Hmm, maybe i am confused but let me try explain again. I think the
issue here is that you must now auto-verifiy public keys that you have
previously trusted on your buddy list with out any limit on the new
name its bound too. This could confuse a user about who they are
talking to unless you can explain the trust relationship from that
last verified key. Without doing that you have the problem:

[email protected] and [email protected] are both on our user's verified
buddy list. No one's key has been compromised. [email protected]
registers [email protected] and talks to our user. Our user see's
this this new patch account as verified because he has previously
verified this public key for [email protected]. He assumes that
[email protected] is the same as [email protected] because of the name
association.

So I think you would still need to do either a simplified verification
upon contact with [email protected] to let the user know this is the
same person as [email protected] or maybe just display the name used for
the first confirmation and hide this information from the user. This
way the public key used by [email protected] will always appear under the
name they originally verified this with to the user even if he is
contacting you from [email protected].

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> In your example, [email protected] gets access to the secret key material, so all
> bets are off there.  I don't think your scenario would be any different if
> each account had a separate key versus all accounts using the same key.
>
> .hc
>
> On 10/31/2013 11:25 PM, Patrick Baxter wrote:
>> Forgot to add, that you could do this if you changed verification to
>> be aware of a key-hierarchy so that if you verified
>> [email protected] with otr key X that is signed by master identity
>> M, then if patch@dukgo has otr key Y and a signature from M, its all
>> OK.
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Patrick Baxter <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> I'm assuming OTR verifies [email protected] is bound to public key X,
>>> but I don't know the spec. In this case, to use the same key across
>>> multiple names with the goal of reducing verification, i think you run
>>> into the following problem:
>>>
>>> 1. You have trusted [email protected] and acquaintance called [email protected].
>>> 2. Evil user creates [email protected] with the same key from 
>>> [email protected].
>>> 3. You see that this key is trusted but confuse evil as patch
>>>
>>> One option would may to check only the username so that
>>> [email protected] must be the same as [email protected]. This won't
>>> work unless you can enforce that people using the same name field
>>> always use the same key and are the same user which are not the
>>> registration semantics of a federated system.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is there a particular reason why OTR apps generally create a new secret key
>>>> for each account rather than generating a single key and using it for all
>>>> accounts?  Our keysync app[1] is basically is a band-aid to ameliorate the
>>>> proliferation of OTR keys, so I'm curious what issues we should be thinking
>>>> about as we progress.  I've been thinking that the next step is that 
>>>> keysync
>>>> should pick a single secret key and use it everywhere with the goal of 
>>>> making
>>>> it more likely that both sides are using verified keys.
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://guardianproject.info/apps/keysync/
>>>>
>>>> .hc
>>>>
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