I’ve occasionally seen people on fedi with PGP (or GPG?

Amelia

I’ve occasionally seen people on fedi with PGP (or GPG? Idk lol) keys in their bio or a link to a site that shows stuff about an encryption key like that to prove they’re who they say they are. How does that work? Can’t yaknow, just anyone put the same string of text in their bio?

Julian Fietkau

@BluesDriveAmelia PGP uses keypairs. I could steal your public key and claim it's mine, but if someone encrypts something with it and sends it to me, I still can't read it without your secret key.

I haven't researched how identity management sites like that work, but maybe they make you sign something (a URL?) with your secret key and validate that against the public key to prove that you're the owner of that identity.