Multiple UIDs or multiple master keys?

Philihp Busby philihp at gmail.com
Wed Jul 15 05:03:17 CEST 2020


On 2020-07-14T11:20:53+0200 Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote 2.5K bytes:

> On Dienstag, 14. Juli 2020 02:48:06 CEST Philihp Busby via Gnupg-users wrote:
> > 2: What benefits benefits are there to having separate master keys for
> > personal and professional use? Outside of not wanting the identities
> > linked, because I am not yet famous enough for that.
> 
> You might not want to store your personal master key on a computer provided 
> (and controlled) by your employer.

Is this alleviated by subkeys? i.e. it is not necessary to keep the master key on another's device.

> Also: Ask yourself what happens when you change the employer. Your employer 
> might want you to revoke the key. And your new employer probably doesn't want 
> the old employer's UID on the key you use for the new employer.

That's what I've done; revoke it. I have not had any employers ever care about my weird PGP thing, but they disable my access to the email when I got fired, of course.

> If you are self-employed and/or use a smartcard for you master key, then those 
> reasons may not be that relevant.
> 
> But I suggest to ask the opposite question: What benefits are there for _not_ 
> having separate master keys for personal and professional use?

The things I found are limits/benefits:
- I can only have one 'default' key in my gpg.conf
- My global gitconfig can only have one user.signingKey



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