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I strongly disagree with #2. Your public key should NOT be public, especially without your explicit consent. Specifically because, at least theoretically, it co
by Tharkun 11y ago
I strongly disagree with #2. Your public key should NOT be public, especially without your explicit consent. Specifically because, at least theoretically, it could be used to derive your private key. From a parandoid point of view that's just Bad.
This is one of the reasons why should use different key pairs for different purposes.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- betenoire 11y agocan you suggest a better name for it then?
- orthecreedence 11y agoI strongly disagree with you. So do many, many people who upload their public PGP keys to keyservers. The whole point is that anybody, anywhere can have my public key without knowing my private key. If you can derive the private key from your public key, then you have a really bad keypair (by algorithm or by keysize).
- snowwrestler 11y agoYes, but communication is the whole point of PGP. I didn't upload my PGP key to a keyserver, I uploaded SSH keys to GitHub so that I could check out my own code--code which is in a private repo. I can't think of any reason that my SSH keys should be publicly avaiable. GitHub offers private repos so I can't understand why keys are all public by default.
- baby 11y agoIt is because there is absolutely no reason they shouldn't be public. You can generate as many ssh key as you want and if they are long enough they are secure.
- baby 11y agoI think you are talking about private keys.
- dimino 11y ago> Specifically because, at least theoretically, it could be used to derive your private key. What theory? I'm unaware of a current working theory that could be used to derive a private key from a public key of sufficient complexity.
- scintill76 11y agoWell, maybe when some of these keys were made, they were sufficiently complex, but now they're not. Revealing those public keys has potentially given attackers months/years to try to factor them offline. If the public keys were not known, Github would have a chance (and hopefully does) of rate-limiting brute-force attacks. Heck, even if Github is doing nothing to help against brute-forcing, just hiding public keys might make the bandwidth costs more infeasible than the cost of factoring a known public key.
- dimino 11y agoThey're insecure whether or not GitHub makes them viewable. All you get by not publishing your public key is a false sense of security. This is textbook security through obscurity, and is considered ill-advised by the security community.
- scintill76 11y agoBut in real-world terms, some users are less likely to be compromised if GitHub hadn't published them. In that light, I don't think it's advisable for GitHub to go out of their way to publish them without the user's knowledge. I think the "security through obscurity" principle ought to, if it doesn't already include this, say that added measures or core design principles should not be based on obscurity. This should not mean that all obscurity must be removed. In this case, GitHub have added anti-obscurity, and the defense is mainly dogmatic mis-application of the principle IMO.
- baby 11y agoif they are "compromised" then the whole security of internet is.