[Gpg4win-devel] branches/kdepim/enterprise4/kdepim/kleopatra

[Marc Mutz]

On Thursday June 24 2010, Emanuel Schütze wrote:
> On 23.06.2010 10:44, Marc Mutz wrote:
> > Then the compendium is wrong. There _is_ no such thing as a "secret
> > certificate".
>
> We have an different point of view for the definition of certificate.
> We plead to use "certificate" differentiated (-> secret and public
> certificate vs. secret and public key).
<snip>

It's not a matter or opinions. "Certificate" is a well-known term:

From Wikipedia:
  In cryptography, a public key certificate (also known as a digital
  certificate or identity certificate) is an electronic document which uses a
  digital signature to bind together a public key with an identity —
  information such as the name of a person or an organisation, their address,
  and so forth. The certificate can be used to verify that a public key
  belongs to an individual.

So: a certificate binds the identity of a user to his public key. It is not 
the public key, and it certainly isn't the secret one, either.

Therefore, "secret certificate" is nonsensical. There simply _is_ no such 
thing. And "public certificate" just misleads the user into thinking that 
there is a secret one, too.

We said we wanted to use "certificate" instead of "key" since that's what the 
user is usually dealing with (even in OpenPGP, that's why we adopted the more 
precise term from S/MIME terminology for OpenPGP "keys", too). We (well, I) 
never intended to make a sweep s/key/certificate/ replacement, because that 
would be just introducing a wrong word for a murky one, in a lot of places. 
But that's exactly what seems to have happened here.

Thanks,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc.mutz at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
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