0xdeadbeef comes of age: making keysteak with GnuPG

[David Leon Gil]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 11:47 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> If we're going to advocate for accessing keyservers via https (which i
> think is a lovely idea, even if it doesn't mitigate all possible
> attacks), it's worth advocating for the well-curated
> hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net [0], rather than encouraging everyone to
> flood either https://keybase.io or https://pgp.mit.edu with traffic.

My problem with the HKPS pool is that I don't know Kristian.[1] And I
don't have any reason to believe that he'd suffer serious financial
damage if the private key for the "sks-keyservers.net CA" got used
maliciously.[2]

(While I know that if a root CA were caught intentionally issuing an
MitM cert for keybase.io or pgp.mit.edu would face likely
delisting/bankruptcy.)

I'd be really happy if Kristian published a GPG-signed log of every
valid certificate for servers in the HKPS pool; then it would be
possible for the distrustful -- or targeted -- to, say, query multiple
HKPS keyservers. This is even better than trusting Root CAs +
Kristian.[3])

[1] Most hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net don't have an alternative trust
path to a standard root CA.

[2] This is different from saying that I think he *would
intentionally* sign a malicious cert, which I don't. I just have no
idea how secure the private key for that CA is. And I know that a
fully isolated, physically secure facility, and a good HSM are really
expensive. (But maybe he is doing this?)

[3] If this is already available somewhere, apologies; I haven't
managed to find anything like it.