Question for app developers, like Enigmail etc. - Identicons

Ben McGinnes ben at adversary.org
Sun Jun 4 23:24:42 CEST 2017


On Sun, Jun 04, 2017 at 08:29:31PM +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> On 06/04/2017 11:21 AM, Stefan Claas wrote:
>
>> The reason why i ask, i started to use Thunderbird with Enigmail
>> and Enigmail shows me always Untrusted Good Signature with a 32bit
>> key ID, when i have not carefully verified the persons pub key and
>> --lsign'ed the pub-key. Showing only the long key id or the
>> complete fingerprint is imho more difficult to quickly memorize
>> than an additionial shown identicon (computed from the
>> fingerprint).
> 
> I'm likely missing something there, but if having a reasonable
> assurance the public keyblock in question should likely be lsigned
> by a local CAkey anyways? Doing a manual graphical verification
> doesn't seem to provide anythin in terms of security here.


It's got nothing to do with security and everything to do with
providing a unique generated icon for each key so an end user can
personally identify the correct key based on coloured shapes instead
of a hexadecimal string.  Which is why I called it Gravatar for GPG.

It's not the sort of thing that should be in GPG itself, but there's
nothing stopping anyone from incorporating that kind of feature into a
key management tool.


Regards,
Ben
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