On 03/09/14 20:25, Erinn Clark wrote: > Hi everyone, > > In September last year I discovered a fake key for my torproject.org email > address[1]. Today I discovered another one: > > pub 2048R/C458C590 2014-02-13 [expires: 2018-02-13] > Key fingerprint = 106D 9243 7726 CD80 6A14 0F37 B00C 48E2 C458 C590 > uid Erinn Clark <erinn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > sub 2048R/D16B3DB6 2014-02-13 [expires: 2018-02-13] > > To reiterate what I said last time this happened: > > 1. That is NOT MY KEY. Do not under any circumstances trust anything that may > have ever been signed or encrypted with this key. I looked around and was > unable to find anything, but nonetheless, it is out there and that is creepy. Hi Errin, The problem you mention here is that there is no way to verify who a certain public key belongs to. I could not even verify yours. I've downloaded both keys above from the keyservers into gpg. One key has no signatures at all, the other key has more than 30 signatures, none of those signers are known in my (small) keyring. I'm none the wiser. And my mail reader doesn't even try to match email-address to public key fingerprint. It won't raise an alarm when there is a mismatch. Thunderbird/Icedove lets me do the hard work. To play Devils' Advocate: It could be that I'm replying to an impostor claiming to be Erinn Clark. I have no way to check. Only by investigating the use of both keys throughout the history at the internet archive, I might be able to discern which key belongs to Erinn and which is the impostor. Heck, I had an email conversation with some people of the CCC where they used one of my gpg-keys to encrypt their message and I used a different key to sign my reply. Their mail program didn't alert, neither did they spot it. I don't blame them. The PGP/GPG web of trust is not designed to introduce strangers to each other. It's designed to let people who've met in person to encrypt their email communication. And extend that to their circle. And when the web of trust would succeed in spanning the globe, it would form a social graph that makes Faceboogle look like amateurs. The cause of this dual-key problem is that that an email-address is seen as the identity, while in fact, the public key is the identity, as there is only one private key that fits the public key. Humans can't deal with key fingerprints. They use the email address as substitute. What's needed is a way to let computers verify that the human readable label (email address) is unique and maps to the same public key. This makes the human readable name a true substitute identifier for the public key. I've come up with a scheme that does that. I call it Eccentric-Authentication. It could solve the MitM problem for web-sites, it could solve the spoiled onion exit nodes problem. And it offers people to create new encrypted communication channels where none existed before. And best, a user agent takes all the hard crypto-problems out of the hands of the end user. Check out: http://eccentric-authentication.org/ With regards, Guido Witmond.
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