WKD shall we add distributing multible pubkeys? (Re: WKD: returns only one pubkey (and why))

Dashamir Hoxha dashohoxha at gmail.com
Thu Dec 15 13:38:42 CET 2022


On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 1:24 PM Andrew Gallagher <andrewg at andrewg.com>
wrote:

> I misread your spec - sorry. But this complicates the lookup process.
> Signatures are often made by subkeys rather than the primary key. Even if
> the user ID is included as a signature subpacket, you still don’t
> necessarily know the primary key fingerprint/id. On the other hand, if
> you’re using WKD for discovery you must already know the user ID - so
> indexing the archive by hashed-userid requires no extra information.
>

Maybe you are right, I don't know enough internal details.
If it is possible/easy to split a public key into its subkeys, I would
still prefer to use a single file for storing each subkey.

Several keys in one file is how all OpenPGP keyrings work, and
> concatenation is not a particularly complex operation, so I’m not convinced
> this is a problem worth solving. :-)
>

We should also consider the client that is downloading a key, and try to
make it as easy as possible to use this key.
After all, why should a client download several keys, when it needs only
one, and the client already knows the ID of the key that it needs?

Dashamir
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