I was curious recently when I heard that SSL had supposedly been broken by a certain rogue government agency, why SSL was chosen in the first place. Could it be that PGP would have been a more secure method to encrypt traffic? Today we also have GPG which is free and open. I believe PGP now offers an authentication hierarchy so it should have what's needed.
1 Answer
The talk is not of SSL being broken, but of the "rogue government agencies" weakening the underlying crypto mechanisms to make the task of brute-forcing the keys factors of magnitude easier (such as making random number generators more predictable). These kind of attacks are not protocol-specific and can be applied to SSL and PGP in equally successful way.
