trust management script

Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder avbidder at fortytwo.ch
Tue Apr 27 09:02:04 CEST 2004


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On Thursday 22 April 2004 00.34, Neil Williams wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for that script, this is certainly useful.

> I worked on the idea that if I
> hadn't verified the key, I probably had never met the person behind
> the key and therefore I was unlikely to be able to make much of a
> decision on how carefully that person would verify someone else's
> key. (Not having had the chance to see them verify my own key.)

I think this assumption does not always hold. I have many keys set to 
full trust in my keyring - these are mostly keys from prominent Debian 
developers. I trust them because I feel I can judge from seeing their 
email on the mailing list how competent they are - certainly better 
than I can judge from seeing them once at a keysigning party.

Trust is always a personal thing, and everybody needs to find their own 
working compromise between usability and paranoia.  In my case, the 
fact that I rarely need to transmit really secret data helps - 
encrypting ordinary email by default is different from encrypting 
account passwords etc.; in the latter case I take an extra look at the 
trust path.

greetings
- -- vbi

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Comment: get my key from http://fortytwo.ch/gpg/92082481

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NzFiMjVlYjcwMDZkYTNlAAoJECqqZti935l6imoAn0wQoGAOwbQ57cQtN7hqrd8t
U4feAJ0U9QusPDlKXRyxRw9Tl/BknoNH5g==
=w1Xt
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