Keysigning party London 2008-06-02

When:

Monday 2nd June 2008. Start turning up around 7pm or so. Be there for 8pm sharp when we'll all introduce ourselves to each other and do the deed. Then we socialise for the rest of the evening.

Where:

Da Vinci's, Imperial College Union, Beit Quad, South Kensington. It's in the building just to the West of the South entrace to the Albert Hall from Prince Consort Road. As you enter Beit Quad, Da Vinci's is on the far side of the courtyard, to the right of the big door. I'll be bearing a prominent "ORG Key Signing" sign, either inside or in the quad if the weather's nice. Here's a map of Imperial College's South Kensington Campus. Beit Quad is towards the top left. Nearest Underground stations: South Kensington, Gloucester Road. Directions from South Kensington station: Head North up Exhibition Road (or take the tunnel beneath it to the Science Museum then continue above ground), then turn left into Prince Consort Road. Pass the Albert Hall on your right, then Beit is the next building on the right after it. Directions from Gloucester Road station: Head North up Gloucester Road to the main set of traffic lights, and turn right (East) onto Cromwell Road. Continue to the next major set of traffic lights, then turn left (North) and proceed up Queen's Gate. Take the next right turn after passing the Imperial College Huxley Building, into Prince Consort Road. Beit Hall is the red-brick building on your left, immediately after the church. Directions by Bus: Routes 9, 10, 52, 70, 74, 360 & 452 all pass within the immediate vicinity of Beit. See TfL's central london bus map for details. The exact GPS coordinates for the main entrance to Beit Quad are: 51.499917, -0.178112

What:

Keysigning party. PGP, CACert, and Thawte web of trust all welcome. If you'd like to come, add a line here. Feel free to state your public key details if you'd like to, but you don't have to. Please bear in mind that the object of a keysigning party is to check each other's identities in real life since purely electronic communications are easily forged - so don't just sign a key because its ID is on this page! By all means copy and paste key IDs from this page, but check the fingerprint of the key you get against one given to you in person by the person whose identity you have checked before signing it, as this page may be trivially tampered with!

What's it all about?

For a more in-depth explanation, see our page on Keysigning parties.

What to bring with you

• Your public key ID and fingerprint, ideally on bits of paper you can hand out to people
• Some form of Identity.
• For CACert Assurance. Join CACert and bring two forms of Photo ID (ideally Drivers Licence and Passport) with your WoT form.
• For Thawte Notarisation: Join their Web of Trust , bring two forms of government-issued Photo ID with your form and a copy of the IDs.
• Something to write with and on, so you can write down key IDs and fingerprints of people who don't have something to hand out
• Alternatively create a list using the script found at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~kwinterl/keyparty/keyp.html#list_based

What to do

• Meet people
• Decide how much you trust their claimed identity
• Collect the key ID and fingerprint
• When you get home, download their keys from keyservers, check the fingerprints match, sign, and upload. Unless you know and trust the person well, it's a good idea to confirm their email address and control of the key before stating the highest level of assurance in your signature. This can be done easily with a tool like caff or using the technique described on the Hants LUG website.

People attending

(if you don't want to reveal your name here, just put a pseudonym or something, so I know roughly how many people to plan for)

• Alaric B. Snell-Pym, PGP key 7371086A on subkeys.pgp.net
• David McBride, PGP key 6A7DF1D9 on subkeys.pgp.net
• Michael Holloway (needs to sort his key and keyserver out!)
• andyjpb PGP (0x7EBA75FF on subkeys.pgp.net), CACert
• Harry Metcalfe (8C4EAFF4 on keyserver.ubuntu.com)
• Andy Smith, PGP key 0x604DE5DB on subkeys.pgp.net
• Ciemon Dunville, PGP key 0xDEA6B847 on subkeys.pgp.net. CACert assurer
• Caroline Ford, PGP key B9B585F5 on keyserver.ubuntu.com
• Tom Dawes-Gamble PGP Key 0x43A6896A CACert assurer
• Andy Millar, PGP Key 0x8D7F13FD
• ww, CAcert assurer, Thawte notary
• Tom D, PGP keys 0x5E008082 and 0x335FE783 on subkeys.pgp.net
• Stephen H, CACert assurer
• Hamlesh Motah, PGP key 0x64F68749 on keyserver.pgp.com (pgp.net is not updating properly)

Results

Well, that went OK in my biased opinion - no disasters, and everyone seemed to have a good time. It was lovely to meet friends old and new, discuss issues of common interest, and spread the word about ORG! I even witnessed a random member of the public come up and ask what we were about, and going off reading an ORG leaflet...

So I'll happily keep doing (regular?) London key signing meets and/or organise key signings at other larger events under the ORG banner while interest continues!

But, rather than sit patting my own back, let's see what we should do better next time. I should probably organise things more up front - it would be easier, particularly if more people are present, if we had a system whereby people who might come can sign up on the Web, so I can email them all with venue changes and other last-minute things, and so we can then hand out pre-generated printouts of the key fingerprints etc. It'd be interesting to get more people in, too; as well as die-hard crypto users and people keen to adopt new things, making a case for people who've never heard of encryption to adopt it and setting up "bring your laptop and we'll help you generate a key" workshops might be fun. Other than that, a nicer venue would be nice, but I think Imperial College Union wasn't *too* bad. A bit noisy and grubby, but it was free, easy to get to, and had food and drink for sale.

Anyway, enough from me. Please add your comments and suggestions below, and I'll try and make the next one better.