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NAME

sq pki authenticate - Authenticate a binding

SYNOPSIS

sq pki authenticate [OPTIONS] FINGERPRINT|KEYID USERID

Authenticate a binding (a certificate and User ID) by looking for a path from the trust roots to the specified binding in the Web of Trust. Because certifications may express uncertainty (i.e., certifications may be marked as conveying only partial or marginal trust), multiple paths may be needed.

If a binding could be authenticated to the specified level (by default: fully authenticated, i.e., a trust amount of 120), then the exit status is 0. Otherwise the exit status is 1.

If any valid paths to the binding are found, they are printed on stdout whether they are sufficient to authenticate the binding or not.

OPTIONS

Subcommand options
-a, --amount=AMOUNT

The required amount of trust.

120 indicates full authentication; values less than 120 indicate partial authentication. When ’--certification-network’ is passed, this defaults to 1200, i.e., ’sq pki’ tries to find 10 paths.

--certification-network

Treats the network as a certification network.

Normally, ’sq pki’ treats the Web of Trust network as an authentication network where a certification only means that the binding is correct, not that the target should be treated as a trusted introducer. In a certification network, the targets of certifications are treated as trusted introducers with infinite depth, and any regular expressions are ignored. Note: The trust amount remains unchanged. This is how most so-called PGP path-finding algorithms work.

--email

Changes the USERID parameter to match User IDs with the specified email address.

Interprets the USERID parameter as an email address, which is then used to select User IDs with that email address.

Unlike when comparing User IDs, email addresses are first normalized by the domain to ASCII using IDNA2008 Punycode conversion, and then converting the resulting email address to lowercase using the empty locale.

If multiple User IDs match, they are each considered in turn, and this function returns success if at least one of those User IDs can be authenticated. Note: The paths to the different User IDs are not combined.

--gossip

Treats all certificates as unreliable trust roots.

This option is useful for figuring out what others think about a certificate (i.e., gossip or hearsay). In other words, this finds arbitrary paths to a particular certificate.

Gossip is useful in helping to identify alternative ways to authenticate a certificate. For instance, imagine Ed wants to authenticate Laura’s certificate, but asking her directly is inconvenient. Ed discovers that Micah has certified Laura’s certificate, but Ed hasn’t yet authenticated Micah’s certificate. If Ed is willing to rely on Micah as a trusted introducer, and authenticating Micah’s certificate is easier than authenticating Laura’s certificate, then Ed has learned about an easier way to authenticate Laura’s certificate.

FINGERPRINT|KEYID

The fingerprint or Key ID of the certificate to authenticate

USERID

The User ID to authenticate.

This is case sensitive, and must be the whole User ID, not just a substring or an email address.

Global options
See sq(1) for a description of the global options.