Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

Re:Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability ... by RegW on Sunday November 08, 2015 @03:16PM (#10529692)

So if the way the receiver gets hold of your public key is by a link in the signed email, what's to stop an attacker changing the link to a fake key and re-signing the email?

Hmm. Why don't we have a standard place on our domains for public keys? For example for [email protected] the public key could be https://key.mydomain.com/myname.

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Re:Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability ... by 102030485868 on Monday November 09, 2015 @11:31AM (#10533960)

Some part of a key exchange needs to be out-of-band.

Alice communicating to Bob what the hash of her public key is over the phone, in person, or otherwise is good enough. Doing that allows Bob to verify whether or not a specific public key belongs to Alice.

The problem with hosting a key on a website is that it only really works if the domain has an extended validation certificate, i.e. someone proved their identity to their domain registrar. Then things just become a question of how much you trust the CA.

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