My public key block appears different on keyservers

[Matt Gantner]

I'm not terribly familiar PNG or GPG keys so bear with me.

I am understanding your statement to be saying that the two keys are
really the same asci text but the line breaks make them appear to be
different.

To test that I ran diff on the two keys and they are completely
different text. Every line was different. So I am falling back to my
theory that the key server software appears to make the public key
different by the nature of its encoding when uploaded.

I managed to set another computer up, with a second gpg identity. I
encoded a message to my first identity using a public key from the
gnupgp keyserver and was able to decrypt it successfully. So despite
the variation in the asci text and length of the public key works.

I am still curious however and wonder if anyone has a theory why these
public keys change depending on the key server?

Thanks for the responses and help.


On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 10:15, David Shaw<dshaw at jabberwocky.com> wrote:
> On Jul 1, 2009, at 9:05 AM, Matt Gantner wrote:
>
>> Hello.
>>
>> I have uploaded my public key (GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin)) via command
>> line and copy / paste methods into keys.gnupg.net and pgpkeys.mit.edu
>> and when I look up the key on the systems they are different. I have
>> been looking at this problem for a few days and uploading my keys to
>> servers. So far none have shown me the same key that I produce on my
>> machine.
>
> Not a bug or a problem.  OpenPGP keys can be represented in many different,
> but functionally equivalent, ways.  Different keyservers may choose
> different packet length types, etc.  In your particular case, it looks like
> they just chose different places to place line breaks in the ascii output.
>
> David
>
>