Sequoia-PGP

Sequoia's Input to the Upcoming European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy

By Neal H. Walfield on February 3, 2026

The European Commission has requested input to inform the upcoming European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy. The initiative “will set out: a strategic approach to the open source sector in the EU that addresses the importance of open source as a crucial contribution to EU technological sovereignty, security and competitiveness” and “a strategic and operational framework to strengthen the use, development and reuse of open digital assets within the Commission.”

The following text is our submission. In our response, we highlight issues with the status quo. In particular, we criticize the dominance of American mega-corporations and suggest an alternative approach where no company is too large to fail, we discuss how proprietary software inhibits sovereignty and security and FOSS enables it, and we call for a significant investment in FOSS in the form of something like the proposed EU Sovereign Tech Fund, and the creation of an IT support ecosystem for consumers of FOSS.

Thoughts on To Sign or Not to Sign

By Neal H. Walfield on January 12, 2026

39C3, the annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), included a presentation called To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends. In their presentation, the security researchers discuss the vulnerabilities that they found in GnuPG, Sequoia, age and minisign. The talk is impressive not the least for the shear number of vulnerabilities (14!) that they found, but also their breadth. They range from buffer overflows, to the use of uninitialized memory, to improper input validation.

In this blog post, I will take a look at the attack that the researchers claim demonstrates a security weakness in Sequoia, and consider its possible impact. In my estimation, this characterization is primarily due to a literal translation of gpg invocations to sq invocations, and the user ignoring sq’s output. As the user is following a recipe, a more realistic analysis should have considered a less naive translation that uses sq’s standard workflows, which would have prevented the attack. That said, the security researchers identify an issue that raises legitimate concerns, and the ecosystem as a whole needs to improve to better protect users.

Sequoia PGP: Following a Moral Imperative

Karakun AG ★ 2023-11-07

Neal makes a call to action: As developers, we have the moral imperative to explain to our clients that they must not violate human rights, in particular the rights to privacy, security, and freedom of expression. Further, we must resist requests to collect unnecessary data, and we must add end-to-end encryption where possible.

He then presents OpenPGP, and in particular Sequoia PGP, as one possible option that developers should consider to help protect users.

Sequoia-PGP, v5 OpenPGP, Authentication, and Debian

Debconf Kosovo 22 ★ 2022-07-18

Justus introduces the Sequoia-PGP project and highlights changes in the upcoming OpenPGP v5. Further, he talks about authentication, and how we can help Debian and the broader FOSS ecosystem secure their communications and software supply chains.