Hanno's blog

Having used my PGP key 3DBD3B20 for almost eight years, it's finally time for a new one: 4F9F43A9. The old primary key was a 1024 bit DSA key, which had two drawbacks:
1. 1024 bit keys for DLP or factoring based algorithms are considered insecure.
2. It's impossible to set the used hash algorithm to anything beyond SHA-1.

My new key has 4096 bits key size (2048 bit is the default of GnuPG since 2.0.13 and should be fairly enough, but I wanted some extra security) and the default hash algorithm preference is SHA-256. I had to make a couple of decisions for my name in the key:
1. I'm usually called Hanno, but my real/official name is Johannes.
2. My surname has a special character (ö) in it, which can be represented as oe.

In my previous keys, I've mixed this. I decided against this for the new key, because both my inofficial prename Hanno and my umlaut-converted surname Boeck are part of my mail adress, so people should still be able to find my key if they're searching for that.

Another decision was the time I wanted my key to be valid. I've decided to give it an expiration date, but a fairly long one: 10 years from now.

I've signed my new key with my old key, so if you've signed my old one, you should be able to verify the new one. I leave it up to you if you decide to sign my new key or if you want to re-new the signing procedure. I'll start from scratch and won't sign any keys I've signed with the old key automatically with the new one. If you want to key-sign with me, you may find me on the 27C3 within the next days.

My old key will be valid for a while, at some time in the future I'll probably revoke it.

Update: I just found out that having a key without SHA-1 is trickier than I thought. The self-signatures were still SHA-1. I could re-do the self-signatures and revoke the old ones, but that'd clutter the key with a lot of useless cruft and as the new key wasn't around long and didn't get any signatures I couldn't get easily again, I decided to start over again: The new key is BBB51E42 and the other one will be revoked.
I'll write another blog entry to document how you can create your own SHA-256 only key.