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I agree, this service should never be used for any serious real-life usage. But this is a _vanity_ key service, and there are legitimate uses for such keys wher

by yuvadam 12y ago

I agree, this service should never be used for any serious real-life usage. But this is a _vanity_ key service, and there are legitimate uses for such keys where no harm can be done. I'm mainly interested in raising awareness to GnuPG and get more people using it - I also organize CryptoParties [1] in my area, exactly for this purpose. [1] - https://cryptoparty.in/ https://cryptoparty.in/

Sarien 12y ago
"there are legitimate uses for such keys" - not for crypto
- yuvadam 12y ago
  How about education and raising awareness?
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    awareness of bad crypto practise? :\
  - xrstf 12y ago
    How do you raise awareness and educate people by selling them conceptionally broken keys? They will get used to "someone else is creating the key for me", as well as to "GPG fingerprints should look like funny words, not 17AB42DE!". For testing and explaining GPG to people, nobody needs vanity keys. You don't raise awareness for GPG by having "DEADBEEF" on your business card.
dvdkhlng 12y ago
Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"? Non-native speaker here, I didn't even know what "vanity" means, just ignored it as noise-word :) Well, after looking it up, I still am not sure that I understand what it means :).
- spydum 12y ago
  vanity base word is vane; or to be so focused on how pretty or appealling you are to others. often used when talking about asthetically pleasing names when talking about tech stuff (vanity hostnames for example.. dns names which are excessively showy, this used to be common on IRC to look "cool").
  - dTal 12y ago
    Would that not be "vain"?
- mike-cardwell 12y ago
  > Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"? No. That is not possible.

by yuvadam 12y ago

Sarien 12y ago

"there are legitimate uses for such keys" - not for crypto

yuvadam 12y ago
How about education and raising awareness?
- aw3c2 12y ago
  awareness of bad crypto practise? :\
- xrstf 12y ago
  How do you raise awareness and educate people by selling them conceptionally broken keys? They will get used to "someone else is creating the key for me", as well as to "GPG fingerprints should look like funny words, not 17AB42DE!". For testing and explaining GPG to people, nobody needs vanity keys. You don't raise awareness for GPG by having "DEADBEEF" on your business card.

dvdkhlng 12y ago

Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"? Non-native speaker here, I didn't even know what "vanity" means, just ignored it as noise-word :) Well, after looking it up, I still am not sure that I understand what it means :).

spydum 12y ago
vanity base word is vane; or to be so focused on how pretty or appealling you are to others. often used when talking about asthetically pleasing names when talking about tech stuff (vanity hostnames for example.. dns names which are excessively showy, this used to be common on IRC to look "cool").
- dTal 12y ago
  Would that not be "vain"?
mike-cardwell 12y ago
> Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"? No. That is not possible.