alt Hacker NewsIt baffles that people think it's a bad thing to disclose a public key. That's their purpose actually. Sure we now have the post quantum computer threat, and some state actors are harvesting keys, but quantum computer is going to disrupt so much, that Id verification won't even matter really.
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That implies they chose not to. More likely the other states simply didn’t realize the value derived from paying a vendor to enable a ‘feature’, not realizing both the necessity of such signatures and that the cost to the vendor and mechanism of delivery is precisely the same regardless. One might consider what sort of pressures a citizen could apply to compel those states to act more to their own benefit, but I have no specific ideas to suggest at this time.
I think it depends on the context? It's in an ID card's design goals to be provably valid, so it's pointless to not publish its public keys, but something like SSH pubkeys, uhh, should I really be so eager to just publicly dump all of mine…?
Where did you get the impression the author thinks it’s a bad thing? From the article:
> These are public keys, which are meant to be published - recovering one lets anyone check a signature, not forge one.
its even called "public" lol
Think about it, the key analogy is just terrible. In the origin domain, losing a key is always bad, and making a key available to all is a non sequitur.
It's not like non-technical people understand asymmetric cryptography. Or even technical people, for that matter.
Maybe we should refer to the public key as an address, and the private key is just a password again. You can send stuff, securely, to an address. And you can verify the sender when you have their address (ie check the signature).