On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 04:36:40PM -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > I'd be up for helping out with that workshop, if someone wants to plan > with me. As part of the monkeysphere dev team, we've spent the last > couple years thinking about OpenPGP keys, and i'm participating in the > IETF OpenPGP WG, so that might qualify me as one of the "local experts", > though the term feels a bit weird. Whether you like it or not, you're an expert. I'd be down with helping plan this too. > Are there specific questions you think we should answer? or should we > do a general overview about how to think about the cryptosystem itself? > or a peek behind the scenes at the packet formats? or an investigation > in the nature of multilateral certification networks? The things that a new user confronts when dealing with OpenPGP that are most difficult to tackle, and most useful, in no particular order are: 1) GnuPG's interesting user interface(s). 2) What the heck is a signature, anyway? a) why do I sign once per user id, and what does it mean? b) why is a signature unrelated to a designation of trust? c) what digest algorithms exist, how to keep track of them 3) What is this secret vs. public key thing? a) what's up with this passphrase, what does it do? Do I even need it? b) which leads into, what's gpg-agent for, and why is it so hard to use? c) subkeys, why and what? 4) Dealing with email clients, mime types/dispositions 5) Encrypting to recipient(s), and doing symmetric encryption. 6) Revocation, expiration, key transition. 7) Refreshing, keys, updating trustdb Uh, that's a lot of stuff, but those are things I never understood until recently (or until the future, because I still don't know). Maybe that list is too newbie-oriented, in which case maybe it would be interesting to start dissecting the binary files themselves, and thinking about deeper issues. --mjgoins
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