some beginner questions

Doug Barton dougb at dougbarton.email
Mon Apr 3 15:30:23 CEST 2017


On 04/03/2017 04:20 AM, Peter Lebbing wrote:
> On 02/04/17 21:00, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
>> In short, the main key acts as a level of indirection, which separates
>> your identity from your encryption/signing keys.
>
> I'd like to extend this short description a bit :-). There is one
> important somewhat-caveat, which is that you can't delegate the Certify
> capability to a subkey. This means you always need to use the primary
> key to sign other OpenPGP *keys*.

We really need to stop referring to this as signing. The number of ways 
that the same term is used to mean different things in PGP is a huge 
contributor to the confusion on the part of new users.

Doug




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