Identifying your private key by the public KeyID

Henry Hertz Hobbit hhhobbit at securemecca.net
Tue Aug 6 14:52:54 CEST 2013


On 08/06/2013 10:38 AM, Kenneth Jones wrote:
> 
> Good day, and hello to the autoresponder (%]##{}#%^!!!) (just
> my opinion, mind you). I've been toying with PGP GPG GnuPG and
> whatever on and off since mid 1995, but recently have become
> interested again as the political situation in the US seems to
> warrant it. (Warrant? We don't need no stinking warrants...)
> anyway...
> 
> I have a question about procedure...nomenclature, actually.
> Is it normal to refer to the private key by its own keyID, or
> by the KeyID of the mating public key? The public fingerprint
> is the one known by others (natch) and it's the identification
> I associate with the key pair. Is there any time when it is
> appropriate to refer to my private key by its own KeyID? I
> understand that each of the two eight-character sequences is
> unique, and so the private key is in fact not accurately
> identified by using the public key's ID, but is it common to
> do so? Seems to me it would be less confusing (for me, any
> way) to be prompted with the Main KeyID than with that of the
> private key.

Are you speaking of the sub key?   From the perspective of
gpg --list-keys and gpg --list-secret-keys the public and
private side have the same key number.  Usually the first
of a two key pair is defined as sec/pub with the two
matching.  The first key is for sighing.  The second key is
for enciphering and is specified as ssb/sub but still has the
same key number in both --list-keys and list--secret-keys.
Beyond that I will let somebody else elaborate.  You put
just your main key in the ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file on Linux
and everything just works.  Ditto for selecting it on
Windows.  E/g.:

pub   2048R/E05A9F9F 2013-08-06 [expires: 2015-08-06]
uid                  Henry Hertz Hobbit (test) <hhhobbit at gmail.com>
sub   2048R/051516A5 2013-08-06 [expires: 2015-08-06]

You just use the E05A9F9F and now this temporary key
is going away.

Regarding the efforts of the autoresponder, TeamSpeak
didn't do it.  Here are their replies to me with the
full message with headers and just the message itself:

http://www.securemecca.com/tmp/FromTeamSpeakDirect.txt
http://www.securemecca.com/tmp/FromTeamSpeakMsg.txt
http://www.securemecca.com/tmp/
(it is best done this way rather than forwarding since
you get the prime copy)

If the monitoring was for a certain organixation it
shouldn't have been done at all.  All it did was pose
a significantly larger burden for TeamSpeak getting rid
of the garbage.  How did they get there address added?
Some little hackers used the technique PeskySpammer uses.
PeskySpammer is NOT a generic term but refers to a group
of spammers that fill one of my email queues with about
100 spam messages per day but it has gone as high as a
thousand per day:

http://securemecca.blogspot.com/2013/07/fake-health-ads.html
(search for MX)
http://securemecca.blogspot.com/2013/01/peskyspammer.html
(see Mail Admin section)

During this brief time of the gnupg-users problems I have had
three malware shipped to me.  They have to infect their SMTP
servers which are just Microsoft Windows PCs.

Next time, don't monitor.  If it is for a certain organization
I don't want to hear another one of their hacker workers
complaining that I don't deserve the car when I walk past them.
If you don't know what that means the day will come when you do
understand and I foiled their effort to give me a car.  If you
can stop the bounces caused by the spammers, next time stop it
IMMEDIATELY.

Even madder than you are about the spam situation!

HHH

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