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About | News | Usage | FAQ | Privacy Policy

Why not sign keys after verification?

The keys.openpgp.org service is meant for key distribution and discovery, not as a de-facto CA. Client implementations that want to offer verified communication should rely on their own trust model.

Why is there no support for identities that aren't e-mail addresses?

We require explicit consent to distribute identity information. Identities that aren't e-mail addresses, such as pictures or addresses, offer no simple way for us to acquire this consent.

Note: Some OpenPGP software creates keys with incorrectly formatted e-mail addresses. These addresses might not be recognized correctly on keys.openpgp.org.

Why are revoked identities not distributed as such?

When an OpenPGP key marks one of its identities as revoked, this identity should no longer be considered valid for the key. And this information should ideally be distributed to all OpenPGP clients that already know about the newly revoked identity.

Unfortunately, there is currently no good way to distribute revocations, that doesn't also reveal the revoked identity itself. We don't want to distribute revoked identities, so we can't distribute the identity at all.

There are proposed solutions to this issue, that allow the distribution of revocations without also revealing the identity itself. But so far there is no final specification, or support in any OpenPGP software. We hope that a solution will be established in the near future, and will add support on keys.openpgp.org as soon as we can.

Do you support Tor?

Of course! If you have Tor installed, you can reach keys.openpgp.org anonymously as an onion service:
zkaan2xfbuxia2wpf7ofnkbz6r5zdbbvxbunvp5g2iebopbfc4iqmbad.onion

Why not encrypt verification e-mails?

Various reasons:
  1. It is more complicated, both for our users and for us.
  2. It doesn't prevent attacks - an attacker gains nothing from uploading a key they don't have access to.
  3. Deletion would still have to be possible even when a key is lost.
  4. It would require a different (and more complicated) mechanism to upload keys that can only sign.

Is this server part of the "SKS" pool?

No. The "append-only" federation model of the SKS pool leads to various problems, that make both operation and use of those servers very difficult. There is also no simple way to store information about e-mail verification in a federated way.

We do plan to explore options for a distributed service in the future, so users can choose between different service operators again.

I have trouble updating some keys with GnuPG. Is there a bug?

This is a problem with current versions of GnuPG. If you are trying to update a key whose owner has not opted-in to having their userid(s) published, GnuPG will complain complain about the key having no userid:

$ gpg --receive-keys FB3751F1587DAEF
gpg: key FB3751F1587DAEF1: no user ID

We are working with the GnuPG team to resolve this problem.

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