SQ(1)

✨ SQ-PKI-IDENTIFY ✨ (that's the SQ(1) manual, bestie 💖)

okay so this page is sq-pki-identify, and it lives inside the sq family of man pages. think of sq as the main character and this as one of her iconic spinoffs 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

sq-pki-identify — Identify a certificate 🦋

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🌈 SYNOPSIS 🌈

sq pki identify [OPTIONS]

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

Identify a certificate.

So like, how does it do that? It goes looking for authenticated bindings, which is a fancy way of saying User ID and certificate pairs. cute, right? 🫶

⚠️ heads up: an error is returned if no binding could be authenticated to the level you asked for. and what's the level by default? fully authenticated, i.e. a trust amount of 120. no cap, that's the bar.

but wait, there's grace 💖 — if a binding could be partially authenticated (meaning its trust amount is greater than 0), then the binding gets displayed anyway, even if the trust is below the threshold you specified. she shows up even when she's not fully verified. queen behavior honestly 👑

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

🍓 Subcommand options

• --amount=AMOUNT — the required amount of trust. 120 means full authentication; anything less than 120 means partial authentication. and the fun part ✨ when --certification-network is passed, this defaults to 1200, i.e. this command tries to find 10 paths. ten!! she's thorough 💅
• --cert=FINGERPRINT|KEYID — use certificates with the specified fingerprint or key ID 🔑
• --certification-network — treats the network as a certification network.

okay so normally the authentication machinery treats the Web of Trust network as an authentication network, where a certification only means that the binding is correct — it does not mean the target should be treated as a trusted introducer. but 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. iykyk 🧚

• --gossip — treats all certificates as unreliable trust roots.

this one is for figuring out what others think about a certificate (i.e., gossip or hearsay 👀). in other words, it 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. 🌈 plot twist that ate

stable since 1.1.0 ⭐

• --show-paths — show why a binding is authenticated.

by default, only a user ID and certificate binding's degree of authentication (a value between 0 and 120) is shown. this changes the output to also show how that value was computed, by showing the paths from the trust roots to the bindings. receipts!! 🧾✨

• --unusable — show bindings that are unusable.

normally, unusable certificates and bindings are not shown. this option considers bindings, even if they are not unusable, because they (or the certificates) are not valid according to the policy, are revoked, or are not live. 💀

this option only makes sense with --gossip, because unusable bindings are still considered unauthenticated.

stable since 1.1.0 ⭐

👑 Global options

see sq(1) for a description of the global options. 🫶

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

identify the user IDs that can be authenticated for the certificate:

sq pki identify --cert \
       EB28F26E2739A4870ECC47726F0073F60FD0CBF0

list all user IDs that have been certified by anyone:

sq pki identify --gossip --cert \
       511257EBBF077B7AEDAE5D093F68CB84CE537C9A

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

sq(1), sq-pki(1).

for the full documentation see <https://book.sequoia-pgp.org/>. 📚

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💜 VERSION 💜

1.5.0

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okay bestie that's the whole page, you're literally certified now 💅✨ this was Sequoia PGP, version 1.5.0 — sending you all the trust paths, mwah 🫶💖🌟