web of trust vs subkeys use cases

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 02:41:25PM +0200, Tiago Antao wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> 
> What would be the best way to deal with this scenario:
> We have a department of people that has to sign messages, each person 
> should have a different key, but the key should not be accepted after 
> the person goes away. For that we need to know if a key is trusted or 
> not. Is it better subkeys (its a small group so it can be manually 
> maintained) or using the mechanisms for a "web of trust"? If we used 
> subkeys, each person would have a subkey of a master key, and somebody 
> would maintain the master.

I think that each person using a different subkey can quickly become
very difficult to manage.  I recommend using the web of trust.  Create
a "keymaster" key, which can then sign all of the individual keys in
use.  For good measure, make this keymaster key the designated revoker
for the individual keys.  When someone leaves the organization, revoke
their key.

David

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   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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