New keyserver at keys.openpgp.org - what's your take?

[Andrew Gallagher]

> On 21 Jun 2019, at 21:49, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> 
> So if we decide we only want to address use case (c), then it doesn't
> seem too crazy to imagine reconciliation among multiple installations of
> all the distributed, cryptographically-validated *non-identity* data
> that hagrid is designed to distribute.  And this should be
> fully-compatible with hagrid's implementation; each instance which can
> simply augment the reconciled data with the identity information that it
> has independently verified.

Indeed, c) was exactly the killer use case I had in mind.

On the other hand, b) is also quite useful in the short to medium term, until all mail providers decide to support WKD etc. And considering that some companies still don’t fully support PGP/MIME after nearly twenty years of being the preferred standard (I’m looking at you, Apple), “short to medium” effectively means “indefinitely”.

So maybe we shouldn’t think of keyservers as storage repositories, but rather as search engines. The keyservers should not be authoritative, but they should be a best effort directory of where the authoritative locations are, combined with a cache of the non-identity cryptographic material in case the authoritative locations get DOSed.

If the authoritative location is not on a keyserver, then we do not need to sync arbitrary data between keyservers, just a list of location hints. The keyservers would then fetch from the authoritative locations and decide for themselves how much of the content to cache.

A