long keyIDs

[Michael Roth]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999 Kevin.Christian at lsil.com wrote:

> Can someone please educate me about the finer points of long vs short keyIDs?

The short KeyID is the lower half of the long keyid. 

If you have a long key-id with the value 0x123456789abcdef the short key
id is 0x89abcdef. As you can see, the chance that two short key ids of
different keys are the same is much higher than on long key ids.

> I can make changes to exmh so that keyIDs are truncated to their short form.
> However, how safe is this operation? Should I restrict the truncation to just
> dealing with keyservers or can I always use short keyIDs? Are there keyservers
> that take long keyIDs?

Hmm. Normally a user which creates a key pair should check with the key
servers that the created key didn't has a short key id which is already
present to avoid collisions.


cu
		Michael