[OTR-dev] a single secret key for all accounts?

[Patrick Baxter]

Forgot to add, that you could do this if you changed verification to
be aware of a key-hierarchy so that if you verified
patch at jabber.ccc.de with otr key X that is signed by master identity
M, then if patch at dukgo has otr key Y and a signature from M, its all
OK.

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Patrick Baxter <patch at cs.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> I'm assuming OTR verifies name at provider.tld is bound to public key X,
> but I don't know the spec. In this case, to use the same key across
> multiple names with the goal of reducing verification, i think you run
> into the following problem:
>
> 1. You have trusted patch at dukgo.com and acquaintance called evil at dukgo.com.
> 2. Evil user creates patch at jabber.ccc.de with the same key from evil at dukgo.com.
> 3. You see that this key is trusted but confuse evil as patch
>
> One option would may to check only the username so that
> patch at dukgo.com must be the same as patch at jabber.ccc.de. This won't
> work unless you can enforce that people using the same name field
> always use the same key and are the same user which are not the
> registration semantics of a federated system.
>
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
> <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
>>
>> Is there a particular reason why OTR apps generally create a new secret key
>> for each account rather than generating a single key and using it for all
>> accounts?  Our keysync app[1] is basically is a band-aid to ameliorate the
>> proliferation of OTR keys, so I'm curious what issues we should be thinking
>> about as we progress.  I've been thinking that the next step is that keysync
>> should pick a single secret key and use it everywhere with the goal of making
>> it more likely that both sides are using verified keys.
>>
>> [1] https://guardianproject.info/apps/keysync/
>>
>> .hc
>>
>> --
>> PGP fingerprint: 5E61 C878 0F86 295C E17D  8677 9F0F E587 374B BE81
>> _______________________________________________
>> OTR-dev mailing list
>> OTR-dev at lists.cypherpunks.ca
>> http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev