Cunningham Law (backfired terribly)
Can someone please explain why PGP is needs all of these? All explanations of public key encryption mention any email embedded emails.
And I probably don’t completely understand what PGP is, so please give me a good article or video on it.
PGP = Pretty Good Privacy. It’s both a company and the original product released by Phil Zimmerman that has since been mostly replaced by Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG).
These products create paired secret keys using the ciphers of your choice. You make the public key available to the public and keep the private key for yourself.
Then, you can either sign or encrypt some content with your private key, and anyone with your public key can validate that it was you who signed or encrypted the file.
You can also use someone else’s public key to encrypt a file, and then only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt it. And they can use your public key to validate that it was you who encrypted it.
Email addresses are optional, but can be embedded in the keypair. This means that someone else can verify that that address is linked with the identity of that keyholder, which assists in getting encrypted content to the right recipient, validates any signed/encrypted email sent from that address, and provides a memorable link to the public key’s owner.
So the email and name will be plaintext in the public key/signatures?
memorable link to the public key’s owner.
Ok, just strange how the key generator insists on specifying them. Encryption usually doesn’t like extra metadata.
Its about trusting the data you’re decrypting actually came from who you think it came from.
So the data is signed with your public key, and your public key is published so people can verify the other stuff you publish. Your email is there just so people can communicate back to you…
You can of course put junk info in the fields if you want, but the purpose of the program is enabling trustworthy lines of communication.
Of course, I generated a PGP keypair back in 1993, stuck it on the MIT keyserver, and it’s there to this day… with a throwaway email address that no longer belongs to me and hopefully no longer exists. The good news for me is that younger me was thoughtful enough to use a pseudonym and non-identifying address, so while I’ve still got the private key around somewhere, it won’t be obvious to someone who steals the email address who that keypair belongs to… and only I have the private key.
I also recall thinking the default algorithm and key length weren’t future proof so spent a good 12 hours generating something stronger, which I believe is still secure today.
So the email and username have no cryptographic purpose, they are just there for convenience.
Thanks I guess…
I mean you can make one without the metadata or phony metadata, it’s primarily used by software to validate you. It’s not like it validates any of the info. You can put [email protected] as your email of you want, good enough.The general idea is that a PGP key is an identity, not just a key pair. There’s plenty of non-PGP ways to make key pairs.
It’s useful when other people look through their keyring, so I can easily find which key I’m looking for. People don’t usually go find your key every time you want to send a message, they import your key then specify the ID or email of the key to use which is usually automatic based on who you’re emailing. And then when you message back, they want their messaging client to be able to look up your key and validate it automatically. I’m not going to go browse my files to find your key again to verify every single one of your messages. And I’ll be messaging you at some email address or other identifier somewhere anyway, so the key ends up tied to a form of identity regardless.
Thanks, exactly what I wanted to know. This explains a lot.
There had to be some reasoning behind it after all.
