On 05/05/2009 09:06 PM, Benj. Mako Hill wrote: > <quote who="Micah Anderson" date="Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:14:55PM -0400"> >> Some people do not like it if you upload your signature on their key >> to a keyserver. > > I think those people are silly and can be happily ignored. Public keys > are designed to be signed by anybody. It's up to you which signatures > you trust. I'll put it this way: i've got no problem with people uploading their certifications of *my* key directly to the public keyservers, because i know my key and UID, and i can recognize them. ;) I *do* worry about people uploading signatures related to e-mail addresses that they haven't verified, though, and caff walks you through the process of verifying that the e-mail address is valid (it also puts the decision about publication in the hands of the keyholder, if you care). If you want people to trust your signatures, you may prefer to use caff (or something similar) to verify the e-mail parts of the UID instead of uploading them directly. For example, tonight, i plan on handing out slips of paper with my name, e-mail address, and OpenPGP fingerprint on them. Poor unsuspecting Ursula will check my ID, match it against the name on my card, initial the card, pocket it, and go home. At home, Ursula will download the key from the keyserver, check its fingerprint, and make sure that the User ID looks reasonable. if i'm a sneaky bastard, nestled in among my other User IDs will be "Daniel Kahn Gillmor <president@whitehouse.gov>". If i'm an extra-sneaky-bastard, i'll actually have printed this e-mail address onto the card i hand out at the meetup, so everything will match when Ursula looks it up. If Ursula signs this key/uid combo and publishes it to the keyserver, she's just contributed to the fiction (or is it!!‽!) that i'm the President. If, on the other hand, she uses caff (or something similar) to generate a detached sig, and send it (encrypted!) to the e-mail address in the User ID, i'll have to actually be able to read mail that goes to president@whitehouse.gov in order to intercept the message, decrypt it, extract the signature, and publish it. Now, if Ursula already *knows* that this is my e-mail address, there's no harm in her sending it directly to the keyservers (assuming she doesn't mind publishing the fact that we've met up in person). But if i'm presenting her with an e-mail address that she has no reason to believe i actually control, she should probably use something like caff. --dkg
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