distributing pubkeys: autocrypt, hagrid, WKD (Re: Your Thoughts)

[Brian Minton]

I'm kind of a corner case, but I can't use wkd because I don't control
my top level domain for my email.   I also can't use DANE for the same
reason.  I can and do use DNS CERT records because it allows a
second-level domain. I suppose this has been discussed to death, but
wouldn't it make sense to only allow external signatures on a key if
they are cross-signed?  That should prohibit third parties from adding
junk to keys, but it doesn't prevent someone from making a key with
your email address in it.  I like the keybase.io approach of having
publicly verifiable signatures to match a key to an id, but it only
works for public ids such as github or facebook, rather than email.
In the case of verifying signatures (for e.g. software distribution),
just the id is needed, and no email is required.  But in the case of
encrypting to a stranger (for instance to send to a well-known
reporter or something), the only way to trust the key is if they
publicly sign something and put it on a publicly reachable website.
It seems that in several well-known cases, such as Snowden, he just
basically got lucky that the key in the keyserver network containing
the Guardian's email address was in fact them and not an impostor.  In
the case of say a mailing list, tofu works pretty well, but still
doesn't solve the problem of a cold communication with someone you've
never before seen a signed message from.