On 10/18/2011 9:08 AM, Jerome Baum wrote: > Makes sense if there's no context. But there's context here -- > "cryptography". In that context, key means something specific.
This ain't EUROCRYPT or FINANCIAL CRYPTOGRAPHY. If you're reading professional journals that are talking about crypto in purely mathematical terms, then yes, 'key' means that. However, in the context of OpenPGP and its predecessors there's about 20 years of precedent for using 'key' to reference the collection of subkeys, user IDs, user attributes, signatures, and so on. This goes back all the way to the early 1990s. Arguably we should be using 'certificate' to describe keys, but honestly, that's a losing battle: the community's inertia on the subject of 'key' is immense. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users