This policy is valid from the 14th of July, 2003, for signatures made by the OpenPGP key with Key ID 0xBDBFE838, created 2001-03-24, fingerprint
7E1A 1505 4BC4 47F2 2F7B 83F0 DE85 83F8 BDBF E838.
It may be replaced at any time with a new version. If a new version incorporates changes that might affect the strength or perceived strength of the resulting signature, the old version will be linked from the new one.
This is version 07/2003, the second revision. It replaces the first revision, 01/2002, which can be found under the URL http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~mmutz/sign-policy-2002-01.html. If you came here by following the policy URL of one of my signatures, please check the date of the signature to find the version of this document that applies.
A document which highlights the changes between this and the first revision can be found at http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~mmutz/sign-policy-2002-01-to-2003-07-diffs.html.
The signee (ie. the key holder who wishes to obtain a signature from me, the signer) must make her OpenPGP public key available on a publicly accessible keyserver, such as the .pgp.net servers.
The signee must prove her identity to me by way of a national ID card, a driver's licence or a credit card. The token must feature a photographic picture of the signee.
For people from outside the European Union, only a combination of at least two of the above tokens will be accepted. Exceptions will be made when the signee can come up with other means of proof of identity. But at least one of the above tokens will stay the minimum requirement.
The signee should have prepared a strip of paper with a printout of the output of
gpg --fingerprint 0xDEADBEEF
(or an equivalent command if she is not using GnuPG), where
0xDEADBEEF is the key ID of the key that is to be
signed.
A hand-written sheet featuring all user ID's the signee wants me to sign and the fingerprint will be accepted, too.
I will sign keys using one of two signature classes:
A signature of Class III always means the email addresses were verified to belong to the signee.
A signature of Class II always means the email addresses were not verified to belong to the signee.
The signee should sign the strip of paper containing the fingerprint in my presense. For efficiency, exceptions will be accepted on larger keysigning parties.
After having received (or exchanged) proofs of identity, I will sign the sheet of paper myself to avoid fraud.
At home, I will prepare emails and send one to each of the mail addresses featured in the user ID's that I was asked to sign. They contain random strings encrypted to the public key whose fingerprint is printed on the paper.
For sign-only keys, the signee has to provide an encryption-enabled key to use for challenge sending instead. Failing that, the signature (if any) will only be of Class II.
Upon reception of encrypted replies, I will check the returned random string for equality with what I sent. The reply must be signed with the key that I was asked to certify, even if the challenge was encrypted to a different key.
User IDs that pass the above test are signed. If one of the user IDs fails the test, a warning is sent to the rest of the user ID's addresses and the procedure is retried with a new challenge at most three times until a successful response has been received or the procedure has been cancelled by the signee.
The signed keyblock is sent to a randomly choosen, signed user ID's address and one or more keyservers.
The signee may hint on which keyservers to use.
Marc Mutz, 2003-07-14