We should talk about Werner Koch's response https://gpg.fail on the oss-security mailing list.

[soatok@furry.engineer]

We should talk about Werner Koch's response https://gpg.fail on the oss-security mailing list.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/12/29/9

Yes, and actually the only serious bug from their list.

Koch either didn't watch the talk, he is in such defense of his own ego that he can't see how serious the bugs were, or he's tacitly admitting that PGP is not a serious recommendation.

Can you distinguish between these three explanations?

Could it be all of them are true?

Impact

While this may allow remote code execution (RCE), it definitively causes memory corruption.

Good research.

I think this sarcastic quip is what reveals Werner Koch's opinion about the security researchers and their work.

The rest of his email is measured (and partly responding to other mailing list participants rather than the disclosure directly).

[soatok@furry.engineer]

I think 2026 should be the year that we make PGP irrelevant.

Not just GnuPG (Koch's implementation), but the entire OpenPGP ecosystem.

Most cryptographers I talk to gave up on PGP over a decade ago.

(After seeing the arrogance and dismissiveness that bled through Koch's oss-security email, who can blame them?)

If you're a country whose government mandates the use of PGP, even in obscure places, let's talk about how to replace PGP.

[momo@social.linux.pizza]

@soatok
Since OS repositories rely on gpg for validating package signatures I took the liberty to forward the talk to my support contact at SUSE. He called me half an hour later stating that he's half through the talk and had already forwarded it to their internal security maillist because it's like a bad car accident you know you shouldn't stare at but you just can't stop watching... and I'm pretty sure Red Hat is watching, too.