PGP: Easy Key Signing Party

Most people know PGP and GnuPG (GPG), or Pretty Good Privacy, as the Public Key Encryption de-facto standard for communicating confidentially across the Internet, originally created by Phil Zimmermann. An excellent starting point for finding what's going on is GnuPG.org.

A weak point of all Public Key algorithms is the spreading of the public keys: any user could bring a public key with false user ID in circulation. PGP and GnuPG solve this problem via the Web of Trust.
When you meet someone in person, and he shows you his passport and he confirms that some PGP key really is his own, you can now trust that key. You can express your trust in that key to other users of PGP by signing that PGP key with your digital signature: "I hereby state that I have verified that this key actually belongs to ...".

However, having to meet everyone on the Internet in person is both unpractical and time consuming. To improve here, so called PGP keysigning parties are often organized at gatherings of lots of people, like conferences: all people present get together in a room to see each other confirming their keys and passports.

This time, Joost van Baal (Tilburg University), with help from Folkert van Heusden, will organize such a PGP Keysigning Party during the Free Software Bazaar. In addition to this, Joost will be around the whole week, happy to serve as the PGP keymaster and sign your keys.

See Joost's page at http://mdcc.cx/gnupg/ for instructions.