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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

What would the PGP key be for?

The Rubygems team (or even just the person who writes the security page) can just generate a new one, for "security@rubygems.org" or whatever, and it can be shared by the team.

The purpose of the key is to allow people to report security vulnerabilities without worrying that by doing so they're giving ammunition to people snooping emails.

Maybe I dont understand PGP and this is a stupid question, but if the site is compromised, would it not be possible for them to just put a different key up? One which they knew the private key for? How would you know the public key on the compromised site has not been changed unless you could compare it to the PGP key from before the site was compromised?

You can publish the key on keyservers and get some trust on it.

e.g

http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=37signals&op=...

http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=heroku

Publishing the key is what allows you to detect malicious changes to the key.

You can't, but having a security.html page gives attackers the possibility to contact you privately and securely; this reduces the chance that they'll decide to "contact" you by completely pwning your public site.

What if the key is endorsed by the individual people on the team? Their personal keys, which they keep, must sign the security team key. A replacement cannot have this endorsement.

@JoachimSchipper do sec people inherently know to try hitting /security.html by convention, or should there be links to it from the main site?

They know to look for a link to the security page.

Github's is in their site footer.

37signals' is in their site footer.

Twitter's is linked off the sidebar in their "About" page.

Google's and Facebook's are the top search result for their site and "vulnerability" "security".

These are all fine options.

Thank you!

You don't want to send an actual exploit in clear text to a possibly compromised email account. PGP encrypts, and provides some level of validation that the message can only be read by someone on the security team.

For encrypting the email with the exploit details. This is quite a common practice in the security industry.

Like signing gems? cough

Signing gems should be mandatory

Don't get me started on python eggs :)

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