ietf-openpgp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [openpgp] Overhauling User IDs / Standardizing User Attributes (was: Re: Scoped trust (signatures))

2018-07-01 19:11:14

On Jun 29, 2018, at 12:45 AM, Wiktor Kwapisiewicz 
<wiktor=40metacode(_dot_)biz(_at_)dmarc(_dot_)ietf(_dot_)org> wrote:

Hi Jon,

This is slightly off-topic but...

Heck, while you’re at it, talk to the Keybase people because they explicitly 
now have Twitter, Facebook, Github and DNS identifies, along with Reddit, 
Hacker News, Bitcoin addresses, Zcash addresses, and more I’m likely missing.

From what I've seen Keybase is not interested in purely OpenPGP solution - 
they want to keep the data on their site [0].

So it’s not worthwhile solving this problem? Or are you saying that because 
they are doing it no one else should do it in a standard way?

I think it’s really cool that Keybase lets you authenticate these other 
networking points. And it sounds like this is at least part of the problem.


And there already is I-D for "keybase but distributed" using OpenPGP - Linked 
Identities by Vincent [1]. Moreover this draft is already implemented in 
OpenKeychain and has verifications for Twitter, GitHub, etc. and works really 
well. I think the concept is proven to be working. (The only issue that I 
have with it it's that it's using experimental UAT IDs, but because Linked 
IDs is just a draft it cannot get proper assignment).

I've been experimenting on a slightly different implementation of Vincent's 
concept (using User IDs and notations instead of Attributes, and defined 
verification language) [2].

Also, a quote from Werner over the use of user attributes from 2017 [3]:

(...) Anyway, I think that the User
Attributes should not be extended over their use for an image.  URIs can
simply be represented by plain User IDs and software can easily detected
such URIs if desired.
The need to implement UAT only adds more complexity for a questionable
purpose.  Note that these image UAT were introduced due to marketing
needs of PGP or NAT and (iirc) only specified after they had been
introduced in their software.

I didn't agree with him back then, but after longer thought I changed my 
opinion - user attributes do not have any fallback mechanism - either most 
software supports that custom special attribute or it's practically 
impossible to work with them (yes, they are supported, but displayed as an 
opaque string [4]). And I say this as a person that added this packet "by 
hand" and use it on my key.

I don’t agree with him now. This is *precisely* the sort of thing that User 
Attributes were created to solve.


(As a side note, photos could be expressed as links to images with a hash, 
that would reduce the key size significantly).

Sounds like a privacy-surly mechanism to me. 

There are many problems around the Internet today where external links cause 
fetches that then cause DNS lookups, SSL fetches, leakages of SNI information 
and others. Keeping the relevant data in a blob is privacy-friendly. 


On the other hand I like the "hand wavy" approach to User IDs, I think it's 
underutilized :-)

Sure, but it means that you are using a generic text field in ways that are 
hard to parse. Why not define it?

        Jon
_______________________________________________
openpgp mailing list
openpgp(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/openpgp

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>