On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 02:24:09PM -0500, David Shaw wrote: > On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 10:15:16PM +0300, Pawel Shajdo wrote: > > Salve! > > Can somebody explain me what is "back signatures"? > > Manual not very clear about this. > > It's a countermeasure against an attack against signing subkeys. > Basically, the primary key signs all subkeys. With backsigs, the > signing subkey also signs the primary key. > > Without this, an attacker can "steal" a signing subkey from someone > else and try and pretend that a signature came from his own key. It's > not a particularly good attack: the attacker can't issue signatures to > prove his ownership.
I should add that this is a new feature for 1.4.3. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
