Why is it possible for someone other than ME to add MY key to a keyserver? I realize that at some point (perhaps only the first time you submit a key?), there has to be some trust model employed, but it seems like this anyone-can-submit-anyone-else's-key situation offers a very obvious attack: anyone could propagate bogus keys across the net by just generating bogus keys with someone else's email/name on them, leading to massive impersonation problems.
Yes, there are such possibilitied.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it seems like there should be a more rigorous method available to, and employed by, keyserver operators for verifying someone's identity before accepting a key submitted (supposedly) by them. Shouldn't the key submission msg itself at minimum be required to be contained within a signed msg from someone with enough "nearness" in trust levels from some trusted introducer known to the keyserver op? I thought this sort of situation was precisely the reason for the trust level system in PGP in the first place.
This may be a can of worms (or not), but if cpunks require fairly decent methods for verifying the identities of people who want to trade keys with them personally, then it seems keyservers should require at LEAST that level of verification (or better).
Sure. Are you offering to do the coding?
I'd like to CLEAR/REMOVE ALL keys from ALL keyservers that are: - attributed to me by others (without my knowledge) - added by others (unknown to me) - purporting to have been generated by me) and start with a tabula rasa. Maybe in a few weeks, once all these (what I consider to be) bogus keys are GONE, I can add my actual key to a keyserver.
Until someone writes code to deal with owner-submission (or whatever) you're SOL. Even if all the operators were to delete all of your keys, someone would eventually mail their entire ring to a server, and those bogus keys would be back up again. You mentioned that you didn't keep your secret key for one of your now-defunct keys. Why not? Are the servers supposed to clean up after you now too?
There doesn't seem to be any elegant mechanism available for doing this yet, but I'm ready to be educated on this point. Any comments?
Do you know how to code in Perl? Code submissions welcome. --Michael -- Michael Graff Iowa State University Computation Center Project Vincent 215 Durham voice: (515) 294-4994 explorer@iastate.edu Ames, IA 50011 fax: (515) 294-1717 gg.mlg@isumvs.bitnet