Experimenting with S/MIME

I’ve been a long time user of PGP, had a keypair since about 2003.  OpenPGP has some nice advantages in that it’s a more social arrangement in that verification is done by physically meeting people.  I think it is more personal that way.

However, you still can get isolated islands, my old key was a branch of the strong set, having been signed by one person who did do a lot of key-signing, but sadly thanks to Heartbleed, I couldn’t trust it anymore.  So I’ve had to start anew.

The alternate way to ensure communications is to use some third party like a certificate authority and use S/MIME.  This is the other side of the coin, where a company verifies who you are.  The company is then entrusted to do their job properly.  If you trust the company’s certificate in your web browser or email client, you implicitly trust every non-revoked valid certificate that company has signed.  As such, there is a proliferation of companies that act as a CA, and a typical web browser will come with a list as long as your arm/leg/whatever.

I’ve just set up one such certificate for myself, using StartCOM‘s CA as the authority.  If you trust StartCOM, and want my GPG key, you’ll find a S/MIME signed email with my key here.  If you instead trust my GPG signature and want my S/MIME public key, you can get that here.  If you want to throw caution to the wind, you can get the bare GPG key or S/MIME public key instead.

Update: I noticed GnuPG 2.1 has been released, so I now have an ECDSA key; fingerprint B8AA 34BA 25C7 9416 8FAE  F315 A024 04BC 5865 0CF9.  You may use it or my existing RSA key if your software doesn’t support ECDSA.