Sign arbitrary data with your SSH keys

> GitHub acts as a trusted third party here, and you have to trust them not to lie about people's public keys, so it may not be appropriate for all use cases. But relying on a trusted third party with a professional security team like GitHub seems like a way better default than PGP's Web of Trust, which was nigh impossible to use.

Hopefully that's a false dichotomy and the entire Free Software community doesn't end up reliant on Microsoft to host all our keys for us. The article goes on to mention key transparency, though, which does seem like the right solution.

I note that rekor (the transparency log implementation used by sigstore) already supports signing with SSH keys[0], so this TechRepublic article about it[1] from March (which lists only "GPG, x509 and Minisign") is already out of date.

[0] https://github.com/sigstore/rekor/blob/main/types.md#ssh

[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/a-new-linux-foundation-...

Thanks for the insight and links!

And really... > relying on a trusted third party ... like GitHub seems like a way better default than PGP's Web of Trust

Made me scream: "What??" I'd personally prefer some decentralized torrent-like way of user key distribution.

What would that look like? Distributing keys is always the hard part.

Distributing small chunks of text sounds like the wrong problem to call "hard". It is building trust in them. Problems with the web of trust are well documented and pretty much boil down to "random people in the Internet turn out to not really be the most trustworthy of mediums".