>There are cases where information [...] associated with a public key)may indeed need to be protected, [...] But public keys should be considered public withou

>There are cases where information [...] associated with a public key)may indeed need to be protected, [...] But public keys should be considered public without exceptions. Your answer actually stumbled into the reason why so-called "public" keys may not want to be published. There are 2 different objectives: - public key as part of a encryption pair : publishing this is no big deal as it shouldn't compromise SHA256 private key for decryption. So "security by obscurity" isn't necessary. - public key as an identity for metadata/tracing : some may not want public keys to be known for correlation ... e.g. That's why Bitcoin wallet software generates new public+private keys for each transaction even though exposing a public key doesn't compromise ECDSA encryption.