web of trust : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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web of trust

A scheme in PGP encryption to verify that a given public key truly belongs to who it claims to. The problem in PGP is all certificates are self-signed. There is no certificate authority company who verifies identities or issues certificates. Basically individual users verify other people’s public keys attesting to that fact by digitally signing with their private key. Based on who you trust to verify others, you can compute a level of assurance about the owner of any presented given key.

PGP public keys are distributed via websites. You can download my pgp certificate at http://mindprod.com/RoedyGreenPGPkey.asc.

You can also get them via server websites such as ldap://pserver.pgp.com and ldap://europe.keys.pgp.com:11370 available via the PGP-Keys program , but the key’s presence there means nothing about its validity. Anybody can register any name with any key.

certificate
PGP

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