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>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 [email protected]
Ames, IA 50011 fax: (515) 294-1717 [email protected]