Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

Valdis.Kletnieks
2011-10-05T04:38:05Z

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On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:17:30 EDT, "Frank Ch. Eigler" said:

> But that's begging the question. The semantics are what you want them
> to be. Some keysigning parties take this super seriously, and maybe
> with strangers there's some room for this. But in the end, when *I*
> see a key with someone else's signature on it, there is no proof how
> rigorously they investigated the person. The "reliable identity" part
> of the web of trust is only one hop deep.

And in fact, there's even support for dealing with bozos who sign keys
incorrectly:

http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN346

"trust in a key's owner" - one of the options is:

none - The owner is known to improperly sign other keys.

(I've done that for 3 people in Europe when I found their sigs on my key on the
keyservers, and they admitted in e-mail that they'd made no real attempt to
verify me...)

You can also assign "partial" or "full" trust, and then configure how many
partial and how many full trust sigs are needed to accept a key as "known".

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