Key Signing Protocol

Taken from a document lifted somewhere off the Internet, circa July 2008...

Once again, we will be holding a PGP Key signing party at the 72nd IETF
meeting in Dublin. We have been scheduled to meet at 16:10 on the evening
of Wednesday, Jul 30 in the Conservatory.  Note that we have a very tight
time-slot between the last afternoon session and the plenary, so please
be on time.

In addition to the normal key-signing (details below), it has been
suggested that this event would be a good venue for people to gain
points in the certification systems operated by CAcert and Thawte.  So,
if you are a Thawte Notary or CAcert Assurer, please consider joining
us.  Those wishing to participate should note that both systems require
that you be registered with the system and present one or more identity
documents, of which the Assurer/Notary must retain copies.  We will not
have a photocopier available during the session, so participants should
make several copies of their documents in advance.  The hotel business
center is located on the 3rd floor of the main hotel; ask at the hotel
reception desk for details.

For more information on CAcert and Thawte, see http://www.cacert.org/
and http://www.thawte.com/secure-email/web-of-trust-wot/index.html


The procedure we will use for the PGP key signing is the following:

o People who wish to participate may do so in one of two ways. You may
  bring slips of paper with your name, e-mail address, key-id, and key
  fingerprint. (One way of generating this if using gpg is "gpg
  --list-keys --fingerprint my_username@hostname") You should bring
  enough for everyone who may attend; given recent attendance patterns,
  around 50 should be more than enough. (You can generally fit 10-12
  strips containing your key fingerprint on a single sheet of paper, and
  then cut out strips to hand out.)

o Alternatively, you may email an ASCII extract of their PGP public key
  to <jhutz@cmu.edu> by noon on Wednesday, Jul 30. Please include
  a subject line of "IETF PGP KEY", and please DO NOT MIME-ENCRYPT your
  e-mail; send it to me as plain text.

  The method of generating the ASCII extract under Unix is:

        pgp -kxa my_email_address mykey.asc (pgp 2.6.2)
        pgpk -xa my_email_address > mykey.asc (pgp 5.x)
        gpg --export -a my_email_address > mykey.asc (gpg)

  If you're using Windows or Macintosh, hopefully it will be Intuitively
  Obvious (tm) using the GUI interface how to generate an ASCII armored
  key that begins "-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----".

o By 14:00 on Wednesday, you will be able to fetch complete key ring
  from any of the following locations with all of the keys that were
  submitted:

        /afs/grand.central.org/project/ietf-pgp/ietf72/ietf72.pgp
        http://grand.central.org/dl/ietf-pgp/ietf72/ietf72.pgp
        ftp://grand.central.org/pub/ietf-pgp/ietf72/ietf72.pgp

o At 16:10, come prepared with the PGP Key fingerprint of your PGP
  public key; we will have handouts with all of the key fingerprints of
  the keys that people have mailed in.

o In turn, readers at the front of the room will recite people's keys;
  as your key fingerprint is read, stand up, and at the end of reading
  of your PGP key fingerprint, acknowledge that the fingerprint as read
  was correct.

o Later that evening, or perhaps when you get home, you can sign the
  keys corresponding to the fingerprints which you were able to verify
  on the handout; note that it is advisable that you only sign keys of
  people when you have personal knowledge that the person who stood up
  during the reading of his/her fingerprint really is the person which
  he/she claimed to be.

o Send the signed keys to the owners, and, optionally, to the PGP key
  servers. Some poeple opt to NOT send the signed keys to the
  keyservers, but rather choose to send them only to the e-mail address
  on the key's userid, encrypted for that particular key. This tends to
  ensures the validity of the e-mail address.

Note that you don't have to have a laptop with you; if you don't have
any locally trusted computing resources during the key signing party,
you can make notes on the handout, and on the strips of papers, and then
take these and sign the keys later.

Acknowledgement: The bulk of the text of this message was taken from the
messages usually sent by Ted Ts'o to announce IETF key signing parties.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA