On April 18/19 a bunch of OpenPGP folks met in Dreieich near Frankfurt to get to know themselves better and exchange experience in implementing and deploying OpenPGP based applications.

During one of the meetings of our local group of regulars at the Chaosdorf, I talked with Nico from Enigmail about the idea to get the few GnuPG frontend authors together for an informal meeting. We agreed that this is would be useful and we decided to go for it in spring. Due to the attention GnuPG received during the following 31C3 it turned out that the planned GPG meeting would grow to an OpenPGP summit with about 30 attendees. We even had to reject several requests to join the meeting due to limited space and time constraints to prepare a larger meeting. Nico took care of the organization and I am really glad that he kept me clear of this task. Thanks.

Our host was Giegerich & Partner, an IT security company which does a proprietary Outlook plugin based on GnuPG. Their local organization was excellent including snacks, beverages, a great self-made dinner, and shuttle service to the hotel and the airport. Network access also worked flawlessly after having signed that usual German Störerhaftung disclaimer. Thanks guys.

After a welcome on Saturday morning from Nico and our host, I quickly explained the planned release schedule for GnuPG and explained a less known feature of GPA and Kleoptra, the UI-Server. We then started the presentations of the projects present: Gpg4win, Enigmail, Gpg4o, r2mail2, OpenKeychain, GPG Tools, Pixelated, Whiteout, Mailvelope, Mailpile, End-to-end, CaliOpen, and Debian.

It was really interesting to learn first hand about the rich environment around the OpenPGP protocol. Although most developers knew about each other it was the first time they all came together to present their projects to their peers. About half of the projects are using GnuPG as their backend engine with the others using one of the Javascript implementations for their OpenPGP core.

The presentations answered a lot of questions but raised others which were discussed during the breaks and the wine and beer track in the evening. Important topics were identified and put on the agenda for Sunday.

One of these topics was the question whether to use PGP/MIME or to create a new format; with about the half of the group in favor of PGP/MIME. It seems that some often used MUAs (mailers) have somewhat limited support even for regular MIME despite that this is a 22 years old and matured standard. In particular webmail applications are quite limited in their MIME handling. They have the easiest way to roll out fixed versions, though. As usual I got into long debates with Bjarni from Mailpile on this. This discussion was continued on Sunday in working groups on meta data encryption and encrypted search.

Another topic was key distribution. I decided not to join the respective working group on Sunday because this will be a too large topic for short working group. During the Saturday presentations it became clear that the more centralized projects, like Whiteout and Google’s end-to-end, can more or less sidestep that problem due to the better control they have on the mail accounts. The presentation from the End-to-end project was nevertheless interesting and probably sparked a few idea.

Mobile clients are a primary, or even the only, target for most projects and thus discussions revolved around issues like reducing the amount of data to download from IMAP servers but still be able to show summaries of the mail content after decryption; or on how to efficiently and securely search through encrypted mails stored on a remote site.

It would be quite useful to publish the results from the Sunday working groups as well as the group picture. However they have not yet been collected; see below for updates.

I appreciated the opportunity to meet the GPG Tools developers, who are very dedicated to make GnuPG working well on OS X. I stressed the importance to actively participate on the GnuPG mailing list to keep information in sync. One example may illustrate this: For years the adaption of GnuPG-2 on GNOME based systems has been hampered by the fact that the gnome-keyring-manager (GKR) tries to emulate gpg-agent and thus inhibits proper working of any advanced function of GnuPG (e.g. smartcards and gpgsm). With Debian’s release of Jessie that problem will even be worse due to other desktop environments now also using GKR. Given that the GKR developers are not willing to change their defaults, Neal, dkg, and me came up with a pragmatic solution for this problem on Saturday morning. Surprisingly we learned in the evening that GPG Tools long ago came up with a very similar solution on how to integrate GnuPG into the OS X keychain.

To comply with crypto geek tradition the meeting ended with a key signing party using fingerprints collected in a shared file, comparing its sha1sum ^W sha256sum locally, and publicly confirming the correctness of ones own key. Some had to rush for the airport or train station and thus not all keys could be checked.

Overall it was a successful meeting and it should be repeated to extend our discussions on the mailing lists in a conference setting. I do not want end these notes without remarking that I am a bit disappointed that many of the participants favored this closed invitation-only style summit and want the next meeting to happen the same way. I would actually like to have an open OpenPGP meeting with a stronger emphasis on Free Software and a clear anti-surveillance message.