dead beef attack

n. [cypherpunks list, 1996] An attack on a public-key cryptosystem
consisting of publishing a key having the same ID as another key (thus
making it possible to spoof a user's identity if recipients aren't careful
about verifying keys). In PGP and GPG the key ID is the last eight hex
digits of (for RSA keys) the product of two primes. The attack was
demonstrated by creating a key whose ID was 0xdeadbeef (see DEADBEEF ).

