Comment on Some interesting comments on the move
logen@exploding-heads.com 8 months agoAs I recall back when I did gpg encrypted email.
You can create a master key. You use this master key to sign other keys.
Keep that master key super safe.
The subkey is what you use in general practice.
You upload your public keys to keyservers, which I believe is what happens with nostr nodes.
Your master key can revoke the subkeys at any time. This revocation is sent to keyservers and the public key is marked as invalid so other people don’t trust it.
You then make a new subkey signed by your master key to prove it is still you, but with a new key, and upload that public key.
Now that’s the key people use to encrypt data for you, as opposed to the old revoked one.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how it works either with the keyservers or nostr, but it seems like it should be doable. Have an air gaped master key that is only used to sign the keys you use day to day, and it’s that master key’s signature that is the verification of your identity.
Bonus points to this system, I can have five different nostr apps each create their own key. I could later verify all those keys with my master key to prove each of these different keys belong to the same identity. With that verification, if implemented of course, the noster nodes could link all the pub keys signed by the same master key to help people follow an identity across different types of content.
I know I’m somewhat confusing different points I was trying to make, but it should all be possible.
masterofballs@exploding-heads.com 8 months ago
Ok so the masterkey and the key server are the central authority. You can implement the same thing in nostr. For example, someone could just manage your key for you. And you interact through a normal username and password. I’m sure those kinda service will come about.
logen@exploding-heads.com 8 months ago
Well, you do all this on the client side. It’s just that the nodes would manage your pubkeys. (Which the might already do?)
If your key gets hijacked by someone, it’s nice to be able to push a revocation certificate, if nothing else.
masterofballs@exploding-heads.com 8 months ago
Well, what is the key server? It has to be a person, computer, blockchain. Something right?
logen@exploding-heads.com 8 months ago
Like a nostr node, anyone can set one up and they can share information with each other.
If you use Linux, you may notice that the keys are updated from time to time, that’s your system contacting keyservers to get a copy of the public keys to verify package integrety.
But yea, they have a central authority, kinda, but really it’s just a place for people to store their public keys so people can use it to verify cryptographically signed content, or encrypt data meant only for the owner of the key pair that the public key is attached to.
To me, it looks like nostr nodes do this, there’s just nothing implemented yet to recover a hijacked key. Tom (if anyone remembers him) could get a following of 10k people, happen to lose control of his private key, and then we are back to the same problem of a central authority banning someone… Possibly even worse because, well, identity theft without a way to proove it.
At this point, at the very least, I’d like the owner of the private key (regular users) to be able to send a revocation certificate to a node which will flag this particular public key as compromised. Other nodes will see this and the flag will spread. Revocation certificats can only be made by someone with access to the private key. So we shouldn’t have any censorship issues here.
tl;dr of everything I’m going on about here so far
I’d like nostr to implement a way for users to print out revocation certs, just like how we can backup our private keys, so that users have the ability to report compromised accounts to the nodes.
I’d also like there to be a system where we can recover from the above situation without having to start over and rebuild trust under a new identity. Such as having a backup key that can veryify a new key belongs to the person who’s claiming it.
We already have a solution for all this, it’s just a mater of nostr nodes supporting it.