Strange output when generating a revocation certificate

Janusz A. Urbanowicz alex at syjon.fantastyka.net
Thu Mar 20 17:52:01 CET 2003


On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 04:18:04PM +0000, William Korb wrote:
> I was generating a revocation certificate for the purpose of creating 
> some internal user documentation, and received a strange message from 
> GnuPG 1.2.1:
> 
> 89$ gpg --gen-revoke -a korb at qisc.com > revoke.asc
> gpg: WARNING: using insecure memory!
> gpg: please see http://www.gnupg.org/faq.html for more information
> 
> *** stuff deleted ***
> 
> Revocation certificate created.
> 
> Please move it to a medium which you can hide away; if Mallory gets
> access to this certificate he can use it to make your key unusable.
> It is smart to print this certificate and store it away, just in case
> your media become unreadable. But have some caution: The print system 
> of your machine might store the data and make it available to others!
> 
> 
> 
> So, who is Mallory, and why would I want to know this? Can we replace 
> this message with something a bit more informative (such as "This 
> certificate must now be imported into your key ring to complete the 
> revocation process" or something along those lines?

In writing about crypto Mallory is a generic name for archetypal 'bad guy'.
Maybe the message should be changed. In one version of my Polish translation
I put 'bad guys' here. 

Alex




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