On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 11:41:18AM -0700, Jon Callas wrote: > > It's too bad there isn't a notion of identity seperate from keys. > > I suppose email address is one, but they shouldn't have used a key > > (which could expire) as a synonym for an identity. That's like > > using a phone number or name as the primary key for a customer > > entry in a database. > > There are many reasons that identity being a key is a good idea. That was one of the great things about SPKI. However, in OpenPGP, you can have just about anything be an identifier and put the signatures where you want. What are you really looking for?
I suppose there are a couple of half-formed thoughts: 1) The ability to attach any email address, and indeed many email addresses to any key makes it rather confusing, but I see no way around this. 2) The UI is pretty confusing for subkeys, and signatures on multiple email addresses attached to the same key. I get totally confused with which key ID I should use; I can't imagine a noob figuring it out. 3) Signatures don't make much sense with pseudonyms. For example: When I ask someone to sign my key, are they attesting that I can receive email at "tra...@subspacefield.org"? Why would a passport help to answer the question of whether mail sent to that address reaches me? 4) Key expiration, or mere increases in computing power, make maintaining the web-of-certification difficult. The best I could think of is the "eternal signing parent key" with encryption subkeys. But maybe what I really want is an "eternal signing parent key", which signs multiple communication keys, so that my message signatures expire, but the ones made on yearly keys by my eternal signing key do not. Which kind of leads to my next point: 5) As a human being, I may know that key A and key B belong to the same individual, but there is no way I can tell PGP this. So if he changes keys due to expiration, or what have you, he's basically a completely new person; none of his old signatures matter, none of the attributes I assigned to him (e.g. trusting him to validate identity before signing) apply to the new key. This can be solved in part by assigning legal names and email addresses to the keys, but that poses other problems related to anonymity, network analysis, physical security, and so on. -- I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. My emails do not have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail program doesn't understand. | http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/ If you are a spammer, please email j...@subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.
pgpYQmCBAhcCB.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
