Cunningham Law (backfired terribly)
Can someone please explain why PGP is needs all of these? All explanations of public key encryption mention any email embedded emails.
And I probably don’t completely understand what PGP is, so please give me a good article or video on it.
Its about trusting the data you’re decrypting actually came from who you think it came from.
So the data is signed with your public key, and your public key is published so people can verify the other stuff you publish. Your email is there just so people can communicate back to you…
You can of course put junk info in the fields if you want, but the purpose of the program is enabling trustworthy lines of communication.
Of course, I generated a PGP keypair back in 1993, stuck it on the MIT keyserver, and it’s there to this day… with a throwaway email address that no longer belongs to me and hopefully no longer exists. The good news for me is that younger me was thoughtful enough to use a pseudonym and non-identifying address, so while I’ve still got the private key around somewhere, it won’t be obvious to someone who steals the email address who that keypair belongs to… and only I have the private key.
I also recall thinking the default algorithm and key length weren’t future proof so spent a good 12 hours generating something stronger, which I believe is still secure today.
So the email and username have no cryptographic purpose, they are just there for convenience.
Thanks I guess…