In order of difficulty, there are three basic parts to using gpg:
- Generate your keys
- Keep your keys secure
- Decide who to trust
Most people will never even get to step one, much less the far more difficult steps that follow. I’ve written about this problem before [article no longer online]:
The web of trust is based on the idea that you can reduce a complex human dynamic, namely trust, into a mathematical system.
Even if you more or less understand the levels of trust gpg offers, it’s hard to be certain how much trust to assign any given key, since you can never know how the owner might use a key.
But what if the goal were simplified? Instead of something complex like “trust”, we might say you have only one decision to make about a key: is this the person I think it is?
Such a system might, I think, gain large-scale acceptance if correctly implemented. Your email address already is your identity, so use email for key signing. A large email provider, say Google, could generate a key for every address. So when Alice signs up for a Gmail account, Gmail transparently signs her outgoing mail with the key held in escrow.
This signing should be implemented such that mail agents can validate it if they know how, but those that don’t transparently ignore it. Perhaps it can be done with some form of multipart/alternative.
When using a client that is aware of the signature, the mail client prompts the user, unobtrusively. So, when Bob gets a message from Alice he sees something like this off to the side:
Are you sure this message is from Alice?
Bob can either click “yes” or ignore the prompt. If Bob clicks yes, he signs Alice’s key under the covers with his own key, also held in escrow.
Implemented in a large enough community, this system could rapidly build a network of signed keys. It’s not clear how we might use this, but if a large scale network of reliably signed keys existed, who knows?
Should Be Simple 