GPG Key Signing Party

Last Thursday we had GPG Key & CAcert Signing party at SUSE office inviting anybody who wants to get his key signed. I would say, that it went quite well, we had about 20 people showing up, we had some fun, and we now trust each other some more!

GPG Key Signing

We started with GPG key signing. You know, the ussual stuff. Two rows moving against each other, people exchanging paper slips

Signing keys

For actually signing keys at home, we recommended people to use signing-party package and caff in particular. It’s easy to use tool as long as you can send mails from command line (there are some options to set up against SMTP directly, but I run into some issues). All you need to do is to call

caff HASH

and it will download the key, show you identities and fingerprint, sign it for you and send each signed identity to the owner by itself vie e-mail. And all that with nice wizard. It can’t be simpler than that.

Importing signatures

When my signed keys started coming back, I was wondering how do I process them. It was simply too many emails. I searched a little bit, but I get too lazy quite soon, so as I have all my mails stored locally in Maildir by offlineimap, I just wrote a following one liner to import them all.

grep -Rl 'Your signed' INBOX | while read i; do 
        gpg -d "$i" | gpg --import -a;
   done

Maybe somebody will find it useful as well, maybe somebody more experienced will tell me in comments how to do it correctly 😉

CAcert

One friend of mine – Theo – really wanted to be able to issue CAcert certificates, so we added CAcert assurance to the program. For those who doesn’t know, CAcert is nonprofit certification authority based on web of trust. You’ll get verified by volunteers and when enough of them trusts you enough, you are trusted by authority itself. When people are verifying you, they give you some points based on how they are trusted and how do they trust you. Once you get 50 points, you are trusted enough to get your certificate signed and once you have 100, you are trusted enough to start verifying other people (after a little quiz to make sure you know what are you doing).

I knew that my colleague Michal čihař is able and willing to issue some points but as he was starting with issuing 10 and I with 15, I also asked few nearby living assurers from CAcert website. Unfortunately I got no reply, but we were organizing everything quite quickly. But we had another colleague – Martin Vidner – showing up and being able to issue some points. I assured another 11 people on the party and now I can give out 25 points. As well as Michal and I guess Martin is now somewhere around 20 as well. So it means that if you need to be able to issue CAcert certificates, visiting just SUSE office in Prague is enough! But still, contact us beforehand, sometimes we do have a vacation 😉