Direct LDAP access

[Wes]

I hope this isn't a duplicate question.  I can't believe it hasn't come up
before, but I searched the 70MB archive file and found nothing.

I tweaked (contorted?) our LDAP server to respond to PGP/GPG key retrieval
requests.  However, it appears that GPG can only access the key server for
the purposes of importing a key into (or exporting from) a key ring.  I can
find no way to get GPG to encrypt or decrypt using direct queries to the
directory instead of using a disk file key chain.

We have a requirement to implement a distributed server application where
the keys (probably both public and private) are in an LDAP directory.
Transferring keychain files around is not an option, both from a firewall
perspective and because at any given time each system could have a different
keychain.  Only the application will have access to the entries in LDAP -
users will not have access.  Performance will not be a problem.

We need to be able to do encryption and decryption with GPG directly
accessing LDAP to get the keys.  Additionally, since the directory is
hierarchical and a given key could occur in multiple subtrees, we need to be
able to specify the searchbase instead of relying on the cn=PGPServerInfo
entry.

Am I overlooking something?  Is this possible today?  If not, and we
developed the code, would be it something that could be integrated into GPG
for others to use?

Wes