[kdepim-usability] untrusted pubkeys

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Monday 27 September 2004 17:30, Jan Muehlig wrote:
> Hi,
>
> working on a redesign of the encryption and signature behavior in
> KMail, I experienced a strange or rather unexpected thing in KMail.

Would you mind briefly describing what you have in mind?

> Now I want to ask if this is just some misunderstand or if it is
> true:
>
> - can you only pgp-encrypt with a pubkey that has been set to
> "trusted"?

There are two different meanings of "trust":
a) The trust in a key's owner (short: owner trust). This can be changed 
with "--edit-key trust". It represents your trust in the key owner 
properly validating keys that he signs. See 
http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN346
The owner trust of the key that you want to use for encryption is 
irrelevant.

b) The calculated trust aka the validity of the key. See 
http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN385
The validity of a key influences whether it can be used for encryption 
or not. gpg has a command-line switch which makes it possible to use 
invalid keys for encryption. I thought I had seen an option to use 
invalid keys in KMail (added as part of Aegypten2), but now I can't 
find this option in KMail 1.7. The only option which could have an 
influence is 'allow clients to mark keys as "trusted"' in the crypto 
backend configuration (GPG Agent).

So the answer to your question depends on what you've meant my "trust". 
Since you talk about setting a key to trusted it seems you meant "owner 
trust". In this case the answer is "No" (see a)).

Regards,
Ingo
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