[44165] in Cypherpunks
Re: The future will be easy to use
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Wed Nov 29 15:15:42 1995
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 12:01:25 -0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
At 03:30 PM 11/28/95 EST, Carl Ellison <cme@TIS.COM> wrote:
>BTW -- PGP currently lacks a way for me to note, when I sign a key, how it
>is that I trust that key (by personal meeting, by attribution, by message
>association, ...). A signed attribute record would let me record that
>information for myself as well as for others.
That would be a useful feature, even if it's just an unstructured text file.
There is a way to do it now, though it's inefficient and hokey -
create multiple key-signing keys, with name fields indicating the attribute,
sign them with your main key, and use the appropriate one of them to
sign keys for people. For instance, I have a key named
"Bill Stewart Unauthenticated Pseudonym Signing Key <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>"
which I use to sign keys of significantly lower trust than my normal key;
you could do similar things for higher-quality certification.
This does increase the depth of the web-of-trust required, which is less
of a problem for low-trust keys than for keys you actually care about :-)
#--
# Thanks; Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
