Ok. But public keys have one serious disadvantage: their size. I can't put a public key on my business card or read it over the phone. I want a unforgeable key name. I want this to be the standard key name in the interface between the application and the crypto engine. I want users to be able to specify them directly, at the very least to bootstrap the public key infrastructure.
There is a patent by someone (I think it was IBM) on how to pack RSA keys in small space. I think they were putting them on the magnetic strips that you have behind every card. I'm afraid I don't have the patent number saved, but I have seen the patent document myself at the patent office. No, I'm afraid I don't remember how they encoded it. Using that method (or something similar), you could probably encode the keys into acceptably short strings with S/KEY-style encoding. Tatu