Re: importing PGP keys

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Jens Lechtenboerger <jens.lechtenboerger@fsfe.org> writes:

> On 2015-01-21, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> writes:
>>
>>> Greg Troxel <gdt@lexort.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> 1 and 3 are certainly useful code to share, but don't seem super tricky.
>>>> I am curious what people are doing for 2.  bbdb?
>
> I’m using jl-encrypt ;)
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DefaultEncrypt

Interesting, thanks for the link! But that doesn't look like it can tell
Gnus to use a certain key for certain contacts. I assume I'd need some
sort of BBDB-based thing to work well.

>> In my case, the problem was that the person just sent me the raw public
>> key block;
>
> I’m surprised that this is possible.  How, actually?
> You might want to warn him/her not to do this.
>
> Without uid, you must remember the key fingerprint if you want to
> use the key.  This does not appear to be human friendly.  Moreover,
> as any link between key and e-mail address is missing, e-mail
> software cannot offer automatic encryption.

I think I was confused -- it's not that the key has no uid, but that
the uid is just a string of letters, not an email address. Not human
friendly, indeed! But I guess not actually a malformed public key. Still
makes it very hard to exchange encrypted emails.

>> I was sure that the gpg key management interface would provide some way
>> of manually adding an email address to someone else's public key, but
>> I'm not finding it...
>
> An owner of the secret key can use the gpg command adduid.
>
> You must not be able to add uids to other people’s keys.  Otherwise,
> you could redirect e-mails encrypted to them.

Very good point!