Is it safe to leave my password-protected PGP secret key available publicly? [closed]

Question

My PGP secret keys are always password protected, which means you need to decrypt it using a symmetric key to get access to my private key.

I am interested in making my password protected PGP secret key publicly available but I am not entirely sure if I am missing something. Storing my secret key on my computer seems only to be making things harder (security through obfuscation) but not actually doing any good.

considering that i can password protect my private key with a 256 bit AES http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Symmetric_algorithm_key_lengths

and that there is theoretical limit for the energy needed to crack a 2^n password using brute force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack#Theoretical_limits

What am I missing?

Answer 1

It decreasing your cryptographic strength a lot as brute force attacks to decrypt it could succeed in a shorter time. Typically passwords have not so many bits than the key itself. Unless your password is more than 20 chars I would strongly advise not to do so. Short passwords can be cracked rather quickly.