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Invitation email
Someone who has a personal trust relationship with the person being invited sends this email.
<pre>
Subject: distribution
Hi,
We want to propose you to be part of a distributed mechanism for the revocation certificate of the Tails signing key.
The idea is to distribute cryptographic shares of this revocation certificate to people that we trust. These cryptographic shares can be put together to reassemble the revocation certificate and revoke the Tails signing key. This may be needed in case something really bad happens to us and we are not able to do the revocation ourselves.
Note: In all this document, 'us' refers to the Board.
You can read a complete description of the distribution mechanism on:
https://tails.net/doc/about/openpgp_keys/signing_key_revocation.
The recipe is public and the only secret component is the list of people who are in possession of the cryptographic material.
We are proposing this to you because we trust in both your technical abilities to store your share in a safe place and manipulate it as required. But also because we trust you as a human being to make informed judgment on when to use your share and act only in the interest of Tails.
The bad things that could happen if the mechanism fails are:
A. The signing key is not revoked when it should be. This could allow possible attackers to distribute malicious Tails images or publish malicious information on our name.
B. The signing key is revoked when it should not have been. This would prevent people from verifying our images with OpenPGP until we publish a new signing key and build trust in it.
Distribution of the shares
Each person from the Board, group A, has a *different* share, A1, A2, ..., An.
On top of this, we defined three complementary groups, B, C, and D of trusted people who have a close relationship with Tails but different interests and different access to information about us. You are part of one of these groups.
Everybody in group B has an *identical* share B.
Everybody in group C has an *identical* share C.
Everybody in group D has an *identical* share D.
Three different shares are needed to reassemble the revocation certificate. For example, shares A1, A2, and A3, or shares A1, B, and C.
How to store your share
Please keep your share in an encrypted storage and make it as hard as you can for untrusted people to get a copy of it.
You can rename the file as long as you keep the number in the file name of your share as it is needed to use the share.
Feel free to back up the file but we might also request you to delete it at some point and you should be able to know whether you still have a copy of it or not. It is all-right to lose your share as long as you tell us that you have lost it. It is actually worse to still have a copy of the share "somewhere" while thinking that you don't, than to lose it by mistake.
Don't hesitate to ask us if you need clarification on the technical aspects of this.
When to use your share
Everybody in possession of a share is subscribed to a mailing list.
If someone in possession of a share gets to learn about a very bad event that happened to many of us and really thinks that we are not capable of revoking the Tails signing key ourselves anymore, then this person should write to the mailing list explaining why she thinks that the signing key needs to be revoked.
Yes, there is no mathematically proven algorithm for this and here is where your judgment as a human being is needed. The description of the very bad event should be checked or backed by enough people to be plausible.
People on the list who are also convinced that the signing key should be revoked share their shares until they have 3 different shares. Then they can assemble the revocation certificate and publish it to revoke the signing key.

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Each person from the Board, group A, has a *different* share, A1, A2, ..., An.
02/28/2022
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Glossary

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, , Tails
. . Tails
Board Board Tails
Browse glossary Tails

String information

Source string description
type: Plain text
Flags
read-only
Unit identifier
540072
String age
02/28/2022
Last updated
12/14/2023
Source string age
02/28/2022
Translation file gettext PO file
string 68