Keyservers

[Robert Guerra]

At 4:05 PM -0700 98/10/22, Caskey L. Dickson wrote:


>The keyserver that PGP uses is publicly available for your download.  In
>fact, I snagged a copy of it the other day with the intent of making a
>patch for gnupg so you can fetch keys from the key server.  Unfortunately
>the Horowitz Key Protocol is not documented anywhere that I could find.
>
>The key server is basically a wrapper around a (really big) key ring that
>it automatically adds and extracts to.

I think it's a bit more than that as it places certain bits of info in a
database.

>My company would be willing to dedicate a computer to be the official
>gnupg key server (perhaps with chaining to existing pgp key servers for
>unknown keys and a more ideal distributed key management infrastructure).


great. I'm not a programmer, so all i can do is offer to help beta test
the thing.

Here's a bit of info that recently was posted to the pgp-keyserver-list:
(hope it helps)

regards

robert



Mailing-List: contact pgp-keyserver-folk-help at flame.org; run by ezmlm
From: Marcel Waldvogel <mwa at tik.ee.ethz.ch>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 15:20:16 +0200
To: Robert Guerra <az096 at freenet.toronto.on.ca>
Subject: Re: upgrading to pksd 0.93
Cc: pgp-keyserver-folk at flame.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Maybe we should open a FAQ :-). See the appended mail from Marc
Horowitz introducing 0.9.3. I have also made my set of patches
(list below) available on http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~mwa/pks-patches.tar.gz

- - Adds the notion of "soft errors", i.e. errors that will be reported
  back to the user but does not abort the whole transaction or even
  crash the process.
- - Backups also work on Solaris 2.6 (where a seek beyond the end of the
  file does not grow the file unless data is written there)
- - "kxa" no longer suppresses subkeys
- - Empty/mission From: and Subject: lines no longer crash the daemon.
- - Incrementals no longer contain the disclaimer
- - Some tries at making large "LAST" and "GET" requests work (not too
  successful, either pksd or sendmail still run out of memory)
- - "pgpdump" no longer returns a wrong keyid or even crashes on DH/DSS
  keys
- - More thorough format testing of a key at submission; some of these
  format failures result in soft errors
- - WWW pages now contain correct signature links
- - "pksclient since" now supports relative times (everything changed in
  the last n seconds)
- - WWW request source addresses are logged correctly on little endian
  machines

- -Marcel

Begin forwarded message:

Mailing-List: contact pgp-keyserver-folk-help at flame.org; run by ezmlm
To: pgp-keyserver-folk at flame.org
Subject: pks 0.9.3 db2test release
From: Marc Horowitz <marc at cygnus.com>
Date: 05 May 1998 19:07:32 -0400

Ok, it's as ready as it's going to get for now.  This release isn't
tested as much as I might like, but it will probably deal with large
keyrings better than the 0.9.2 server.  I think bulk loading is a
little slower now, but I'm not certain.

Besides integrating db 2.3.16 from sleepycat, I've also integrated a
number of new bug fixes and features which people have sent in.  In
particular, pksdctl now has a shutdown command, and pksd.conf has a
max_last parameter to limit the size of last responses.  The
documentation could use more work.

You can get the tarball and signature from:

http://www.mit.edu/people/marc/pks/pks-0.9.3db2test.tar.gz
http://www.mit.edu/people/marc/pks/pks-0.9.3db2test.tar.gz.asc

This isn't advertised on the web pages anywhere, yet.  I'll be reading
this list to see how things go.  Hopefully the new database backend
will prove more reliable than the current one.

If people are feeling really excited, they can send patches to use the
logging and transaction features of the new backend :-)

		Marc

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3ia
Charset: next

iQCVAwUBNiNTl+q7ynKGIBQHAQFUIgQAkYcgB2THi2o4PmNVT3V+9Fz6Na+D8/or
JNQbbBmgU2vZ9IWdpaUNU5w3Aekfbi53yhbG3Mc6ZJpUydPwBmjw8/ziAES5ZXZm
cr3YXd/UTqDbcSMMIr2CvlWJGH08kl9YIi52DFPEOSZSnlYCTz9FBUwDZW/MDj1g
9C739DB9qe4=
=A7Ve
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Robert Guerra <az096 at freenet.toronto.on.ca>
WWW Page <http://www.interlog.com/~rguerra/www>
PGPKeys  <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3378/pgpkeys.html>