gpg / pgp encryption
 

When using gnu pg encryption I decided to upload my key to a keyserver.

However over a period of time I seem to have aquired more than one self signature

How and why has this occurred???

You get more than one key id? Usually an key has an private and a public part, but one id only ...

I am also not sure I understand the question. Do you mean you have more than one set of keys??

Well, if you look at your key on the keyserver what you can see is all the signatures that you have on your key.

Locally when I look at the signatures on my key I have all the ones from other people and one self signature from my good self.

However uploading this exact key to a keyserver and then checking on the keyserver all the signatures, what I see is multiple self signatures. I can see the same thing on other peoples keys as well. After a period of time of updating my key etc. I have seen that the number of self signatures that can be viewed on the keyserver - but NOT locally has grown. Accordng to the key server I have more than one self signature.

The keyservers version of my key with respect to self signatures is therefore in contrast to the result of local query the key. And this is my question - why should this be ?

it may be a silly question for u but how can i get a pgp key for myself

Not sure about pgp, but as I recall from the docs gpg is based on it. For a gpg key refer to this site:
http://www.gnupg.org

If you run into trouble post back.

Not sure either about pgp - this is for gpg though:

If you want to generate your own public-private keypair use

gpg --key-gen

Is this what you mean ???

Other people can sign your key, this is a part of the trust infrastructure that PGP uses. I don't know if it is this that you are thinking about?

Yeah, that is not really my problem. Apart ro the other signatures from whoever you have to self sign your key - which shows up with all the other signature you have collected.

However over time I seem to have collected more than one self signature - which is a bit strange to me.

Is this a feature of the keyserver?? For instance when you change your primary key id you required to put in the key password - so I guess you resign the key - in which case maybe it is the keyserver that doesn't like you making changes and gets confussed over the self signatures - Does this sound reasonable to anyone???