[H-GEN] Key-signing at Humbug: Saturday, 1st March 2003

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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David Findlay <david at davsoft.com.au> writes:

> Jason wrote:
> > I never could get that to work a few months ago when I was trying to
> > establish trust in Mark's key again, but now I see they've added a
> > "trace to/from this key to:" option (which you don't even need to be
> > logged in for) on the "ascii armored key for ..." pages.
> How do you trace those keys? I've noticed that suddenly I have a
> path to some of the KDE developer's keys. Pretty cool. Thanks,

I assume from your second sentence that you're not asking about how to
use the BigLumber site.

The procedure should be a pretty simple directed graph traversal,
simplified somewhat (perhaps) by the existence of the Strongly
Connected Set (the set of keys such that any two keys k1 and k2 in the
set have a path between them (from k1 to k2, say))[1].

The basic idea would be to make a stack or queue of keys, initialized
with the key you're starting from, and push the keys signed by the
current one onto the stack/queue and popping/dequeing as necessary
until you find the key you're after or run out of keys.

Fuller explanations are available from books like Aho et al (good, but
cost money) or from slides/lecture notes online (not so good, but
free!)

jason

[1] : This translates to the set of people who can, in theory,
      transitively be sure that anyone else's key belongs to who the
      key says it does.

      In practice it's a bit more complicated because not everyone can
      be trusted to sign a key properly.
-- 
``I may have agreed to something involving a goat.''  -- CJ

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