[OTR-users] generating keys

[Ian Goldberg]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 11:47:37AM -0800, CLAY SHENTRUP wrote:
> first of all, i've been meaning to ask why there is more than one key in
> gaim; one for every account. i always manually make them all the same by
> editing the private keys file. it would be nice to be able to set it to just
> use one key per user per host.

Different accounts have different keys, because people may not want it
to be obvious that accounts X and Y actually belong to the same person.
You can just put a couple of extra lines on your web page, like this:
http://r6.ca/russellotr.asc

> but one thing i just had happen, which was really weird, is that i was using
> an account that already has a key, and a new key was generated, obviously
> foreign to my friend. i closed gaim and removed the new key from the key
> file, and restarted..and everything worked fine. so why did it just add a
> new key in the first place?! bizarre.

The most probable thing that jumps to mind is that when you edited the
private keys file by hand, you ended up with an invalid key somewhere (a
mismatched paren, possibly).  When the new key was created, the keys
file would have been rewritten correctly.

Would that match the behaviour you saw?

   - Ian