this schism exists, I see there are risks of OpenPGP fragmentation and interoperability issues. This could affect not just E2EE emails but also data encryption generally, cryptographic signing and other cryptographic operations that OpenPGP supports.
- Which standard is best (technically or otherwise) for OpenPGP users and the future of OpenPGP?
- What should OpenPGP users (end users, application developers, etc) do while this schism exists?