Quote from: pine on August 02, 2012, 07:24 amYou mean proving you are who you say you are upon initial contact? No... I don't think there is. Not with PGP all by itself at any rate. It is possible to do it by building a reputation system outside of your initial communication e.g. the PGP key servers, where you could build a web of trust system thing.There is already a web of trust system built into OpenPGP. That's what the trustdb file is for and what signing (technically certifying) keys are for.The majority of OpenPGP users use their real names and email addresses rather than pseudonyms like we all do. So if they receive a key from someone they know they can call that person, for example, and confirm the fingerprint of that person's key before signing it. People also hold key signing parties where they confirm someone's fingerprint and some form of ID (driver's license, passport, etc.) before signing a key.Given the nature of this community we're not going to be able to take advantage of that.Quote from: pine on August 02, 2012, 07:24 amAnd then that itself is not immune either to a particularly determined adversary with huge resources, although it gets geometrically unlikely you'll pull that hack off I think.True, but there really is a limit to how much effort someone or some group will or can devote to people on SR. It's a matter of where to place the resources and the payoff for doing so.The NSA, for example, have much more dangerous people to pursue. They have the resources, but there's no payoff for them.The CIA would be in much the same category (and possibly see some opportunities for themselves).It's only groups like the DEA that are a problem and they really aren't in the same league as either the CIA or NSA. No doubt they'd like to take down some of the major vendors and they'd definitely like to be able to take down DPR or compromise the SR systems so they can continue to take down vendors, but it is unlikely that they have the resources (or knowledge) to achieve that.Quote from: pine on August 02, 2012, 07:24 amBut otherwise it's a thorny problem with no easy and simple answer unless everybody loses their anonymityLosing our anonymity or pseudonymity is too high a price to pay in this environment. Instead we just have to cope with the lack of a web of trust and proceed with caution in all our dealings.Quote from: pine on August 02, 2012, 07:24 amand gets PGP public keys generated with some relationship to biometric data (also possible in the near future if not already, but also likely hackable). Actually, forget that, that's probably a horrible idea.It's already possible to include a picture with a GPG key, but that is entirely optional. If some other biometric data could be converted to a digital form to use as a comparison, it may be added in the future. It is unlikely to be mandatory, though.Remember, GPG is developed in Germany which has very strong constitutional privacy protections. These constitutional protections are a direct result of WWII. Germany does not want that part of history to repeat itself. Plus half the country still remembers being under the dominion of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and they don't want to repeat that.The author of GPG, Werner Koch, would have been in his late 20s when the Berlin Wall fell, so he'd have very good memories of the bad things that can happen in an authoritarian state (though I believe he grew up in West Germany).Quote from: pine on August 02, 2012, 07:24 amHappily though, immediately after 1st contact with somebody, you can then ensure further communications do come from that same person by using PGP signatures. For our purposes on SR, that is good enough because we by default trust that we can't trust anybody here due to anonymity.Exactly.