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Comment by dvdkhlng | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a very bad idea to use this service. Your secret key should never be shared with a 3rd party.

Using an untrusted 3rd party service to generate a public/private key pair is like asking a thief to sell you a new door lock.

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I agree, this service should never be used for any serious real-life usage. But this is a _vanity_ key service, and there are legitimate uses for such keys where no harm can be done.

I'm mainly interested in raising awareness to GnuPG and get more people using it - I also organize CryptoParties [1] in my area, exactly for this purpose.

[1] - https://cryptoparty.in/

"there are legitimate uses for such keys" - not for crypto

How about education and raising awareness?

awareness of bad crypto practise? :\

How do you raise awareness and educate people by selling them conceptionally broken keys? They will get used to "someone else is creating the key for me", as well as to "GPG fingerprints should look like funny words, not 17AB42DE!".

For testing and explaining GPG to people, nobody needs vanity keys. You don't raise awareness for GPG by having "DEADBEEF" on your business card.

Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"?

Non-native speaker here, I didn't even know what "vanity" means, just ignored it as noise-word :) Well, after looking it up, I still am not sure that I understand what it means :).

vanity base word is vane; or to be so focused on how pretty or appealling you are to others. often used when talking about asthetically pleasing names when talking about tech stuff (vanity hostnames for example.. dns names which are excessively showy, this used to be common on IRC to look "cool").

Would that not be "vain"?

> Is there a technical way to implement a service like that in a non-compromising way? I.e. user sends you his public key, you brute-force some nonce value, until the key's ID is "nice"?

No. That is not possible.

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