subkey rotation [was: Re: Get your free Yubikey sponsored by Infomaniak (available for free for any DD and DM)]
On Tue 2018-04-17 09:52:56 +0800, gustavo panizzo wrote:
> I would advise you against generating new subkeys, after some years your
> public key will be a mess (like mine, 0x44BB1BA79F6C6333), as you cannot
> never remove expired/revoked keys from the public part.
What's the problem here? is it the size of the OpenPGP certificate?
The way it's presented on the keyservers' webinterface? or are people
actually encrypting to your expired subkeys?
aiui, most OpenPGP clients are capable of simply ignoring
expired/extraneous subkeys; if they're not doing that right, we need
some more active bug reporting :)
I've started here, encouraging some standard implementations to drop
unusable subkeys from "clean" OpenPGP certificate export:
https://dev.gnupg.org/T3622
I welcome other bug reports that encourage this kind of good data
management.
> If you are talking about private-company wide keys, it may make sense
> but for your personal life-long key I don't think is worth it
Should we be encouraging "life-long" keys? I know that primary key
migration is a pain, but at some point it makes sense to switch
algorithms, even if your key material was never compromised (compromised
primary key material would warrant an earlier rotation of course)
But let's say that you use your key for a career-spanning three decades,
and you rotate three subkeys (E,S,A) every year, and you use 4Kb RSA
keys. By the end of this time, the assembled historic subkeys, binding
signatures, and cross-certifications are still less than 128KB. Is this
really too large to accept?
(and of course, you can still distribute the more compact, pruned
certificate that contains only the latest subkeys)
so, I don't think your public key is a mess! :)
--dkg
Reply to: