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We have sorta drifted into pure speculation... Just to be clear, I reject your contention that there might be some sort of identity verification benefit associ

We have sorta drifted into pure speculation... Just to be clear, I reject your contention that there might be some sort of identity verification benefit associated with distributing the keys across the SKS network. Cryptographic identity is normally represented by a really long number of some sort (called a key fingerprint in the PGP case). a PGP identity contains an email address, but that is a completely unfounded assertion from the creator of the identity. That contention has to be supported in some way. Anyone can create as many PGP identities as they want with any email address in them. They can upload those identities anywhere they want and they might be replicated. An attacker can't "replace" a PGP identity because they can't create another identity that matches the key fingerprint.

woodruffw 2y ago
> Just to be clear, I reject your contention that there might be some sort of identity verification benefit associated with distributing the keys across the SKS network. I don't understand why you think I'm contending this. The claim is not that SKS distributes meaningfully verifiable identities, it's that there is no longer a reliable, scalable way to discover public keys at all in PGP. Whether or not you trust those public keys or the claimant human identities in them is a separate subsequent step; the entire argument is that the failure mode happens before then, and that this makes PGP an unsuitable serious choice for scaling signatures on PyPI. (PGP fingerprints are a red herring -- it doesn't matter how forgeable or unforgeable a key's fingerprint is if I can't discover the key. No key, no verification, full stop.)