newbie question about identities

[Erwan David]

Le Fri  3/10/2003, Atom 'Smasher' disait
> i'm only a few years behind with gpg/pgp, but trying to get up to
> speed....
> 
> i like the idea of identities, but i'm not sure if i'm either missing
> something, or if that part of the system (or documentation) is flawed....
> 
> let's say i have 2 identities....
>         employee@big-corp
>          radical@big-corp-sucks
> 
> obviously, each of these identities should be kept *FAR* apart.
> 
> according to the documentation [that i've found], all you have to do is
> use the gpg "edit-key" and "adduid" to add an ID to your key-pair, and
> then you can use one key-pair for multiple IDs.
> 	http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN282
> 
> i see 2 problems with this:
> 1) the key-id is the same for both roles
> 2) when exporting the public key, both identities are part of it
> 
> both of these factors make it too easy for one's "other" identity to be
> revealed... this could be bad (very bad, since keys are like viruses,
> and can't be removed from circulation).
> 
> so the question is, am i missing something? or is this a fact of life if a
> single key-pair is used for multiple IDs? if one wants to use multiple
> IDs (and keep each ID isolated from all other IDs), is it necessary that
> each ID has it's own key-pair?

What you're missing is that you want to keep things apart, but put
them together. If you want nobody able to relate your boith IDs use
different keys.

You can have several keypairs.

-- 
Erwan