To me it, this seems to close a big gap: https://gnupg.org/blog/20230321-adsk.html
If I understand correctly it would greatly help maintaining a long-living identity while rotating encryption subkeys as needed (eg: as I loose/break HW tokens).
Because of several small issues: first, thereās no consensus among OpenPGP implementers if ADSK is a good idea. Some of them (say Sequoia) would rather have clients implement encrypting to *all* valid subkeys (instead of only to the most recent one) obsoleting the need for ADSK. Note that this is left unspecified in the spec.
The other issue is that this feature *may* be patent-encumbered because itās exactly the same feature thatās present in Symantec PGP: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/153511/additional-decryption-key-adk-guidelines.html
Funnily enough GnuPG consumed these old Symantec packets and emitted āBig Brotherās key (ignored)ā (https://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg.git;a=blob;f=g10/parse-packet.c;h=8bd283b4bc1debf9cdead7da92948fc22b780114;hb=HEAD#l1780). I guess itās not āBig Brotherā if youāre doing it, right? š
Oh, did I mention that the OpenPGP WG have other problems right now such as GnuPG actually forking OpenPGP into https://librepgp.org ?
Well, it depends on what you want to achieve.
If your primary key expires then everything else becomes expired too so I suggest thinking about this first. Iām using yearly expiry since it gives a good balance. Remember that clients need to update expired keys so it shouldnāt be too short or youāll make it inconvenient to them, but not too long too so that they check it regularly just in case you revoke or add a new one. Details at https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2018/08/13/openpgp-key-expiration-is-not-a-security-measure/
Iām using a single User ID out of simplicity. Since algo preferences are stored on User IDs your recipients may have a completely different view of your cert if they fetch it with a subset of your User IDs (just like WKD lookup in GnuPG does). Some details at https://openpgp.dev/book/adv/certificates.html#adding-unbound-local-user-ids-to-a-certificate
Yeah, WoT seems to be dead at this point, and I say that having my key in the Strong Set. It may work in small circles of friends or orgs. https://openpgp-ca.org explores this further.